Gloom and Doom at Campus Legends 2026
It has been a crazy weekend! I was invited to demo Gloom and Doom at the Campus Legends esports finals, so I spent the last two days manning a table and chatting to a whole bunch of people who came to check out my game. I explained the game and answered questions till my voice almost gave out, but it was a great experience!
Campus Legends is an annual esports tournament for schools in Singapore to compete in, and this year they were generous enough to create a space for local Singaporean indie game developers to showcase their demos and completed games. Big thanks to Claudia for taking the initiative to set this up and reaching out to game devs like me.
As such, many of the visitors to my table were students, and in addition to telling them about Gloom and Doom, I was able to psyche them up to tell their own stories. Game engines have made game development a lot more accessible than it was when I was their age, so it’s an amazing time for people to take those shifting ideas in their heads and turn them into a tangible story for others to enjoy. If a person with no coding experience like me can put together a little demo like Get The Kids To School, I’m sure they can develop something too!
I think the best part for me was when my wife and kids came to visit. I think the little ones were really happy to see our little project being shown to the public like that, plus all the other video games they got to try out.
Gloom and Doom stickers!
I had a really good time at the event, though the lead-up to it was something else. I’ve only done an event like this once before, at Level Up KL in Malaysia a couple of years ago. I remember then that I didn’t have much stuff at my booth to give out to visitors and all, so this time I printed stickers as little takeaways. I’d never printed stickers before, so it was a bit of a learning curve to get the artwork ready, learn what a die-cut outline is and why it absolutely must be a vector path, and work with safety margins so my artwork doesn’t get cropped. I eventually ran out of time to tinker, and printed circular stickers instead of custom shapes.
Then I also mistakenly printed a whole bunch of Story Stripdown stickers on large sheets, so I had to cut them into individual pieces by hand. Don’t make the same mistakes I did!
These illustrations came in handy when I was explaining the story to visitors.
For decor, I got a few cheap picture frames from IKEA and stuck artwork and QR codes into them. That was something I learned from the other exhibitors at Level Up KL.
But yeah, all in all, it was a fun weekend, and I’ll always look forward to opportunities to talk to folks about game dev, 90s pop culture references, and storytelling techniques. Let’s see what comes next!
Oh, I gotta share some of the really cool indie games that my fellow devs are working on. Check these out, in no particular order
Shadow Rush - a roguelike action game where you dash around killing monsters.
Hantu and Hunted - a fun multiplayer game where humans have to escape from an assortment of Southeast Asian ghosts.
Detective Hindsight - A puzzle game where you solve crimes using a psychic little girl’s drawings.
Fleeting Requests: Freya and Ray - A visual novel about helping people with magic.
Tails & Talons - A card game with cute characters like the Nekomancer.
Cursed Companions - A multiplayer game where you use your voice to cast spells but have to avoid Taboo words!
