You don’t really believe it. This has got to be a dream, right? Your game wasn’t THAT good, was it? Oh no, your Twitter’s blowing up. All your friends are congratulating you. You feel momentarily self-important, but the feeling then gets overshadowed by how guilty you feel for your self-importance.
You struggle to figure out who to invite to your VIP table. You have all these seats to fill, given that tables like these are meant for actual games studios with actual teams. In the end, you put out an open call on social media, so as not to hurt anyone’s feelings. The people who take you up on it are grateful, sometimes effusively so. Some of them even bring glowsticks.
You discover firsthand the sensory hell of the expo floor, now that you’re actually forced to be there. You field questions from baffled business dudes who don’t understand how you would monetize something like this. (That is, after they go up to chat with the cis dude friends you asked to help out at your booth, who have to explain to the business dudes that um, actually you, and only you, were the one who made this game, yes, all of it, even the programming.)
