“AppCircus is a unique global travelling showcase of the most creative and innovative apps presented by their creators during some of the most influential international events in mobile/web. AppCircus is open to developers, startups and any other organization and offers each participant a chance to get a nomination to the Mobile Premier Awards.”

On June 21 was celebrated in Barcelona the AppCircus Dev Day. On every AppCircus event all kind of app developers are invited to submit their apps to the contest. I finally decided to submit New Sokoban, despite I was sure that it was impossible to be selected as finalist.

However, some days before the event I received an e-mail telling me that New Sokoban was one of the 11 finalists selected to be pitched on the AppCircus main event. I needed to prepare my pitch! 😀

It was a very short pitch: only 3 minutes. Not much time to say a lot of things. I usually don’t prepare my presentations with much anticipation. I like to improvise. I usually prepare a very brief outline before the event. Then, at the event, I listen carefully to the presentations that are given before mine and slightly adapt my presentation depending on them.

However, 3 minutes are not enough time to do it. So I decided to explain the most basic and important thing about New Sokoban: New Sokoban is the result of a very intense and exciting creative process. New Sokoban was not created following business, marketing or monetization guidelines. It was just the game I wanted to create. It was personal. The game experience that New Sokoban offers is very unique just because of that.

I tried to explain it to the audience telling them that the puzzles of New Sokoban were created from scratch by me, one by one. Without any mathematical algorithm that calculated them automatically. The puzzles in New Sokoban can not be created by a machine. Play the game and you will understand why.

Unfortunately, most of the audience didn’t understand it. In Spain the “indie style” is not very popular and games are still considered “not serious work”. So, you know, an indie games dev is the worst combination 🙂

Most people at the event still think that a puzzle-designer-robot would be more profitable. And they are probably right. But, you know, I was not talking about money.

By the way, New Sokoban didn’t win the contest 😉