Philly Game Forge’s first showcase: nearly 30 devs demo games

Now that’s what an indie game community in Philadelphia can look like.

At the Philly Game Forge‘s first showcase event, nearly 30 game developers from the region showed off their work at the city’s first coworking space for game studios and makers. There was pizza, there was beer, there was Starburst candy corn. At nine p.m., two hours after the showcase began, it was so packed you could hardly make your way through to the iPads and computers set up with games.

The showcase, organized by developer Shawn Pierre and Cipher Prime‘s Will Stallwood, will happen about twice a year, said Dain Saint of Cipher Prime, the Old City studio that launched Game Forge last month.

Many developers showed off games that were still in development or that they had made at the recent Philly Game Jam hackathon.

We asked party goers what their favorite games were. If there aren’t links to the games, that means they’re not widely available yet. Check out the answers below.

Drew Wallace: Intake by Cipher Prime or Jamestown by Final Form Games, but the high schooler interns at Final Form so, he says, “I’m biased.”

Greg Lobanov (left), himself a local game developer: Tag, a game built by Cipher Prime’s Dain Saint and Will Stallwood during the Philly Game Jam

Ray Merkler: These French Fries are Terrible Hot Dogs by Shawn Pierre of Origaminc

Mel Kinney (left) and Tara Levin: Humdinger by Flyclops and The Moment I Saw Your Eyes by Little Wins. Levin is close with Flyclops cofounder Parker Whitney. [Full Disclosure: Levin previously served as a Technical.ly advertising manager.]

Jason Marziani of Little Wins (left), with Game Forge showcase organizer Shawn Pierre, told us that he built The Moment I Saw Your Eyes at the Cipher Prime’s August Game Jam and named it that because of a mishap on Spotify. The prompt, Marziani said, was to develop a game named after an Oasis song. So he did a quick search on Spotify, found “The Moment I Saw Your Eyes” and then three days later, realized Oasis is also the name of a barbershop quartet that sings a song called, yes, “The Moment I Saw Your Eyes.”

John Landers: Waiting for the Rapture, a card game by (Facebook alias) Kelvin Spacejam

Johnny Cook: Intake by Cipher Prime

Matt Welsh: Dark Shift by Alien Bug

Kat Angeloni: Monsters! by QuadraTron — “I got on the high scoreboard.”