Hi! I haven’t written a blog post in a while, mostly because I went and started making my game full-time! I’ve also decided to not write any technical dives into my game until it’s fully released, and I know what actually works and what doesn’t 😅.
Context
The event that I joined is called Game On, and it came back after a long pause caused by the pandemic. It had events and booths directed to both game developers and gamers, which ensured a quite diverse crowd.
I’ve been developing my game full time since the beginning of January 2024 and around August I started sending builds of my game to various friends, gathering feedback and improving the game based on it. After a few iterations, I’ve also started thinking about pitching my game to various publishers. Having seen this GDC talk, that I highly recommend watching if you are interested in showcasing your game, I realized that this could be my golden opportunity to talk to some publishers and press. Spoiler alert, I didn’t. But I managed to take some very important experience and insights about showcasing my game and the game itself. And I wanted to share the former here (I am still working on incorporating the latter!) and maybe inspire some people who want to go to their first expo!
Survival
Let’s start with ways to actually survive the 3-day event, especially in the case of going solo, which I did.
Starting with food. The first day, I picked up a pre-made sandwich on my way to the convention centre. It was a great choice as it was cheap, and I didn’t have to leave my booth. However, the various food truck yummies were tempting me too much, causing me to cave in and want to buy some food around the venue. The issue, however, is that I decided to do that on the second day of the con, which was on a Saturday and jam-packed with various events and, obviously, people. Which resulted me in only getting lunch at 4 PM after big breakfast at 8 AM. I also was lucky that there were volunteers at the event, who could look after my booth when I was getting some food. In hindsight, swapping the food acquisition options between the first and the second con day would have been way smarter.
At a convention, one’s voice is probably one of the most important tools in their arsenal, and my experience as a hobbyist choir singer didn’t let me down when having to maintain this tool. A week before the convention, I got a trusted throat medicine that has saved me several times before and while it helped some neighbouring game developers, I ended up not using it during the event. Instead, I managed to maintain my voice with a natural remedy. Every morning after waking up, I would boil the kettle, add a pack of camomile tea into a thermos, fill it and leave it to cool down a bit. Once the tea is still hot, but drinkable, I would add some honey (I used dark honey collected around barley fields), mix it and close the thermos and then sip it during the event. As a closing statement, I feel like I should mention that experiences with this might, obviously, might vary, and I haven’t committed to a scientific approach and fully explore the with’s and without’s, but at worst you’d have something sweet to keep you warm.
The Presentation
When I finally confirmed my attendance to the convention, I got a reply saying that I have half of a day to make 2 posters that would be printed and used in my booth, which as you can see as the picture below. From the previously mentioned GDC video, I knew that putting things up high was a good choice, that’s why on one poster I used the title of my game, and the second poster was used to host a QR code with a linktree link, which houses all of my game related social links that can also be edited! Even with a bright light pointed at the code creating a big white spot, most devices could still read the code properly. Truly magical experience.
On the topic of social media. The first thing people expected from the QR code and then asked about are the store page links, like steam or itch. But my linktree page didn’t have them. Luckily, I was always around and could explain my reasoning and redirect them to various social sites, where I would post weekly updates about my game and promised to share the information when my game comes to any digital store. Personally, I think I managed to mostly translate the interest in my game into a social following without losing too many people, even though I had my doubts if X/Twitter, YouTube, TikTok and Instagram would cover everything and was even considering creating a newsletter, but eventually I decided against creating more commitments and just kept the existing sites. Time will tell if that was the correct decision, but I am feeling positive!
I was satisfied with the banners that I created and how visible they were, but I already have some ideas on how I would like to improve them!
One of them is to put some action words that relate to the gameplay, like “Evade the guardian. Break the seals. Defeat your foes”, or a super short description, like “Dark Souls inspired roguelike with chases and puzzles”, which could really help to inform the onlookers on what the game is about. Obviously, showing gameplay on a secondary monitor (like a laptop + monitor combo using extended screen options) would certainly help considerably, but if it’s crowded seeing the short description would definitely be easier.
Expanding on informing what the game is about through the poster, I saw some booths that used several pictures from the game, some with UI/HUD, some without. Some used them as small framed shots scattered over a larger background. And some combined the shots to make the background. Definitely a lot of inspiration that I will be considering the next time I will be making a poster.
The Game Demo
Up until now, the time of writing, I am polishing a vertical build of my game – a single level with some items, a few enemies, a few room variations, 2 puzzles and a boss battle. As I previously mentioned, I managed to do several iterations of the game build before showcasing the game at the event, and I consider myself lucky for it, since, even with all the improvements, I received a ton of feedback and observations, both from the players and me. It was tempting to go back to the university times and just try to remember everything, but taking a notepad and a pen was the second-best choice (right after the camomile tea), since I managed to take 5 notepad-pages-worth of information, which I should cover in my devlog soon™️.
I tried to not filter the things I wrote down on the spot, and instead noted almost everything. My reasoning was that I should do a better job of deciding what feedback to implement and what to skip when I am rested and in a better mindset. So I wrote down the things people said and some improvements that I came up with on the spot. I also noted things that I had to explain directly to people rather than letting people figure it out, which wasn’t always the case, especially with some bits of the HUD. Overall, I am quite happy with things I noted, and have already made a first pass and implemented some of the things mentioned in my notes.
My game is a roguelike, and it’s quite difficult to determine the length of a run, since to progress further a player needs to feel the rhythm of the game, learn the enemy patterns and so on. Thus, I’ve had a person play for a few minutes then put the controller down, and I’ve also had a person play for around 1.5 hours straight. Personally I was okay with both and both gave me different insights. After talking with some more experienced devs, I learnt that having a 10 – 15 minute long demo is ideal as it maximises the amount of people playing and sharing their opinions. Of course, it’s more difficult with a game like mine, but if I was making a more linear experience, I think that’s what I would be aiming for.
For a next showcase, here are things that I didn’t consider before, but will from now. Firstly, narrative and story bits. During my development, I decided to have minimal story in my game, mainly to save on the production costs, but also it felt like learning to write stories was one more skill I need to learn, and I wasn’t sure if I had the time for it. Personally, I think it was a correct choice to have only the gameplay present in the showcase demo, without any extra content. But I also realize that some projects can require the story bits as it could be part of their demo, or just necessary to provide the context. Like all things game-dev – it’s all about balancing and managing risks.
Audio is an important asset to a game and should not be overlooked. Initially I was expecting for the monitor speakers to do the job, but after the first day I learnt that this idea was naive and all the chatter from the visitors, surrounding booths and the music coming from the massive speakers all around the venue drowned the measly rear-firing speakers. Luckily I was living near the venue, so for the next day I brought in speakers that could definitely help people hear all the sound effects. I also saw some other developers using smaller Bluetooth speakers, which worked quite well. I was also glad that I implemented sound control into my game and managed to disable music for the event. Even though I like the score that I made for the first level, I am afraid that listening to it for 21 hours could make me hate it, similarly to making a song into a morning alarm sound.
It’s also worth considering having a special version of the game just for the showcase. This version could include things like the ability to jump in and out of various levels, or disabling the quit button, so that one doesn’t have to make sure that people aren’t hacking their PC. If a game has skill trees, cosmetics and the like, it could also be worthwhile to have them unlock and letting people to just play around with them.
So what now?
After feeling the satisfaction of writing a blog post, I will tumble back into making the game -polishing it further until I deem it good enough to be released online and then start working on new levels. But in terms of showcases and game events, I am super glad I went into this one! And I am very likely to go to more of them especially with all this newfound experience, just not sure if I will get with Lurking Behind again, or will aim to make a new game and see how people like it!
Martynas Antipenkovas 