In December 2025 we attended a conference GDS Prague where we showcased our debut game called Somnium: Awaken. GDS Prague is the oldest Central European festival dedicated to games development, game technologies, business and marketing. During this 2 day long event you can listen to talks, participate in workshops or visit a Indie Expo Zone.

From Attendees to Exhibitors

Last year, we headed to GDS 2024 just to soak in the atmosphere and see what everyone else was building. We enjoyed a lot of interesting indie games and some really great talks. We walked away inspired and knew that we wanted to be on the other side of the booth for the next one.

Up until we applied for the Indie Expo Zone, we hadn’t shown Somnium: Awaken to a single person outside our small development team. We honestly weren’t 100% sure we could get a demo polished enough for people to play, but we decided to take a chance and go for it.

When we got the news that we were accepted, the excitement kicked in. From that moment on, it was all hands on deck as we worked tirelessly to get everything ready for our first public appearance.

Preparations

Once we were accepted, the real challenge began. We started with a solid outline, aiming for about 15 minutes of gameplay. However, as any developer knows, plans rarely survive contact with reality. Over the next two months, we redesigned the demo two or three times. Every time we had to scale something down, a new fear crept in. We were terrified that players would finish the whole thing in under a minute and walk away without proper feedback.

The tension peaked the night before the event. While most of the GDS crowd was heading to the official welcoming party to network and grab a drink, we stayed back at our desks. We chose the “grind” over the party, and for a while, it felt like a terrible mistake.

Somewhere around midnight, we managed to break… well, everything. A “quick fix” turned into a total meltdown of the build. It took hours of debugging and a lot of beers, but we finally managed to get a working build ready at around 4:15 AM. We set our alarms for 6:30 AM, grabbed a 2 hours of sleep, and hoped for the best.

The event

Friday morning arrived far too quickly. As the doors opened, we found ourselves standing at our booth with a mix of excitement and pure nerves.

Because it was a Friday morning, the Indie Expo Zone started off a bit quiet. That slow start gave us plenty of time to overthink everything. We found ourselves whispering questions back and forth: “What should we have on the screen when nobody’s playing? Is the main menu enough? Should we loop a gameplay video? How do we actually get someone to stop and talk to us?”

Slowly but surely, the first few testers sat down, and then more followed. Our biggest fear—that players would breeze through the demo in a minute or two quickly vanished. We didn’t see a single person finish in under ten. People were taking their time, soaking in the atmosphere of our game and actually engaging with the level we built. After the stress of the night before, seeing the game hold people’s attention so well was the best reward we could have asked for.

Final words

Looking back, it’s crazy to think how close we came to pulling out of the event entirely. When we received our acceptance email, we were so nervous that we waited until just one hour before the deadline to actually confirm our spot. Like most developers, we’re perfectionists, and we struggled with the idea of showing a demo that wasn’t perfect yet.

But now that the dust has settled and we’ve had a chance to talk about the experience together, we’ve realized it went better than we ever could have hoped.

There is no substitute for watching a real person play your game. We saw exactly where players struggled, what felt intuitive, and where we needed to polish the experience further. Beyond the technical lessons, the most incredible part was the feedback… It was overwhelmingly positive. We walked into GDS 2025 with a lot of nerves, but we walked away with the confidence that we’re building something people could truly enjoy.

GDS Prague, thank you for having us. We can’t wait to show you what’s next for Somnium: Awaken.