New Achievement Unlocked: Mutant Pizza Games Showcase at Comic Con

Holy Hell, what a strange and wonderful journey this has been.

Last week, March 5-8, I was selected as a part of the Emerald City Comic Con (ECCC) Indie Showcase. This was a panel of various game — both video and tabletop — developers in the Pacific Northwest (PNW, acronyms, am I right?) showing off their creations. People got a chance to play games and connect with the developers in person. Flowery words won’t do this experience justice, so I’ll just say this: It was fucking awesome!

We were nestled along a thoroughfare that gave us hefty traffic, and was outside of the crowded and loud conference room spaces. Many people stopped and looked, some struck up conversations, a few sat down and played some games.

Here’s a photo of my spouse and I in our Burt and Ernie shirts (I’m Burt), standing under a large mushroom thing!

I went there with purpose, a slightly better approach than going there with ambivalence. My goals were simple: Get more people to join my newsletter content stream of never-ending Mutant Pizza emails sent from my patented Spam Blaster Machine 5000 (SBM5000)* and get people to try out my games, raising awareness for the upcoming fall ’26 Kickstarter for Graphic Design is My Passion.

I want to share with you my experience. Let me take you on a journey, one that starts in Downtown Seattle and ends four days later, all the way over in Downtown Seattle. (ECCC was in Downtown Seattle and didn’t move at any point, so the destination really is the journey, or it’s the friends we made along the way? I dunno.)

For those who are experiencing my writing style for the first time, I have enough self-awareness to know that I write as if I’ve escaped from a psychiatric institution. But the joke’s on you: Those were all defunded in the 80s by Reagan, so I wouldn’t even have the luxury of being sent off to one in the first place. Hah, suckers!

Anyway, without further ado aside from that footnote, so I guess with a mild case of further ado…

*Spam Blaster Machine 5000 is not an actual product

How’d you get to do something like that?

What, are you saying I’m unqualified?

No, I—

—A designer friend told me about it and I signed up on the ECCC website. In my application, I described the games I was showcasing and I think the state they were in was a key factor to being selected. What I mean by that is, the Indie Showcase is for games that are more or less playable and somewhat complete.

Poorly lit photo of my spouse sitting at our table.

A game doesn’t have to be done, done, as in golden, or locked, or however you wish to describe it. But it does need to be mostly done. The Indie Showcase is just that, a showcase. It’s not meant for you to gather extensive developmental feedback. In fact, I opted to not gather feedback at all. I was there to simply show off some cool games I made.

What’d you do to prep?

I spent months shaping what I was going to display at the showcase. At first, it was a lot. I was going to show four games. But then I realized that I didn’t want to rush to get all four games in a playable state before ECCC, so I cut it down to two.

One game was finished, it was a game I sold at the Indie Night Market at PAX West last year. (What fun!) That’s a little game I like to call Color Space, since that’s what I named it. Th—That’s why I like to call it that.

BUT, I decided to challenge myself and create a variant to Color Space for people to play. That variant has since morphed into Color Space 2.0!

Another game on display was Graphic Design is My Passion (GDMP). I had a fully playable version at ECCC, and a ‘hard mode’ expansion that I’ve been working on.

Both games were a HIT, in my completely biased, not humble opinion. Either that, or people at ECCC were really good at pretending to enjoy my games! Which was it, huh? Ha ha, just kidding. But seriously, were y’all pretending or not? I’ll assume not so I can preserve my sense of self.

GDMP is coming to Kickstarter some time in the fall, I don’t have a Kickstarter page ready for it yet, but once I do, I’ll beg everyone reading this to follow the page for maximum algorithmic worship.

Wait, can you make a new version of a board game you already released?

Yes.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION INBOUND!

Anyone who placed an order on March 3rd or later has received a copy of Color Space 2.0 with the 2.0 rules booklets. Anyone who purchased Color Space before that time can still play this new version by downloading the 2.0 booklets for free from here: https://mutantpizza.net/download-rulebooks/

The new version uses all the same components as the prior version. I’ll also still include the prior v1.1 booklets for people who refuse to accept change into their lives.

A game of Color Space in play.

How’d the showcase go?

What an experience! It’s one thing to be able to proudly display these interactive artforms with people, these assortments of cards and wooden pieces, but I’ve reached an entirely different echelon of joy to watch strangers play my games and have fun. And to be included amongst a group of talented, dedicated, thoughtful, and kind game developers and ECCC staff has made me feel like I’ve achieved something truely grand.

Wall-E and Mo!

The energy and happiness and the downright genuine connections I was able to make with people at ECCC was a unique experience that I’ll cherish forever.

So how’d it go? I’ll say it again: It was fucking awesome!