I decided to restructure our blog format slightly, since we may start having some entries from other people-- starting with one from one of our writers, Megan (Omega), in the works. That, and I don't think Andrew and I have been posting often enough to warrant each having our own column right now. :P

Anyway... as far as convention reports go, I think I'm going to continue the format that Andrew used for Anime Central. Rather than boring you all with a play-by-play of each con, I'm just going to describe a few of our most memorable times from each one. And yeah, I'm a little behind with these, but I'll catch up. Eventually.

So, going in order, the next con we went to after ACen was Fanime.

Memory #1: Geographical location still means something.

Many of our booth visitors seemed more interested in what we were doing, after learning that we were a local company. I was a little surprised by the extra attention, considering how common Internet usage has become these days. Most people I know have ordered things online or have met friends online from other countries. I've even worked on paid projects with people I've never met in person before.

People still care where a company is located?

Apparently some do. In addition to various friends and relatives stopping by throughout Fanime (hi Mom and Dad!), we were surprised to see an officemate from our building who just happened to go to Fanime every year. Small world. (Hi Steve!) It was also interesting to meet the reporter from Nichi Bei Times who included part of an interview with us in his report on Fanime, and a ton of other cool local people.

Memory #2: Audience participation and humor are good panel ingredients.

For the past couple years, we've been doing an introduction-to-ren'ai panel at all the cons we attend. Before this year, we used a Powerpoint slide show to drive the presentation, with a couple slides at the end about our own game. This year, we decided to split our presentation into 2 panels-- one on ren'ai games in general, and a separate one just about Shira Oka.

Not only that, but we decided to replace our Powerpoint slides from previous panels with a new presentation that's actually driven by our own in-game engine, with Shira Oka characters narrating the presentation. Overall, we wanted to make our panel more fun and interactive.

The only problem was, we couldn't exactly get all the lines professionally voiced just for the panel. At ACen, we solved this problem by having a couple panelists (staff members) reading the lines. It went okay, I thought, but I wouldn't say it was spectacular.

When Fanime came along, I had a crazy idea. What if we used audience members do the voices? It would be risky, since we would be depending on random people to do a good job, but it definitely satisfied our goal of making the panel more interactive...

It worked out surprisingly well, even though (or maybe because) there was a shortage of girls in the audience, and our cast of characters is mostly girls. So yeah, we had a couple guys voicing female characters. The guy who voiced Alice was particularly... memorable. I don't know if I'll ever look at Alice the same way again.

It's always neat when audience members come up after our panel ends to continue chatting with us. This time in particular, we were surprised and flattered when a couple people told us afterwards that it was the best panel they attended at Fanime. Wow.

Some criticism we got was that there wasn't enough general information on ren'ai games, and we focused on our own game a little too much, considering it was an overview-to-the-genre panel. In retrospect, this was true-- we didn't mean to, but the Q&A period ended up being dominated by questions about Shira Oka. It's no surprise that if you ask us questions about Shira Oka, of course we're more than happy to talk about it. :P

I think we managed to improve on that for the next panel (AX), but I'll save the details for my AX blog-to-come.

Memory #3: Anchovy overdose == bad

On one of the days, we decided to get pizza for lunch. Somehow we got on the subject of anchovies. It's one of those pizza toppings that every pizza place seems to offer, but who actually orders it? Is it still on the menu just for legacy reasons?

Andrew actually likes to get it sometimes, but admittedly no one else we know does. So it was decided that we would be getting an anchovy pizza. Half of one anyway, half something-else, just so there was a fallback for the less-brave souls. He returns an hour later with the pizza, and we just marvel at it for a while before digging in.

I took one of the edge pieces, so it didn't have nearly as many anchovies as one of the middle pieces. I don't remember if April had a slice or not. (I don't think she did.) Kate, who was originally going to try it, changed her mind after she noticed that the anchovies were "hairy". For the record, anchovies are not hairy-- the "hairs" are actually tiny bones, which are edible.

Well, if you consider anchovies edible in the first place. :P For one thing, they're extremely salty, and a tad fishy. And I found out afterwards that Andrew actually asked them for extra anchovies. Personally, I don't think I would ever order an anchovy pizza myself, but I'm willing to eat a slice if there's one in front of me, so I did.

It tasted okay. But then, for the next few hours after lunch, Andrew and I felt... weird. I wish I could think of a more descriptive word, but it was just kind of this... weird headache. Our standing theory is that all the extra salt caused some kind of imbalance in our body chemistry, which usually isn't so good. Fortunately, it went away after a while, and that was that.

Anyway, lesson learned. I don't think we'll be having anchovies again for a while.