December 2, 2015 at 09:13NextCastle Party 2015: how I showed my game
A month ago, I took part in an indie showcase at the St. Petersburg NextCastle Party 2015 festival, and would like to share my experience and impressions with you. I am an amateur gamer, to get to such a relatively large event is a serious achievement for me. Let's see if I was able to correctly dispose of the chances given to me and show my game as it should. Photos - Mikhail Evstratov
NextCastle Party is the annual festival of indie and retro games held in St. Petersburg. It appeared recently, in 2012, but it is rapidly gaining momentum, almost doubling the audience and scale every year. More details can be found on the festival website or its VKontakte group , but a selection of photos
since the last event.
To become a member of the indie showcase, it turned out to be enough to submit an application with a description of the project and wait until two weeks are left before the festival opens. To this significant day, the organizers selected 30 of the many announced projects, including mine, and distributed them between the two exhibition days. I got the second - Sunday.
To make it clear what will be discussed, I will show a video clip from the final part of the post. If you are going to read the whole thing, then you can not watch. I warn you in advance: all materials from the stand are crammed with information about the game and there can be no talk about any anonymity of the project. You already saw the picture in the teaser, right?
Further, I will pedantically describe the process of preparing this demonstration, all my findings and conclusions: how I applied logos to clothes, what equipment I needed, how much money was spent, what I wanted, what I got and the like. A lot of details that are likely to be interesting to those who are developing games or who have to deal with the self-organization of the exhibition stand.
After the first euphoria of the chosen one has passed, the time has come for insidious plans. Inspired by last year's report from the developers of the game "12 is better than 6" I started to prepare. The organizers provided me with the following resources:
Here is the complete list of Sunday indie showcase projects:
The organizers shared the expected number of visitors: 1000 people in two days. We divide in half and take into account that in addition to the indie festival, it is also dedicated to retrostuffs and eSports. It turns out about 100 people to a potential audience that can be attracted to the stand. My game requires some time for training, you can not play it for less than three minutes, so there will be clearly more potential players than opportunities to introduce them to the gameplay.
In the process of preparation, I was driven by several desires. Without thawing anything and not twisting my soul, I spread them all in order of magnitude and importance for me:
For simplicity, we will consider my goals the satisfaction of my desires. To achieve these goals, I set myself the following tasks:
As you can see, a pretty solid list. Looking at him, I realized that in the evenings I won’t have time to do all this. I took 4 days off from work - from Tuesday to Friday, at midnight of which a train was already waiting for me to St. Petersburg.
It required one large double-sided rollup and distribution flyers. A rollup is a vertical banner with a roll-up web. When folded, it is a compact but heavy box (mine looked very much like a hunting rifle in a case and weighed 14 kilograms). Unfolded - a rectangle stably standing on the floor without unnecessary details. The minimum rollup size is 80 × 200 cm, then there are wider options, but in my case the extra width was useless - the table was small. The rollups are single-sided, then the front is the image, and the back is blind and the back support stand is visible, and there are two-sided ones, then the rollup does not have the wrong side - the canvas is on both sides. My rollup stuck out in the middle of the exhibition hall, so there was no choice - it should have been two-sided.
I considered the main goal of the rollup to draw attention to the stand and showcase the brand. The more information husk on the banner, the worse it will perform this function. I decided to move all the information to the flyer, and make the rollup just a big flag: logo, name and nothing else.
The project has long grown out of my programmer-art, the great and terrible weilard is now responsible for pumping the graphic component of the game . My task was to prepare sketches. To save Andrei time and effort, I decided that an artist was needed for one job: creating a high-resolution rollup layout. I will make a flyer myself using fragments of rollup. This was the right decision, since we spent quite a lot of time coordinating the rollup layout, and I managed to print it with a margin of just one day.
The logo became the central element of the rollup, followed by the name of the game. Nothing more substantive, spray from below to fill the empty bottom. The layout was done at 80 dpi, but it was possible less - the output when printing on banner fabric with a resolution of 720 dpi is not what you might think when comparing the layout resolution and print resolution. I don’t know how exactly it was possible to lower the resolution, but just keep in mind that banner fabric is not paper, small details are eaten up.
Another important nuance was the stock strip on the layout - an additional 5 centimeters from the bottom of the canvas, on which I simply reflected the bottom of the layout. 2 of these five centimeters were in the visible zone (the rollup model was slightly higher than the standard one), if there wasn’t anything there, a bright white underside would come out. This question should definitely be clarified in communication with the printing house.
The flyer format chose A6 (105x148mm) as the most common. Most likely, the rest of the participants will be the same. You can show off and make Euro-format, under the envelope, but if visitors will collect flyers in a bundle, then mine will stick out and get in the way, maybe it will be folded, breaking in half.
On the back there are four screenshots from the game, two short paragraphs with the essence and links to contacts, the main of which is the VKontakte group. Link to the group is duplicated by a QR code. Not sure if this works, but everybody hangs, and I hung for solidity.
He printed the flyer on thick paper with a density of 300 g / m2, the density practically did not affect the cost (printed here ). The flyers turned out good, nice, like cards from some kind of board game. Except that the edges are scruffy in places - when trimming, the edges sometimes bulge and a loose cardboard on the cut becomes visible. However, this is not significant.
What is more significant is that colors are distorted during printing. The flyer, when it was printed, fell into the blue, the rollup also, although not so much, the announcement of the photo contest went green.
If anything, I did color proofing, and they printed out my rollup in miniature. Color proofing was a waste of time. The colors are distorted in different ranges in different ways, just to make the layout a little greener after the color proof does not work. Moreover, you have to edit blindly, because there is no way to repeat the color proof again and again after each edit. All I did was spend 2 hours on traffic jams getting to the printing house and was upset at the result. Next time I will not deal with this nonsense. Firstly, the departure of flowers is very noticeable in sunlight and poorly in artificial light, and secondly, the audience did not see the original and do not suspect an ambush. You can compare the rollup in the photo and its source code above. Photos - Mikhail Evstratov
At first I talked with printers like this: I found several services that were suitable in terms of cost and range, and sent them all letters with questions, pictures and more. I looked further on the reaction rate and adequacy. The difference in reaction rate was sometimes per day, the difference in approach and deadlines is also very significant. This approach worked well in quiet mode. When the deadlines began to run out, I had to overcome my fear of phone calls. Calling turned out to be much faster and more efficient.
The hustle and bustle of preparing layouts, searching for printing houses and traveling back and forth is very unsettling. There was no question of any parallel development with the game code. I tried several times, in the end, anyway, I was frustrated by anything, but not the game itself. Even a business card was made up for himself in a severe attack of procrastination. It is good that the wife dissuaded the paper from spending nonsense. It turned out to get rid of unhealthy printing excitement only after the last order was placed.
The setting of the game is a laboratory, and the entire game process takes place inside the terrariums. The characters communicating with the player are the gray-haired professor and his laboratory assistants. Laboratory gowns as the clothes of the stand team were adopted without options: the white gown is visible both in the uniform and motley crowd of visitors, it is overalls and adds specialist charm to the wearer, several people in gowns are a vivid stereotype of the team of scientists or the medical council of doctors. In general, we take!
The logo of the game is very convenient. It is nice a few years after its creation to make sure that it did everything right: monochrome, contour, inscribed in a circle, a short monosyllabic name. If there was no suitable logo, it would have to be invented urgently.
Visitors who should be attracted by the dressing gown see mainly his back, since the wearer of the dressing gown is usually facing the other person. Therefore, the logo with the name of the game should be placed as large as possible on the back, and how it will turn out in front. Most likely the dressing gown will be unfastened, we are not in the hospital, so the options “on the whole chest” disappear. Only small areas on the floor remain in front.
The dressing gown is not a T-shirt, they are not printed in printing houses, so the easiest and most effective way of applying the logo is to spray paint through a stencil. Having some experience in making DIY stencils, I made this sketch on sheet A2:
I assumed that the stencil would be cut out of a thick film or plastic. The stencil should be one solid design, so I had to use the logo inversion (otherwise the round-eyes hung under the eyes in the air) and add jumpers to the letters of the name.
Fortunately, in one of the printing houses where I sent my layout for consultation, there was an attentive and competent specialist who opened my eyes to the adhesive stencils. I did not need a hard reusable stencil, it was more practical to use several disposable adhesive. An adhesive stencil has no limitations related to its integrity, “hanging” elements are simply glued before use on a fabric on a temporary substrate. The stencil layout returned to the original logo:
The paint was used by MARABU Textil Design, a special aniline spray for textiles. It is not required to fix it; it is not suitable for everyday wear. Before spoiling the real clothes, I tried to put a small logo on the pillowcase: Four dude cropped gowns froze in horror. After analyzing the situation, I came to the conclusion that I too generously sprayed paint, achieving a wet shine of the fabric. You need to stop at the moment when the painted surface is just beginning to stop being dull. After taking into account the negative experience, the final application of the logos was quite successful. Each dressing gown took about 20 minutes, of which the process of applying paint did not take even a minute.
First, the robe is fixed, the bottom substrate is separated from the stencil and it is glued to the place of application. Areas of the dressing gown outside the screen are covered. I used the pages of old magazines. Further, the most difficult stage is the separation of the upper substrate. The white parts of the stencil should remain glued to the fabric, and the transparent substrate is separated. The substrate is strong, pulls everything onto itself, shifts the stencil, sticks to your hands and generally interferes in every way. Enrages terribly! But sooner or later, on the battlefield there remains only a tattered working layer of the stencil, which must be glued as tightly as possible to the fabric. Painting takes place quickly and easily, the main thing is not to overfill the paint (to prevent wetting of the fabric) and spray it perpendicular to the surface, otherwise it blows under tightly fitting places.
The best part is to peel off the stencil when the paint is slightly dried. The artifacts have never been without, but the nightmare that appeared on the test pillowcase has never been repeated.
I had one monitor, the second I took from work with a laptop. I had brackets for both monitors (cool black home and working simpler):
In principle, regular stands could be dispensed with, but the bracket allows you to adjust the height of the screen, free up space on the table and, most importantly, move the screen beyond the dimensions of the table, increasing the size of the stand.
Small household speakers and a bunch of flyers ideally fit on the vacated space under the screens. At the back of the table was a laptop from which the image was broadcast on one of the screens, a base for wireless headphones and a base for wireless gamepads. Under the table was a box of my desktop, a keyboard and a mouse for it, two pilots with sockets.
The composition was completed by the ikeev bar stool for the player. Convenient thing. The chair allows you to sit and relax with your hands on the lap of the gamepad. In addition, the seated person is slightly lower than the standing one, so viewers who do not have to crawl from the sides can stand behind him. Photos - Mikhail Evstratov
They took pictures with a Nikon D80 camera with a 50mm fixed lens, tightly clamped 1.8 aperture (in A mode) and ISO shut off. There was still not enough light. How did you get photos like the one that is higher in the text, ask its author, I don’t own such kung fu secrets. For the video, there was a regular Panasonic HC-W850 household camera.
Both devices were managed by one person - my wife. Lena photographed or filmed what was happening at the booth in her free mode, and her task was to photograph people for the contest. And the camera and camcorder had to buy more voluminous memory cards. The camera is 16 gigabytes (in our case it is about 3000 photos), the camera is 32 gigabytes (about five hours of video). This volume was quite enough.
With batteries a little more interesting. The camera doesn’t need much, but the camcorder’s battery runs out in an hour. Given that we forgot to charge her, after 40 minutes she already demanded to retire. With the old Sony, the reception worked with the purchase of a voluminous Chinese clone of its battery, but this one checks the authenticity of the battery, refusing to work with counterfeit goods. The solution turned out to be very simple: the camera is charged via USB, and I bought a used external battery for 16000 mAh (Xiaomi Mi Power Bank 16000), which Lena just carried in her pocket, connecting the camera with her native cable.
There was a tripod for the camera, which, alas, my wife did not use for the intended purpose, she was too unusual. Another lightweight tripod was taken for the illuminator. I assumed that there would not be enough light at the exhibition and bought the YN-160 S video light in advance . It was very useful to me for shooting the application of stencils on bathrobes, but it turned out to be inapplicable at the exhibition - people were constantly around us, the illuminator would inevitably blind someone. As a result, we did not use it, and its tripod worked just as a holder of the photo contest announcement.
We have beautiful overalls and a bright banner, why not invite visitors for a second to be in our place? We will have a competition for the craziest scientist! We give the player or just the interested visitor a free robe and offer to depict Professor Nimnul against the background of our rollup. Photo - Mikhail Evstratov Looking ahead, I’ll say that the contest turned out to be a pretty good idea. It was attended not only by the players at the stand, but also by simply passing visitors to the festival. Rollup without unnecessary information, a stereotypical theme and simple props did not disappoint. The competition was attended by 45 people:
When photographing a person, we asked him to leave contacts for communication in our notebook, after which we immediately photographed this entry. Thus, when parsing photographs after a series of pictures of one person, there was a frame with his contacts. Moreover, we numbered the contacts in the list, and both the current record and several previous ones fell on the photo - this helped a lot to figure out complicated situations. Found everyone.
At first, I presumptuously assumed that two people at the stand would be quite enough. I was mistaken. It is so good that the world is not without good people! Thanks to the help of our Petersburg friends, the stand team grew to five people, and no one was sitting idle. It turned out to quickly expand the stand, impromptu to organize the second game point (an additional gamepad with the base magically appeared) and replace the braking laptop (as if a spare laptop materialized from the air). Flyers began to disperse like hot cakes, and not only the players, but also visitors passing by began to look at the competition. And it just looked like a miracle, in fact it is the result of coordinated team actions. Friends, thank you! Here are 40 minutes of booth installation, shortened to a minute and a half:
Actually, even the idea of the final competition I threw my friend from St. Petersburg Alexander Nikolaev , one of the organizers geymdev community XGM . The label “XGM recommends!” Is his initiative. There were three projects with XGM on NextCastle Party: my worms, Princess.Loot.Pixel.Again and Doors, which are better not to tear. We all united before the exhibition in a general chat room and throughout the festival shared information and even some equipment (showed games on different days). Cooperation is an indie developer’s secret weapon that is hard to overestimate. I ask you to consider this an urgent recommendation - in this case, all participants benefit from the association. If you are interested in amateur game development, and somehow I can be useful to you - just let me know!
I so wanted to have time to implement hotsets in the game! Split the screen in half so that you can play the game together at the same computer. It’s good that I managed to stop in time! I limited myself to the implementation of control using a gamepad and a set of demo levels. And then I barely managed. On the one hand, the exhibition is an excellent occasion to squeeze into a spring and, finally, to do something important, which was not decided before. On the other hand, tugging with printing and props is very distracting, as a result, serious chips are no longer resolute - because of procrastination, I was mainly involved in refactoring, debugging and polishing trifles.
In moments of nervous tension, I want to break loose and play something. The week before the final week flew: colleagues from Message Questbecame full, I decided to support them with the ruble and installed the long-removed Steam. Along the way, I came across an old friend - an old Kingdom flash drive, trimmed for Steam . Four in the evening I never found. Apparently, they rolled up under the sofa. Maybe someone can develop games by playing other games, but it's definitely not me. Once again, he demolished Steam from the computer entirely. Once again it helped.
I finished the demonstration set of levels all the way, made changes to them both right before the departure for the show, and right at the stand. All the stages of the preparatory plan, which I optimistically set after preparing the levels, went off the chimney.
Below is a table with financial costs. The second monitor and laptop were kindly allowed to snooze from my workplace. I already had brackets for monitors, headphones and photo equipment, I don’t include them in the estimate. The label only additional costs:
In some cases, it was possible to save by buying used things on ads on Avito.
I will not bore the complete list of junk that I had to carry, but I can not help but mention its weight. A backpack with the bulk of things weighed 46 kg. Attached was a box with two 24-inch monitors, weighing 10 kg. My wife had to drag separately a folding bar stool, a photo and video camera, and an armful of packages with personal items that could not fit in a backpack. The most ergonomic option would be to go to St. Petersburg by car, but would have to lose an extra two days on the road, so I decided to grunt a little. The most difficult moment was to drag this belongings 500 meters to the metro after the festival. I will never do it again. Such hard-lifting things need to be carried by car. Challenge with dragging things inside trains, stations and subways is quite enough.
By the way! On the way, the folding bar stool turned out to be an indispensable assistant - we sat on it waiting for the train, I put the backpack on it, putting it on or removing it from the back, and most importantly, you could stand on it, pushing the backpack onto the top shelf in the reserved seat.
Both game points worked almost all the time, in only six or seven exhibition hours, about 60 people played the game. On average, it turns out a little less than 10 minutes per person. From solid exhaust - 20 new people in the VKontakte project group. This is clearly not the most ergonomic way to build an audience. But, in fact, this is not the main thing (see the goals section). And here is the very video from the introduction:
Next, a brief summary of the conclusions that I made on the results of the show. These are not recipes for all occasions, this is the dry residue of my thoughts about demonstrating my game.
Whenever possible, you need to organize two game points. The person playing at the stand attracts other people who want to play, the second game point allows you to use this effect and halve the waiting time for those who did not have a gamepad.
Two game points require two people escort. By my own feelings, when you play a game while communicating with the developer, and he abruptly switches from you to a neighboring player, it’s unpleasant, and you want to leave.
The chair increases the time of the game session, it is more convenient for a sitting player to play than a standing one. They played more and longer at a game point with a chair.
An increase in a game session is good only up to a certain limit, at some point it begins to reduce the bandwidth of the stand.
The presence of a tutorial is very important, the game should tell about itself, while the developer forcedly or deliberately left the player alone and alone. In addition to the presence of the tutorial, the sequence of levels is important - everything should be shorter and brighter at the exhibition. In vain, I inserted an additional dumb level before the exhibition for a more smooth increase in complexity - this level ate up precious time of attention and the formation of an impression of the game.
Hardcore is not for exhibition, it is better to lower the complexity in the exhibition build. Most of the players got stuck and fell off at the fifth level, at which I have the erroneous too sharp jump in complexity and, most importantly, the duration of the level. All ten available levels of the game passed only one person out of sixty. Build for the exhibition, where they play inattentively, where there are many distractions around, including the author of the game, should not be the same as for a thoughtful home leisurely acquaintance.
After the tutorial, short and stressful levels are best. If the level is short, and the delay between the death of the character and the start of a new session is minimal, then some increased complexity is forgiven. When I simply switched the jammed player to further shorter levels it worked.
The special exhibition demo level turned out to be just a saving solution. It was a level, with almost all the content of the game, and almost no challenge for the player. Sooner or later, I suggested switching to this level to all players. Most agreed and stuck on it just crawling a worm on the map and eating helpless enemies. What is characteristic - hardcore workers refused, and rushed with greater fury to squeeze the level at which they were stuck.
The suit helps to overcome constraint. When you feel burdened, it’s easier to make contact with others. On the other hand, with people who were also wearing suits, it was harder for me to communicate than with the rest. I had never been to such events before, was embarrassed when meeting with cosplayers, tried not to meet their eyes and was generally shy. I felt that I had to play along somehow, but at the same time had a poor understanding of how I could do this. He concluded that extravagant costumes establish an excessive distance, you just need a uniform with a chip. Robes were perfect in this regard.
As soon as the game point is released and there are no active people, you need to first make contact and offer to play to the audience or passers-by. Sometimes a person lacks decisiveness and reason to move from a spectator to a player. I felt this moment when on the first day of the exhibition I briefly tried to play on the stands of other developers:
As you understand, I am experiencing some communication problems. :) Perhaps other people feel this is not so acute. Nevertheless, everything is easily solved by the initiative of the developer. This moment was felt especially well by my wife, who was engaged in a photo contest. She watched the players at the stand, and as soon as they finished playing and were about to leave, she invited them to participate in our photo contest. Almost no one refused.
If you allow sound, then you need to sound. Sounds attract attention and voice what is happening on the screen. Playing without sounds is only half the game! If you give the player headphones, then the audience is left with a silent movie. For the basis of the game point, small household speakers were used, they turned out to be quite enough.
The second game point was voiced by headphones so as not to arrange a salad of sounds. In headphones, the player can either listen to the game or the developer. Someone took off the headphones from one ear, someone just hung on the neck, but everyone had to somehow solve this conflict.
Headphones, like gamepads, were wireless. Sennheiser HDR 170. It’s convenient to use them at home (spin-turn, go wherever you want), and at the exhibition this convenience is multiplied by the number of device transfers from person to person. Wireless things are easy to offer, transmit, throw and lay temporarily on a chair, without fear that someone passing by will dump everything on the floor. He was worried during the work, he even had spare wired headphones ready, but there were enough batteries for all six hours.
The camera embarrasses and annoys people, it’s better to shoot players from somewhere far away and from a tripod. We did not do either one or the other, so there was nothing special to take from the pile of footage. Most of the moments are rejected by camera hanging in hands, unsuccessful zoom and frame transfer. With a tripod it would not be so dynamic, but more freedom for installation and a completely different level of quality. I think a monopod or tripod folded into a monopod would be the most ideal option.
The question with the light remained open. There was not enough light at the exhibition, and its own light was too aggressive to use it all the time. In general, the pictures were pulled by post-processing, but I would like more. Photos - Mikhail Evstratov
Be sure to assemble the stand at home. This is a conclusion on their own mistakes. Test switching was in the plans, but I decided to first squeeze the chain of demo levels, and then time ran out. Having already arrived in another city, I found that to regulate the bracket for a heavier monitor, I need a set of hex socket wrenches, and my laptop does not match the interfaces with the monitor intended for it. The PC supports DVI, HDMI and VGA, a laptop VGA and HDMI, one monitor VGA, HDMI and DVI, and the other only VGA and DVI. So I got confused too.
The expansion of the VKontakte group was almost entirely due to the photo contest. Three quarters of the new people signed up for the group after I posted their photos, contacted and gave a link to the group. Also, the photo contest was well reposted and worked great as an info guide.
It was quite difficult to disassemble the participants ’contacts written in words. Next time we ask you to write in block letters.
Immediately after the exhibition, I planned to release a new full-fledged release, localize it and start the Greenlight campaign. No matter how! The initiative is a renewable, but rather quickly exhaustible resource. The forces are finite. I barely summed up the results of the competition, as it were, I posted the exhibition build and wrote this report for almost a month desperately procrastinating. I really hope that my experience will be useful to you at least something. It turned out to be much more nuances than you can afford to describe in the article, so I’m ready to gladly reveal the missing in the comments. Just ask!
since the last event.
To become a member of the indie showcase, it turned out to be enough to submit an application with a description of the project and wait until two weeks are left before the festival opens. To this significant day, the organizers selected 30 of the many announced projects, including mine, and distributed them between the two exhibition days. I got the second - Sunday.
Flash forward
To make it clear what will be discussed, I will show a video clip from the final part of the post. If you are going to read the whole thing, then you can not watch. I warn you in advance: all materials from the stand are crammed with information about the game and there can be no talk about any anonymity of the project. You already saw the picture in the teaser, right?
Further, I will pedantically describe the process of preparing this demonstration, all my findings and conclusions: how I applied logos to clothes, what equipment I needed, how much money was spent, what I wanted, what I got and the like. A lot of details that are likely to be interesting to those who are developing games or who have to deal with the self-organization of the exhibition stand.
Initial conditions
After the first euphoria of the chosen one has passed, the time has come for insidious plans. Inspired by last year's report from the developers of the game "12 is better than 6" I started to prepare. The organizers provided me with the following resources:
- A round table (Ø70 cm, height 110 cm) in the middle of the indie showcase zone (B3, highlighted in orange on the plan).
- Mandatory delivery time from 12 to 18 hours, but you can start at 10:30.
- Permission to use one rollup banner.
- Socket 220v.
Here is the complete list of Sunday indie showcase projects:
| A1 Box Life A2 Reflection Of Mine A3 Message Quest A4 Steam Panic A5 (no one came) | B1 Rotacube B2 Knighttron B3 Carry B4 Security Hole B5 Karma.Incarnation 1 | C1 (your project could be here) C2 The Uncertain C3 Wizard Swipe C4 The Atomy C5 Doors that are better not to open |
| 12 is better than 6 on a stand as last year’s winners. | ||
Targets and goals
In the process of preparation, I was driven by several desires. Without thawing anything and not twisting my soul, I spread them all in order of magnitude and importance for me:
- A dream come true as I shine at the stand of my own game, like Phil Fish from Indie Game: The Movie .
- Audience expansion, an attempt to at least slightly grow the VKontakte project group.
- Getting some pleasant status from the organizers, which later can be boasted in the trailer for Steam Greenlight.
- Creating an information feed for publishing news about the game on different resources, take photos and videos, for its (information flow) operation.
- Operation of the exhibition deadline to enhance development.
- Watching how different living people play my game and analyze their behavior.
- Meet other developers and interesting people.
- Receiving feedback from players.
For simplicity, we will consider my goals the satisfaction of my desires. To achieve these goals, I set myself the following tasks:
- Due to the location “surrounded”, the stand should have three front and only one back of four.
- You need two monitors, one of which is gaming, and on the second, videos about the game are constantly spinning.
- Need a high rollup banner that draws attention to the stand. Together with monitors, it should ensure the operation of the stand in three out of four directions. Something like this (with the red side to the windows):
[1], [2] - monitors 24 '
[3] - laptop to monitor 2 (which just has video)
[4] - roll-up banner (85 × 200cm)
[5 ] - the working side of the stand
[6] - the non-working side of the stand - We need handouts with the address of the VKontakte group.
- The team at the stand should be at least two people, since it is impossible to shine and shoot it on video at the same time.
- Videos and photos should be shot in the maximum volume, then we will analyze what is needed and what is not.
- The team at the stand should be brightly and uniformly dressed for beauty and attention. Clothing should contain the logo and name of the game. The setting of the game is a laboratory, so lab coats will be a win-win option.
- We need some kind of competition among players with an award in the VKontakte group, to collect players' contacts and motivate them to look into the game group after the festival.
- It is necessary to lengthen the game session as much as possible so that the stand always has movement. Therefore, you need a chair for the player (the organizers do not provide chairs).
- The game must support control from the gamepad and reassignment of the functions of its buttons on the go in user settings.
- In addition to the usual "long" sequence of increasingly complex levels, a game needs a couple of levels that have the main features of the game and there are no special tasks for the player. Easy and enjoyable levels for familiarization, which you can enable stuck in training or rushing players.
- It’s necessary to get to St. Petersburg from Moscow, where I live, with all my belongings, have a rest overnight, then deliver the inventory to the exhibition itself, then pack up and make the way in the opposite direction.
As you can see, a pretty solid list. Looking at him, I realized that in the evenings I won’t have time to do all this. I took 4 days off from work - from Tuesday to Friday, at midnight of which a train was already waiting for me to St. Petersburg.
Polygraphy
It required one large double-sided rollup and distribution flyers. A rollup is a vertical banner with a roll-up web. When folded, it is a compact but heavy box (mine looked very much like a hunting rifle in a case and weighed 14 kilograms). Unfolded - a rectangle stably standing on the floor without unnecessary details. The minimum rollup size is 80 × 200 cm, then there are wider options, but in my case the extra width was useless - the table was small. The rollups are single-sided, then the front is the image, and the back is blind and the back support stand is visible, and there are two-sided ones, then the rollup does not have the wrong side - the canvas is on both sides. My rollup stuck out in the middle of the exhibition hall, so there was no choice - it should have been two-sided.I considered the main goal of the rollup to draw attention to the stand and showcase the brand. The more information husk on the banner, the worse it will perform this function. I decided to move all the information to the flyer, and make the rollup just a big flag: logo, name and nothing else.
The project has long grown out of my programmer-art, the great and terrible weilard is now responsible for pumping the graphic component of the game . My task was to prepare sketches. To save Andrei time and effort, I decided that an artist was needed for one job: creating a high-resolution rollup layout. I will make a flyer myself using fragments of rollup. This was the right decision, since we spent quite a lot of time coordinating the rollup layout, and I managed to print it with a margin of just one day.
The logo became the central element of the rollup, followed by the name of the game. Nothing more substantive, spray from below to fill the empty bottom. The layout was done at 80 dpi, but it was possible less - the output when printing on banner fabric with a resolution of 720 dpi is not what you might think when comparing the layout resolution and print resolution. I don’t know how exactly it was possible to lower the resolution, but just keep in mind that banner fabric is not paper, small details are eaten up.
Another important nuance was the stock strip on the layout - an additional 5 centimeters from the bottom of the canvas, on which I simply reflected the bottom of the layout. 2 of these five centimeters were in the visible zone (the rollup model was slightly higher than the standard one), if there wasn’t anything there, a bright white underside would come out. This question should definitely be clarified in communication with the printing house.
The flyer format chose A6 (105x148mm) as the most common. Most likely, the rest of the participants will be the same. You can show off and make Euro-format, under the envelope, but if visitors will collect flyers in a bundle, then mine will stick out and get in the way, maybe it will be folded, breaking in half.
On the back there are four screenshots from the game, two short paragraphs with the essence and links to contacts, the main of which is the VKontakte group. Link to the group is duplicated by a QR code. Not sure if this works, but everybody hangs, and I hung for solidity.
He printed the flyer on thick paper with a density of 300 g / m2, the density practically did not affect the cost (printed here ). The flyers turned out good, nice, like cards from some kind of board game. Except that the edges are scruffy in places - when trimming, the edges sometimes bulge and a loose cardboard on the cut becomes visible. However, this is not significant.
What is more significant is that colors are distorted during printing. The flyer, when it was printed, fell into the blue, the rollup also, although not so much, the announcement of the photo contest went green.
If anything, I did color proofing, and they printed out my rollup in miniature. Color proofing was a waste of time. The colors are distorted in different ranges in different ways, just to make the layout a little greener after the color proof does not work. Moreover, you have to edit blindly, because there is no way to repeat the color proof again and again after each edit. All I did was spend 2 hours on traffic jams getting to the printing house and was upset at the result. Next time I will not deal with this nonsense. Firstly, the departure of flowers is very noticeable in sunlight and poorly in artificial light, and secondly, the audience did not see the original and do not suspect an ambush. You can compare the rollup in the photo and its source code above. Photos - Mikhail Evstratov
At first I talked with printers like this: I found several services that were suitable in terms of cost and range, and sent them all letters with questions, pictures and more. I looked further on the reaction rate and adequacy. The difference in reaction rate was sometimes per day, the difference in approach and deadlines is also very significant. This approach worked well in quiet mode. When the deadlines began to run out, I had to overcome my fear of phone calls. Calling turned out to be much faster and more efficient.
The hustle and bustle of preparing layouts, searching for printing houses and traveling back and forth is very unsettling. There was no question of any parallel development with the game code. I tried several times, in the end, anyway, I was frustrated by anything, but not the game itself. Even a business card was made up for himself in a severe attack of procrastination. It is good that the wife dissuaded the paper from spending nonsense. It turned out to get rid of unhealthy printing excitement only after the last order was placed.
clothing
The setting of the game is a laboratory, and the entire game process takes place inside the terrariums. The characters communicating with the player are the gray-haired professor and his laboratory assistants. Laboratory gowns as the clothes of the stand team were adopted without options: the white gown is visible both in the uniform and motley crowd of visitors, it is overalls and adds specialist charm to the wearer, several people in gowns are a vivid stereotype of the team of scientists or the medical council of doctors. In general, we take!
The logo of the game is very convenient. It is nice a few years after its creation to make sure that it did everything right: monochrome, contour, inscribed in a circle, a short monosyllabic name. If there was no suitable logo, it would have to be invented urgently.
Visitors who should be attracted by the dressing gown see mainly his back, since the wearer of the dressing gown is usually facing the other person. Therefore, the logo with the name of the game should be placed as large as possible on the back, and how it will turn out in front. Most likely the dressing gown will be unfastened, we are not in the hospital, so the options “on the whole chest” disappear. Only small areas on the floor remain in front.
The dressing gown is not a T-shirt, they are not printed in printing houses, so the easiest and most effective way of applying the logo is to spray paint through a stencil. Having some experience in making DIY stencils, I made this sketch on sheet A2:
I assumed that the stencil would be cut out of a thick film or plastic. The stencil should be one solid design, so I had to use the logo inversion (otherwise the round-eyes hung under the eyes in the air) and add jumpers to the letters of the name.
Fortunately, in one of the printing houses where I sent my layout for consultation, there was an attentive and competent specialist who opened my eyes to the adhesive stencils. I did not need a hard reusable stencil, it was more practical to use several disposable adhesive. An adhesive stencil has no limitations related to its integrity, “hanging” elements are simply glued before use on a fabric on a temporary substrate. The stencil layout returned to the original logo:
The paint was used by MARABU Textil Design, a special aniline spray for textiles. It is not required to fix it; it is not suitable for everyday wear. Before spoiling the real clothes, I tried to put a small logo on the pillowcase: Four dude cropped gowns froze in horror. After analyzing the situation, I came to the conclusion that I too generously sprayed paint, achieving a wet shine of the fabric. You need to stop at the moment when the painted surface is just beginning to stop being dull. After taking into account the negative experience, the final application of the logos was quite successful. Each dressing gown took about 20 minutes, of which the process of applying paint did not take even a minute.
First, the robe is fixed, the bottom substrate is separated from the stencil and it is glued to the place of application. Areas of the dressing gown outside the screen are covered. I used the pages of old magazines. Further, the most difficult stage is the separation of the upper substrate. The white parts of the stencil should remain glued to the fabric, and the transparent substrate is separated. The substrate is strong, pulls everything onto itself, shifts the stencil, sticks to your hands and generally interferes in every way. Enrages terribly! But sooner or later, on the battlefield there remains only a tattered working layer of the stencil, which must be glued as tightly as possible to the fabric. Painting takes place quickly and easily, the main thing is not to overfill the paint (to prevent wetting of the fabric) and spray it perpendicular to the surface, otherwise it blows under tightly fitting places.
The best part is to peel off the stencil when the paint is slightly dried. The artifacts have never been without, but the nightmare that appeared on the test pillowcase has never been repeated.
Stand equipment
I had one monitor, the second I took from work with a laptop. I had brackets for both monitors (cool black home and working simpler):
In principle, regular stands could be dispensed with, but the bracket allows you to adjust the height of the screen, free up space on the table and, most importantly, move the screen beyond the dimensions of the table, increasing the size of the stand.
Small household speakers and a bunch of flyers ideally fit on the vacated space under the screens. At the back of the table was a laptop from which the image was broadcast on one of the screens, a base for wireless headphones and a base for wireless gamepads. Under the table was a box of my desktop, a keyboard and a mouse for it, two pilots with sockets.
The composition was completed by the ikeev bar stool for the player. Convenient thing. The chair allows you to sit and relax with your hands on the lap of the gamepad. In addition, the seated person is slightly lower than the standing one, so viewers who do not have to crawl from the sides can stand behind him. Photos - Mikhail Evstratov
Photo and video shooting
They took pictures with a Nikon D80 camera with a 50mm fixed lens, tightly clamped 1.8 aperture (in A mode) and ISO shut off. There was still not enough light. How did you get photos like the one that is higher in the text, ask its author, I don’t own such kung fu secrets. For the video, there was a regular Panasonic HC-W850 household camera.
Both devices were managed by one person - my wife. Lena photographed or filmed what was happening at the booth in her free mode, and her task was to photograph people for the contest. And the camera and camcorder had to buy more voluminous memory cards. The camera is 16 gigabytes (in our case it is about 3000 photos), the camera is 32 gigabytes (about five hours of video). This volume was quite enough.
With batteries a little more interesting. The camera doesn’t need much, but the camcorder’s battery runs out in an hour. Given that we forgot to charge her, after 40 minutes she already demanded to retire. With the old Sony, the reception worked with the purchase of a voluminous Chinese clone of its battery, but this one checks the authenticity of the battery, refusing to work with counterfeit goods. The solution turned out to be very simple: the camera is charged via USB, and I bought a used external battery for 16000 mAh (Xiaomi Mi Power Bank 16000), which Lena just carried in her pocket, connecting the camera with her native cable.
There was a tripod for the camera, which, alas, my wife did not use for the intended purpose, she was too unusual. Another lightweight tripod was taken for the illuminator. I assumed that there would not be enough light at the exhibition and bought the YN-160 S video light in advance . It was very useful to me for shooting the application of stencils on bathrobes, but it turned out to be inapplicable at the exhibition - people were constantly around us, the illuminator would inevitably blind someone. As a result, we did not use it, and its tripod worked just as a holder of the photo contest announcement.
Photo contest
We have beautiful overalls and a bright banner, why not invite visitors for a second to be in our place? We will have a competition for the craziest scientist! We give the player or just the interested visitor a free robe and offer to depict Professor Nimnul against the background of our rollup. Photo - Mikhail Evstratov Looking ahead, I’ll say that the contest turned out to be a pretty good idea. It was attended not only by the players at the stand, but also by simply passing visitors to the festival. Rollup without unnecessary information, a stereotypical theme and simple props did not disappoint. The competition was attended by 45 people:
When photographing a person, we asked him to leave contacts for communication in our notebook, after which we immediately photographed this entry. Thus, when parsing photographs after a series of pictures of one person, there was a frame with his contacts. Moreover, we numbered the contacts in the list, and both the current record and several previous ones fell on the photo - this helped a lot to figure out complicated situations. Found everyone.
Command
At first, I presumptuously assumed that two people at the stand would be quite enough. I was mistaken. It is so good that the world is not without good people! Thanks to the help of our Petersburg friends, the stand team grew to five people, and no one was sitting idle. It turned out to quickly expand the stand, impromptu to organize the second game point (an additional gamepad with the base magically appeared) and replace the braking laptop (as if a spare laptop materialized from the air). Flyers began to disperse like hot cakes, and not only the players, but also visitors passing by began to look at the competition. And it just looked like a miracle, in fact it is the result of coordinated team actions. Friends, thank you! Here are 40 minutes of booth installation, shortened to a minute and a half:
Actually, even the idea of the final competition I threw my friend from St. Petersburg Alexander Nikolaev , one of the organizers geymdev community XGM . The label “XGM recommends!” Is his initiative. There were three projects with XGM on NextCastle Party: my worms, Princess.Loot.Pixel.Again and Doors, which are better not to tear. We all united before the exhibition in a general chat room and throughout the festival shared information and even some equipment (showed games on different days). Cooperation is an indie developer’s secret weapon that is hard to overestimate. I ask you to consider this an urgent recommendation - in this case, all participants benefit from the association. If you are interested in amateur game development, and somehow I can be useful to you - just let me know!
Finish the game
I so wanted to have time to implement hotsets in the game! Split the screen in half so that you can play the game together at the same computer. It’s good that I managed to stop in time! I limited myself to the implementation of control using a gamepad and a set of demo levels. And then I barely managed. On the one hand, the exhibition is an excellent occasion to squeeze into a spring and, finally, to do something important, which was not decided before. On the other hand, tugging with printing and props is very distracting, as a result, serious chips are no longer resolute - because of procrastination, I was mainly involved in refactoring, debugging and polishing trifles.
In moments of nervous tension, I want to break loose and play something. The week before the final week flew: colleagues from Message Questbecame full, I decided to support them with the ruble and installed the long-removed Steam. Along the way, I came across an old friend - an old Kingdom flash drive, trimmed for Steam . Four in the evening I never found. Apparently, they rolled up under the sofa. Maybe someone can develop games by playing other games, but it's definitely not me. Once again, he demolished Steam from the computer entirely. Once again it helped.
I finished the demonstration set of levels all the way, made changes to them both right before the departure for the show, and right at the stand. All the stages of the preparatory plan, which I optimistically set after preparing the levels, went off the chimney.
Budget and Logistics
Below is a table with financial costs. The second monitor and laptop were kindly allowed to snooze from my workplace. I already had brackets for monitors, headphones and photo equipment, I don’t include them in the estimate. The label only additional costs:
| Title | Costs (RUB) |
|---|---|
| Short white medical gowns 4 pcs. | 3 900 |
| Cliches for drawing logos of 6 pieces. | 2,000 |
| Paint for applying logos on bathrobes | 800 |
| Layout rollap 80x200, 75 DPI | 8,000 |
| Print rollap | 6 100 |
| Printing flyers 300 pcs. | 2,450 |
| Illuminator for photo / backlight banner YN-160 S | 3 300 (Avito) |
| Printing and laminating photo contest announcements | 400 |
| Prize fund for the photo contest | 1,000 |
| SD card for the camera 16 GB | 1,200 |
| SD card for camera 32 GB | 2,000 |
| Powerbank for autonomous camera operation 16000 mA / h | 1 800 (Avito) |
| Spare gamepad (in case the main one is broken) | 1,500 (Avito) |
| Spare AA batteries for gamepads and lamps 10 pcs. | 400 |
| Player bar stool | 1,500 (Avito) |
| Optional festival ticket for wife | 800 |
| Train tickets Moscow-Peter for two round trip | 4,000 |
| Total: | 41,150 |
In some cases, it was possible to save by buying used things on ads on Avito.
I will not bore the complete list of junk that I had to carry, but I can not help but mention its weight. A backpack with the bulk of things weighed 46 kg. Attached was a box with two 24-inch monitors, weighing 10 kg. My wife had to drag separately a folding bar stool, a photo and video camera, and an armful of packages with personal items that could not fit in a backpack. The most ergonomic option would be to go to St. Petersburg by car, but would have to lose an extra two days on the road, so I decided to grunt a little. The most difficult moment was to drag this belongings 500 meters to the metro after the festival. I will never do it again. Such hard-lifting things need to be carried by car. Challenge with dragging things inside trains, stations and subways is quite enough.
By the way! On the way, the folding bar stool turned out to be an indispensable assistant - we sat on it waiting for the train, I put the backpack on it, putting it on or removing it from the back, and most importantly, you could stand on it, pushing the backpack onto the top shelf in the reserved seat.
Summary and Conclusions
Both game points worked almost all the time, in only six or seven exhibition hours, about 60 people played the game. On average, it turns out a little less than 10 minutes per person. From solid exhaust - 20 new people in the VKontakte project group. This is clearly not the most ergonomic way to build an audience. But, in fact, this is not the main thing (see the goals section). And here is the very video from the introduction:
Next, a brief summary of the conclusions that I made on the results of the show. These are not recipes for all occasions, this is the dry residue of my thoughts about demonstrating my game.
Two game points
Whenever possible, you need to organize two game points. The person playing at the stand attracts other people who want to play, the second game point allows you to use this effect and halve the waiting time for those who did not have a gamepad. Two game points require two people escort. By my own feelings, when you play a game while communicating with the developer, and he abruptly switches from you to a neighboring player, it’s unpleasant, and you want to leave.
The chair increases the time of the game session, it is more convenient for a sitting player to play than a standing one. They played more and longer at a game point with a chair.
An increase in a game session is good only up to a certain limit, at some point it begins to reduce the bandwidth of the stand.
From tutorial to lawlessness
The presence of a tutorial is very important, the game should tell about itself, while the developer forcedly or deliberately left the player alone and alone. In addition to the presence of the tutorial, the sequence of levels is important - everything should be shorter and brighter at the exhibition. In vain, I inserted an additional dumb level before the exhibition for a more smooth increase in complexity - this level ate up precious time of attention and the formation of an impression of the game.
Hardcore is not for exhibition, it is better to lower the complexity in the exhibition build. Most of the players got stuck and fell off at the fifth level, at which I have the erroneous too sharp jump in complexity and, most importantly, the duration of the level. All ten available levels of the game passed only one person out of sixty. Build for the exhibition, where they play inattentively, where there are many distractions around, including the author of the game, should not be the same as for a thoughtful home leisurely acquaintance. After the tutorial, short and stressful levels are best. If the level is short, and the delay between the death of the character and the start of a new session is minimal, then some increased complexity is forgiven. When I simply switched the jammed player to further shorter levels it worked.
The special exhibition demo level turned out to be just a saving solution. It was a level, with almost all the content of the game, and almost no challenge for the player. Sooner or later, I suggested switching to this level to all players. Most agreed and stuck on it just crawling a worm on the map and eating helpless enemies. What is characteristic - hardcore workers refused, and rushed with greater fury to squeeze the level at which they were stuck.
A uniform
The suit helps to overcome constraint. When you feel burdened, it’s easier to make contact with others. On the other hand, with people who were also wearing suits, it was harder for me to communicate than with the rest. I had never been to such events before, was embarrassed when meeting with cosplayers, tried not to meet their eyes and was generally shy. I felt that I had to play along somehow, but at the same time had a poor understanding of how I could do this. He concluded that extravagant costumes establish an excessive distance, you just need a uniform with a chip. Robes were perfect in this regard.
Communicative Initiative
As soon as the game point is released and there are no active people, you need to first make contact and offer to play to the audience or passers-by. Sometimes a person lacks decisiveness and reason to move from a spectator to a player. I felt this moment when on the first day of the exhibition I briefly tried to play on the stands of other developers:
- Approaching an empty stand requires effort, as this is a direct initiation of contact and, in addition, you risk getting stuck in a conversation when the game is already boring, but it will be awkward to leave.
- When someone has finished playing and, in theory, you can get out, you worry that you will play worse than your predecessor. Better to let someone else play, and I'll see.
- When the player has left, and you remain the only spectator, then the constraint makes him leave with the player, the situation goes to point (1).
As you understand, I am experiencing some communication problems. :) Perhaps other people feel this is not so acute. Nevertheless, everything is easily solved by the initiative of the developer. This moment was felt especially well by my wife, who was engaged in a photo contest. She watched the players at the stand, and as soon as they finished playing and were about to leave, she invited them to participate in our photo contest. Almost no one refused.
Sound
If you allow sound, then you need to sound. Sounds attract attention and voice what is happening on the screen. Playing without sounds is only half the game! If you give the player headphones, then the audience is left with a silent movie. For the basis of the game point, small household speakers were used, they turned out to be quite enough.
The second game point was voiced by headphones so as not to arrange a salad of sounds. In headphones, the player can either listen to the game or the developer. Someone took off the headphones from one ear, someone just hung on the neck, but everyone had to somehow solve this conflict.Headphones, like gamepads, were wireless. Sennheiser HDR 170. It’s convenient to use them at home (spin-turn, go wherever you want), and at the exhibition this convenience is multiplied by the number of device transfers from person to person. Wireless things are easy to offer, transmit, throw and lay temporarily on a chair, without fear that someone passing by will dump everything on the floor. He was worried during the work, he even had spare wired headphones ready, but there were enough batteries for all six hours.
Photo and video
The camera embarrasses and annoys people, it’s better to shoot players from somewhere far away and from a tripod. We did not do either one or the other, so there was nothing special to take from the pile of footage. Most of the moments are rejected by camera hanging in hands, unsuccessful zoom and frame transfer. With a tripod it would not be so dynamic, but more freedom for installation and a completely different level of quality. I think a monopod or tripod folded into a monopod would be the most ideal option.
The question with the light remained open. There was not enough light at the exhibition, and its own light was too aggressive to use it all the time. In general, the pictures were pulled by post-processing, but I would like more. Photos - Mikhail Evstratov
Pre-switching
Be sure to assemble the stand at home. This is a conclusion on their own mistakes. Test switching was in the plans, but I decided to first squeeze the chain of demo levels, and then time ran out. Having already arrived in another city, I found that to regulate the bracket for a heavier monitor, I need a set of hex socket wrenches, and my laptop does not match the interfaces with the monitor intended for it. The PC supports DVI, HDMI and VGA, a laptop VGA and HDMI, one monitor VGA, HDMI and DVI, and the other only VGA and DVI. So I got confused too.
Competition
The expansion of the VKontakte group was almost entirely due to the photo contest. Three quarters of the new people signed up for the group after I posted their photos, contacted and gave a link to the group. Also, the photo contest was well reposted and worked great as an info guide.
It was quite difficult to disassemble the participants ’contacts written in words. Next time we ask you to write in block letters.
Plans
Immediately after the exhibition, I planned to release a new full-fledged release, localize it and start the Greenlight campaign. No matter how! The initiative is a renewable, but rather quickly exhaustible resource. The forces are finite. I barely summed up the results of the competition, as it were, I posted the exhibition build and wrote this report for almost a month desperately procrastinating. I really hope that my experience will be useful to you at least something. It turned out to be much more nuances than you can afford to describe in the article, so I’m ready to gladly reveal the missing in the comments. Just ask!