Video Games – Page 2 – Mini Mammoth Games

Adelaide's Addition To The "Space Race"

As many of you may be aware, we at Mini Mammoth Games have been working on a lunar rover game alongside multiple universities and space companies. Working with a large group of Flinders students we were able to create a basic demo that allowed players to control a lunar rover and perform the same tasks that the Australian Rover Challengers would have to complete. During the event we received amazing feedback from a wide array of attendees. From children refusing to put down the controller, to students who are dreaming of working within the space industry.

After the completion of the 2022 Australian Rover Challenge Mini Mammoth and the Andy Thomas Centre for Space Resources decided that Roving Rovers could continue to improve upon the first demo to help support the rover challenge and help to drive more interest into Australia’s growing space industry. So back to the screens we went, updating rovers for a fun and unique, but definitely not realistic rover to bring a bit more personality to the game. This also allowed us to create a mascot to help drive interest and emotional investment into Roving Rovers. This mascot became known as Brum, a fun and personable rover reminiscent of a bug. This next version of RR was taken to the 14th Space Forum in 2022, this allowed us, for the first time, to really reach into and have a look at the current state of the space industry and how it is evolving.

2023 rolls around and we spy another Australian Rover Challenge, this time we had focused hard on allowing the players to both choose pre-made rovers (one being the Adelaide Uni teams rover) and the option to modify and create your own version of Brum. This was a favourite section for many players, especially the ability to play as the rovers they’re watching compete. Furthermore we updated all the tasks to realistically resemble what the challenge’s tasks are. Which was also a big draw for the challenge teams as well, many came over to have a look and see just how similar it was and allowed other team members to be in control of the rover.

If you’re in Adelaide during the month of September 2023 make sure to stop by the MOD museum to play our demo for FREE during the exhibition! If you’re here specifically here on the 1st of September grab a FREE ticket from our Eventbrite page and celebrate the opening of our exhibition!

Meet The Team

Although the team for Roving Rovers includes those outside of Mini Mammoth Games, here are the Leads that will be ensuring it’s success!

Adding on the rest of the Mini Mammoth, our combined skills will allow us to achieve anything we wish for Roving Rovers!

What's On For The Future

In July we attended Avcon and allowed visitors to try out a demo of Roving Rovers, if you want to read more on that check out our blog!

In the rest of the coming year we will be showcasing Roving Rovers at every potential opportunity, these include many upcoming conventions! The first being Gamescom in August, then South by Southwest and the Melbourne International Games Week marathon. These are great opportunities for us to showcase our current prototype as we will be updating Roving Rovers over the course of the rest of this year. With many new opportunities for our community to have a tasting of Roving Rovers’ potential! So we look forward to seeing the rest of what South Australia will be showcasing at these events.

Roving Rovers has been a great opportunity for Mini Mammoth Games and we are very excited to see where it leads us in the future, furthermore we are excited to see what you are able to achieve with Roving Rovers!

A demo with the chance of completely making your rover from scratch; want only wheels? Sure, go ahead. Want three sets of wheels? Sure, you can do that! No ability to actually perform any tasks? Well, we can’t stop you, I guess. Where is it now? You ask, well, find out through our socials, but you might be seeing us pop up at all sorts of events, games? Space? Small business? Keep your eyes peeled and you might just catch a glimpse of us.

Want to test the current demo?

Want to keep up to date? Join the Roving Rovers mailing list here:

Or join our discord server, subreddit or follow our other socials for any and all updates!!

See you on our journey!

Avcon 2023

In a good stroke of luck our application to avcon was accepted and we decided to showcase Roving Rovers. This was an exciting start to the now continuous conventions that will crowd the rest of our calendar. Although we had only a week’s notice we had already had our fair share of conventions so we were prepared to take on the task of getting everything ready.

Preparation

Now to prepare for the convention Mini Mammoth focuses on 3 main aspects, these being: the game itself, marketing collateral and a little bit of merch to spice things up.

Now thankfully we had already built a player ready demo thanks to the Space Forum last year, but we still had the other 2 to take care of.

For the marketing collateral we had 2 assets to create and order; a 2m tall pull-up banner and a smaller table top banner. Both showing off Roving Rovers but the smaller held a QR code to easily allow visitors to sign up to our mailing list.
In regards to the merch we brought along a myriad of collectables; badges, stickers and some cards. The first 2 served the same purpose, to help spread awareness of Mini Mammoth Games and Roving Rovers. This meant that we had to create multiple designs for each, which we will show you below:

Will just like to shamelessly promote the fact that we made the badges ourselves, from design to actually hand pressing them together with a manual machine. This took a lot of time, but saved us a ton of money, though that was only because we knew someone with the manual machine beforehand.

The cards we designed to help visitors with easy access to everything Roving Rovers, this means the game, our socials, any community forums and so on and so forth.

Exhibiting!

With Avcon being at the convention centre it meant that there was plenty of (paid) parking around and underneath which meant that we didn’t have to haul everything from a distance. Though we will suggest making sure you have a trolley if you are bringing more than one trip’s worth of things. We had 2 trips to get everything inside however that was with us holding on to more than what we should have been comfortable holding. Including this it still only took me and 1 other approximately an hour to set everything up and have a short tour of the rest of the venue to see what other stalls were looking like.

Both Saturday and Sunday were an excellent experience for our staff and placements alike, we had offered them the opportunity to allow them to gain more experience within the industry that would otherwise be unknown without becoming an indie developer.

“Avcon was a fantastic experience for us to get Roving Rovers out there and get real feedback from players. It was great seeing all the talented cosplayers, artists and other game developers from South Australia.” – Tyler (Programming Director)

Thank you to everyone who attended Avcon and especially those who came to the indie games room as this is one of the few conventions that help to lift up the indie developers within South Australia. Furthermore this was a great way to show off Roving Rovers to the wider Australian community as this was a project that had mostly stayed within the space industry till now.

Conclusion

While we are lucky to be able to attend Avcon at such short notice, it still was a last minute push to get everything ready on time. Thankfully we had a small break before client work was set to start the week after, this being the main reason we were able to successfully prepare.

If you aren’t interested or unable to exhibit at Avcon we would still highly recommend attending as a visitor, however this was a great way to experience exhibiting a game for the first time.

Overall Avcon is a great convention to attend and helps to support a wide range of small and independent businesses from South Australia. We had a great time and apart from the last minute rush it was a rather chill time to prepare for and attend. If you are an indie developer looking to attend here are our tips for attending conventions:

If you plan to showcase a demo at conventions make sure to add marketing collateral or merch assets into your pipeline; so that they aren’t done last minute.
If any of these items are to be printed by a third party make sure to leave at minimum a week for printing and delivery.
1. Officeworks is our recommendation for pull-up banners
Make sure to leave QA time for your demo so that visitors to your table don’t spend their time finding every bug.
1. Have your demo accessible to the public so they can play it even if they miss out at the convention, this should be something that you advertise while you’re there!
Make sure to have a set plan; this will help to remove a lot of stress and allow you to enjoy the experience more.

Thank you to everyone who attended and we look forward to seeing everyone’s faces in the future, whether at next year’s Avcon or other conventions that help to celebrate Australia’s talents!

If you would like to check out Roving Rovers follow this link:

And if you would like to stay up to date with its development sign up to our mailing list: