Exhibiting my game on a shoestring budget

Learning from local shows

Going in with a goal – I came into this with a specific goal in mind: that very soon I want the game to get through Greenlight and on to Steam.  This being the case, the immediate goal was to try to get as many people to sign up for my ‘newsletter’ as possible – so that I could send an email when the Greenlight page goes live.  I had other things I wanted to do such as connect with people and be part of greater gamer/developer community, but those were secondary.

DIY booth - I put together this booth on a shoestring budget, but all in all I guess it worked out pretty well.  In this picture you’ll see

There were 3 machines running the game all night – This worked beautiful.  There was quite a lot of play on the game outside of core hours.  I didn’t track this play but would occasionally walk by to see if I needed to reset anything – and there were often people happily at play!  The fact that the machines were cheap (and huge) made it easy to walk away without too much concern.

Added display features – I added in a couple of features to make the game more functional for being left alone for long stretches. Specifically:

Poor voice & energy management – By the end of day one I was already hoarse from talking to people and my voice was almost completely shot by the middle of the second day.  I used throat lozenges and gargled with salt water but I could still barely talk the whole second half of the event.

Not enough speakers – Yeah… I brought one set that was loud enough and another that was too quiet and didn’t bring speakers for the other two units.  I just ran out of time and never got out to buy more sets.  I was fortunate enough to be set up next to @mommysBestGames, who lent me a set of speakers - They are the best!

I should have tested the full setup at home! – When I tested the game on my new computers, they all ran reasonably fast – in the 45 to 60 fps range.  But when I hooked everything up in the exhibit hall the frame rate dropped to about 12 frames a second.  I panicked and stayed up all night making a build with no particles or special effects.  I also made a full build with some of the display settings changed.  As it turned out, when scaled to fit on the big monitors the program was using a setting that made the machines chug.  Fixed but at a very high rate of anxiety.

My organizational issues (and control issues?) made it difficult to accept help – My brother agreed to help me show the game which was a huge act of kindness.  Unfortunately we never really got on the same page as to what form that would take.  Having someone to come take over during core hours from time to time was a huge relief à but I was never sure when he was coming or how long he was planning to stay. 

I think he would have appreciated more guidance from the beginning but I never seemed to get organized enough to functionally coordinate with him.  Sorry bro!

Should have figured out a plan of where I was staying each night – This is a pretty obvious thing to work out but… I was torn between staying at a buddy’s room there on the waterfront or driving the ½ hour home each night.  Most of the nights I ended up driving home and it would have been better to go in know where I was going to lay down.