Attending G-EIGHT, the Indie Convention with an Area for Erotic Games | Push Square
For an event still in its infancy, Taipei-based indie expo G-EIGHT immediately appears accomplished far beyond its years. Its sophomore effort – conducted on the Taipei Expo Park on a sunny weekend in early December – was bustling with enthusiastic attendees, all eager to test drive the latest efforts from local Taiwanese developers, spanning established names like Red Candle through to up-and-coming student projects from freshly minted graduates.
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This was not a damp, grotty rented room with some Alienware rigs running Unreal Engine asset swaps: it was a fully realised convention in its own right, and a credit to its creators, Taiwanese YouTuber Thomas (Ting-Tse) Chang, streamer 6tan (Kuang-Lei) Wang, and Rayark Inc co-founder Tony (Yung-Ting) Li. With the Taipei Game Show also relying heavily on its enormous independent games section, we spoke to Thomas Chang to learn a little more about the origins of an expo only in its second year.
“We think Taiwan’s homegrown game scene is strong enough to support an exhibition that focuses more on local and self-made games, albeit on a smaller scale,” Chang told us, enthusiastically. “G-EIGHT is all about giving developers without much marketing help a chance to show off their stuff to players. It's a way for people from Taiwan and around the world to see what’s special about our games, which are full of life and variety.”
Among the games we played on the day, roguelike Storm Edge from Shield Breaking Games and cyberpunk point-and-click Minds Beneath Us by Bear & Bone stood out. The creator of the former told us he’d quit his job as a mechanical engineer to pursue production on his dream isometric roguelike, while the latter has been built by a ragtag group of university graduates who all met on campus. The futuristic art stood out to us here, with local retail chains like
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