Madison, Wisconsin

At MDEV 2026, in addition to covering the event on behalf of Boss Rush, I had the privilege of hosting several friends of mine who worked on the Visual Novel dating simulator: I Wanna Be. You can find the Store Page for the game here, with a demo expected some time soon. Four of them crashed in my living room for the duration of the conference in exchange for food.

I Wanna Be is a Visual Novel sitcom where you play Bobby, a transfer student new to a dysfunctional school full of conceited and goofy people. You meet characters such as the cruel and vindictive, lovely Brooklyn, the mobster Gambino, McRonald the magician, amongst others.

A few months ago, I suggested that the other developers on the game come to MDEV in Madison, Wisconsin, as a great opportunity to promote the game, make connections with other developers, and learn more about game dev. Several of them agreed.

From left to right in the photo above, we have Richard, Jeff, Yo Ming, Tim, myself, and Adam. Several other members of the development team were not able to make it to the conference, but they were there in spirit. Richard was not officially part of the develop game, but rather a friend of ours who kindly dressed as one of our characters, McRonald, in order to bring in and interact with players. Jeff is the lead designer and mastermind of the game, working on everything from the programming to the narrative. Yo Ming is one of our excellent artists. Tim is running marketing, at least the parts that don’t involve me yapping about it wherever I’m allowed to. I’m one of the writers and narrative designers of the game. Adam designed several of the minigames in I Wanna Be. The cardboard cut out is of Brooklyn, the girl you’re trying to date in the game.

The night prior to the start of MDEV, a lot of work on the game still had to be done, especially in preparation for the booth itself. To entice dehydrated gamers and developers, we set up a “sweatshop”, their words, not mine, to cut out stickers that I had printed and place them upon water bottles. This was despite my compatriots having spent anywhere between five and seven hours on buses and trains to Madison.

Furthermore, the cardboard cutout of Brooklyn had to be assembled from twenty-odd pieces of copy paper. One issue that I ran into with printing Brooklyn, is that a tiny monkey from a browser extension I have printed on every single page without exception. Naturally, I did not notice this while printing, and instead we had to redact the monkeys to ensure they weren’t too distracting. Several survived on the cutout, if you look for them.

Aside from Brooklyn-assembling and bottle-labeling, we spent time playtesting the game, knocking out a few more bugs, and coming up with lines for Richard, aka. McRonald, to draw people in for the booth. I browsed the scripts for McRonald’s lines in the game, and came up with a few more. McRonald is a rather conceited and duplicitous jester type of character, so most of the lines were self-aggrandizing or bs-ing the person he was talking to.

At around midnight, everyone crashed on whatever furniture I had that best approximated a bed. That meant converting one couch into the pseudo-bed mode, a bean bag, an armchair, and the floor. We forgot to inflate my inflatable mattress, so that had to wait until the second day. I slept in my palatial queen-sized bed as usual, so only the peons had to suffer.

The following day, we raided my PC for two monitors. We set one up to show a gameplay reel on repeat, and then another monitor for people to actually play the game. Richard/McRonald stood out in front of the both and dragged introverted strangers against their will to check out the game.

Thankfully, the reception to the game was largely positive. The sense of humor in it isn’t for everyone, but most people found lines that made them laugh, and we even had several people play for forty five minutes or an hour at a time. We left with about fifty more wishlists than we started with. A rousing success by our books.

Here on out, we’re spending more time focusing on polishing the demo, fixing bugs, and adding optional dialogue to the game. I kept the Brooklyn cutout, which now judges me every time I walk into my kitchen for a snack. We expect to release with one complete storyline for the route of dating Brooklyn, with several more routes with different plots and endings for dating several other characters. And I’m sure to babble on more about this game later down the line.

What about you? Have you ever wondered what goes down behind a booth at a game convention? Or if you’ve run booths before, what was your experience like? Let us know in the comments or on the Boss Rush Discord.

Featured Image Credit: Graphic by MDEV, Photo by Lev Working