You Suck at Showcasing Your Game

[Music] I'm gonna start because I have 30 minutes for this talk and 150 slides so let's see if I can make this work so hi my name is Nicole I betcha I'm from Romania and we roll our R's and people cannot pronounce my second name so I kind of became Nikolai BBQ and I'm the founder of those awesome guys a small indie studio from that of people from all over the world we made a game called move or die for a player friendship ruining game that came out last year and I go to a lot of events and I love talking about games because they're awesome and in order to illustrate this I figured I should take my photo of all of my badges and I took this photo when I started working on these slides and by the time I was done I had to take an extra photo so that's cool and today I'm gonna talk about how to showcase your game and based on that animation alone you know that you should probably not trust me I'm going to break this talk into three parts before during and after the event and in order to make things a bit more easier I'm gonna put a timer at the top of the slides telling you when to do what you're about to see on screen because it's so much more convenient so starting right off before the event the first thing you have to do is this side that you want to apply decided you want to go to an event so you have a selection of events you can go to for example if you want some press you go to e3 if you want some players you go to Gamescom if you're interested in talking with developers you have GDC steam dev days if you have weird stuff you should go to a maze and if you want to hear people in suits talk about CPM and retention rates and buzzwords go to casual connect but don't go alone tag along a group and doing this is amazing because going with a group means the costs are lower you don't have to spend time on logistics and all those things all of those are taken care of by the group so you have certain groups to pick from for example there are curated groups like indie mega booth or the mix where you apply with your game and they decide if you're worth investing into and they send you to an event and that's cool there are country groups if your country has won that's great they're usually sponsored by governments they're amazing though they're weird groups where you can basically contact them directly like all control GDC amazed and their entire events where you can talk directly with the organizers like twitchcon and so on so forth but point is not all of these groups go to all the events so in order to fix that problem I created this Venn diagram where you you can just pick the the event you wanna go to and you can see what groups go to that event in that circle so yeah that's applying next up trouble and housing make sure you book your housing two days before in the event because you have to set up your booth and you think that things won't go wrong but they will go wrong and you will be fixing bugs on your Airbnb couch and book one day after the event like one extra day so you can have some time to see the CD maybe catch up on potential meetings so on look close to the event because again you don't think things will go wrong but they will so you'll have to run back and forth and you'll be super grateful when you don't have to go all the way to the other side of the city so that's trouble and housing next up parties these are super important and I cannot stress enough how important these are parties sell out weeks before the event and it's really a it's a bummer because parties are a great way to meet new developers in a more casual kind of setting that doesn't have this Terao game developers event kind of feel to them so they're amazing but as an example that party which is like quite an own party sold out in three minutes so that's kind of tricky to get tickets to all the parties and there are several ways you can do this you can check Eventbrite Facebook there are some Google Docs floating around with all vents and one cool thing you can do is go on one of those websites that keep track of changes on certain websites and you can just input the party website and you will get a notification whenever the tickets go on sale those are parties next up print if you're gonna showcase your game you're gonna print some marketing materials and I'm talking about banners shirts business cards whatever one very important thing to keep in mind is colors and just to illustrate this can you guys tell me what company this is yeah what about this one yep and what about this one exactly well I'm not sure how well the colors show up on the projector but you get the idea and you might be thinking oh god I have to be this huge company in order to pull this off but you don't and just as an example this is tiny build and the cool thing about them is that they have this super aggressive orange all over them and it's not only in their banners it's also in their lanyards and in their business cards and everywhere and it makes them super easily recognizable and it's super super useful the same for a switch game arena again it's in their clothes it's in their everything so when you see a pink person somewhere around the convention you know they're working for a Sweden game Arena roll up banners now if you're gonna make roll-up banners for your game please please keep the logos as high as you can because when you are at an event there are there's a sea of people around you and the only thing you can see is from the shoulder up so anything below that is occluded and if your banner looks like this nobody will remember the name of your game or the logo so don't do that fliers stop it with the pliers they don't work actually how many of you got a flyer and then went back home and got it out after folding it nicely and putting it in your pocket and actually went on the website on that flyer yeah not a lot of people but yeah they don't work because you you see these tables around the event and they're not places where you can pick up a player from it's where you drop off a flier it's where Flyers go to die and if they don't go there they end up on the floor and we've all seen these scenarios at the end of events instead you can make business card sized fires these are so amazing it's it's exactly like a flower but convenient and it has all the information you need on it for example for move or die we had the title of the game the logo some bullet points about the game and on the back it had a character and a little description for each character so it had this kind of collectible feel to it so yeah those were prints stop it with the Flyers next up adjust your game you can be smart about this if you're gonna showcase your game at a convention you can do what we did we move or die and we made a convention mode which was easily accessible in the options menu and when you turn it on it makes some changes to the game for example when you play move or that you can set how long a match can last and when convention mode is turned on that option is disabled and it defaults to five minutes so the player doesn't have to worry about that make sure the game runs on its own and by this I mean make it very clear when the demo ended so the player actually knows when to put down the controller make sure it auto restarts both in game and both if the game catches on fire which was our case several times we had a program running in the background checking if the game is running and if it crashed and it was not running it would boot it up again and nobody knew that it felt like it was a soft restart but yeah if you have a multiplayer game fill in empty slots with AI because it's super convenient to just pick up a controller and jump right in and replace an AI and if you have an unlock system make sure you unlock everything because no one will grind for that legendary item in your game on the show floor and if not everything at least enough to show what the game has has going for it idle card this is another very cool thing that shows up in convention mode in move or die if the game doesn't receive any input for around a minute or so and it's basically a looping video that's a bit more engaging than a very cold menu screen so it encourages the player to actually pick up the controller and on top of that make a safe environment when compared to mode was turned on we don't allow the player to back out too far like go in the menu and mess around video video options to potentially mess the experience for other players so we make the game we lock it in the character selection screen so it's a much more streamlined experience so that's game adjustments backed up next up packing you want these things in your luggage because you will need them and if you don't need them your neighbor will and when you don't have them you will be super glad that your neighbor has them so please please be a good indie dev and have all of these in your luggage and most importantly on top of all of these have throat lozenges because your voice is the most important thing you are supposed to talk about your game that's why you're there and if you're going to lose your voice in the first day that won't be fun here's a quick tip throw in an extension cord because you will need it and you're gonna become a hero at airports so that's cool controls now if possible try avoiding keyboards because keyboards are kind of intimidating they have a hundred plus keys on them and how many game how many keys is your game using probably not more than ten or so so I would advise using a controller and if you can do it you can make one of these things which is what the behemoth did for their game pit people and it's basically a 360 controller with prettier buttons so it's super engaging it encourages you to actually try out the game out of curiosity but if you're gonna use controllers go wired because you won't have to worry about batteries running out you won't have to worry about potential interference with all the other controllers on the venue but most importantly because people still so yeah you want one of those which I'm not sure where you can find them but I'm pretty sure you can find them on eBay and Amazon so yeah it's basically a thing that locks your controller to your booth so it's still there the next day if you have a mobile game you can get the same thing for a phone basically or a tablet or even better you can do what team meet lid with their new mid ball game and just get a huge touchscreen which is such a better way to to show your game and here's another quick tip don't rent screens from the venue because they tend to be super super expensive and if you're a small indie dev you most likely cannot afford that so look for the local rental companies they're amazing now you're at the event what do you do first you build your booth and when it comes to building boosts height is very important this was the mover type booth at Gamescom and you can see that is move or die because we had a big banner saying move or die and next to us there was a very cool game called epic story because you can see their banner but next to them was another cool game that I can not name because I cannot see they're better so height is super important and that's why you see if that's why these are the things you see when you first walk into a venue these huge banners and that's why they're on the ceiling because height is at a premium and the higher you can get your prints the better and here's a weird setup I had at one of the events where I put a screen really really high and that was super super cool for spectators to just watch the game from a distance a quick way of doing this and a cheap one is to get balloons that spell out the name of your game and you don't have to worry about I don't know giving them too high because they do that on their own sound is also very important because you're basically surrounded by super loud companies and the reason why you're there is to get players attention and you you can do this very easily by using sound and you might think that I the speaker might be too loud when you test it on your own but I can assure you it's not loud enough because it's a different thing when you test it on your own and you tested with a huge crowd surrounding it completely occluding the the sound but luckily you can easily fix that with one of these portable amps that you can find for quite cheap and then return them this kind of works for multiple games but if your game relies on I don't know narration or very heavily relies on sound that's kind of tricky because I would advise staying away from headphones because it prevents you from talking to the actual player which is something I love doing and it's kind of tricky when you end up in that situation with one cup of the year and the other one trying to focus on two sources of audio so avoid headphones if possible lights are also also very important because when you look at boosts at an event they're all static they're all banners they're all static things and when you see something flickering in the background your eyes subconsciously go there without you realizing so this gives you a huge advantage these are basically cheap LED Christmas lights around are better and they're super super effective also if you want to look super professional get a TV topper which is basically a piece of cardboard with your logo on it and duct tape it to the back of your TV looks super professional buy food before the doors open because you think you'll have enough time you won't have enough time to do this during the event unless you have a dedicated team and you take shifts running to grab food so I advise to do this before the doors open to the public because it's gonna be super useful or you can just grab a sandwich on a fly that's both building next up film everything because it would be such a waste of time to actually go to an event and not have anything to show after it so what I do is I take shots of the crowd of I take interviews and you can do this very easily with a basically recording audio with your phone and then having a friend point the camera at you and I also have this thing called a reaction cam which is basically a web cam that you put on your monitor facing the crowd and you let it record during the entire event and you might be thinking that Oh I don't want to go through three days worth of footage and find the interesting spots well here's the cool part you don't have to because assuming that webcam records audio you can just see where the peaks are in the audio track and those are interesting parts right there it's basically somebody yelling or the crowd clapping and when you when you put all of those together you end up with something like this which is a snippet from the move or Die trailer and I think it's super super effective to not only see the gameplay itself but also how people react to your game and I just love seeing this it's so cool so yeah filming next up giveaways basically you want a lot of people at your booth and giveaways do exactly that so I'm sure you walked around at an event you saw a lot of zombie hands in the air that's probably because the company was throwing free stuff in the crowd and it's usually pretty easy to make these things you can make anything from plushies pins shirts and these things are super amazing because they give you this seal of validity they make you look super professional even though you might not be also you can even just print steam keys on a business card and even that is considered something you can give out for free but if you cannot make these feel free to mail some companies and tell them that you're going to showcase your game and that you want to do a giveaway and they will be more than glad to send you free stuff so that's cool quick tip tournaments bring a lot of ice to your game and the cool part about this is that you don't necessarily have to plan for it you can just grab a marker and a piece of cardboard and write something on it really quickly and one cool idea that I saw my friends at juicy bits doing is they have this party game and they the thing where they gave out free steam keys for every spectator if the player won a match against the AI it was a very difficult AI but the point is if that happened everybody looking at their booth got a free steam key so I shamelessly ripped off this idea out of curiosity at a small local event and basically this is how it looks when that happened and I think this is freaking awesome and not only that this guy was super excited but yeah those are contests next stop spectators spectators are super important because you only have a limited number of computers and screens that you can use and people have to wait until they get their turn to play your game and you have to make sure you can keep them there long enough so they can try the game and that is pretty tricky because spectators attract more spectators but they have a surprisingly short time frame when it comes to grabbing their attention and I was thinking how I can show this in a very interesting way so what I did is at an event that I was showcasing move or die at I just stepped away from my booth and I was recording random people walking by my booth and then I edited that footage and I added a number above their head representing the number of seconds they were looking at my booth and you end up with something like this and I just took a lot of time to edit as you can see in this case we're under five seconds so that's a very small time frame here's a different one we were just walking by they see my booth who's checking his phone a little bit looking at the booths a bit more and yeah that's under 10 seconds that's fencing and this is this one this is the last one and it's my favorite some girls were passing by they were looking at the booth and I was panning to show the booth and then back to them and they're gone and I couldn't even set this up if I wanted to so yeah you have a super short time for him to get their attention and you have to give them something to do so we we made these prints of character outlines and we encouraged people to draw their own characters and if they took a photo of it and post it on social media they have a chance of winning a free steam key for the game and people loved it and it was such a success that we always run out of prints there were so many drawings that we literally built all of them and I I could literally wallpaper my entire room with them and I would still have some left and on top of that it's really cool because there were some really really cool ones I would never be able to do this myself but most importantly we got the best ones and we actually added them in the game so they became actual playable characters and I love having this two-way conversation with with the players so that was it about spectators next up elevator pitch you've heard a lot of tips and suggestions about elevator pitch and I won't tell you that all you have to wake up in the middle of the night knowing how to describe your game but what's something that not a lot of people mention is that you will repeat yourself a lot and it's perfectly fine because you optimized that sentence that perfect sentence for your game and you know it perfectly and for you it feels super weird because you know it and you keep repeating it but for the person you're talking to it's perfectly normal because it's the first time they're ever hearing it so you will repeat yourself a lot and it's perfectly fine let's see what's next talk to people everybody is as scared as you are because we're all game developers we're all gamers and even better introduce your friends when you hang out with your friends and you you meet somebody new introduce your friends because it makes it so much easier for them and you'll be super grateful when a friend of yours does this for you and regarding friends ditch them because I mean specifically in this case you are literally in the same building with the best people from this industry it would be a waste of time to spend that time with your friends instead of meeting amazing people so yeah don't hang out with your friends meet new people yeah talk one quick tip is a say goodbye instead of walking off that's super super cool so yeah you're done with the event what do you do now I would advise you edit your footage and get everything you recorded and try to make a coherent video out of it you could use it as a trailer or you could use it as a short promotional video like specifically for that event so I do these quite a lot and yep that's Japan and it's a pretty cool thing these because they're so easier to share than a bajillion photos so yeah edit your footage next up business cards you probably got a lot of them you give out a lot of them make sure you follow up but I would say wait wait around three or four days before you send back emails because people fly home they're busy they take some time to get back to your regular schedule I think three or four days is the best amount of time and write post mortems write about your experience because it's very hard to talk about showcasing your game because it's hard doing it so you probably try to learn more about this by reading what other developers did and writing a post-mortem is your way of giving back to the community so please do this don't forget about contest winners in case you had contests that with with winners announced after the event because we forgot about that and it was not fun yeah that's it you're done you're done with the event now it's the best part you get to check out the sale spike because you went to an event you got a ton of sales except you didn't because it doesn't work like that and that's a huge misconception that developers have and in order to represent this I went to some developer friends and I asked them about their sales graphs and here's an example here's a brigid or you see all those spikes those are discounts you see PAX East right there in the middle it barely the dent this is the the graph remover died all those spikes again discounts all those events we went to barely show up on the on the on the graph here stardew valley I had to zoom in to see packs there and it was lower than the previous day so yeah here are some more you can take photos of these you can you can find them in the vault events don't bring your sales so please keep this in mind but they bring you something better and here are some examples I went to an event and then in my hotel I ran into James port know from extra credits and then some time passed and he introduced me to a publisher that I ended up talking with here's another example I went to an event and then I made a very cool Chinese developer and then some time passed and he helped me localize my game in Chinese I went to an event and I I met a cool dude sitting on the couch on the couch of the hotel lobby and it turns out that he was a director for a very cool documentary called game loading some time passed and he ended up visiting me in Romania so he can record the special segment for his documentary and I can keep doing this I met Northern Line at an event and he played my game and then some time passed and he made a video about my game and it's the same with Giant Bomb they mentioned us on their panel because we ran into them at an event so with all these things in mind I want to repeat that events won't get you sales they'll get you awesome relationships so with that in mind get ready for the next event thank you [Applause] oh yes we have time for questions not sure how much time I have left we are questions hi yes yes what's the point of even having a booth if the whole point is making connections with or relationships with others so so having a booth first of all it's a great way getting into an event but on top of connections it gets you exposure that translates into into sales over time for example Northline ended up making a video about movor died because he got to play it at an event and it's a different thing when you can go up to a booth and play the game or have me show it on a phone which is not the same thing and another cool thing that I served when going to events for example I went to games come several years in a row and the first year of people never heard of the game but then the second year when I was stepping away from the booth and blending in it to the crowd I was hearing people walk by and go like oh I remember that game that's move or die we played it last year so it gradually builds exposure so I think it's pretty worth it on top of the connections you make yeah so you mentioned when you have a lot of spectators or players at your booth you that breeds more but it's also my experience that if you have none that keeps more away or any tips for getting out of that so that's kind of tricky because play spectators always have so just people walking around always have this thing where you you try to get them to play the game and they always go like now and I'm just watching and I mean the reason why they're there is to play games so you have to figure out a way to get them to actually try out your game and a very effective way of doing this I figured out that is to just hand them the controller and go like hey hold this for a second and you should just walk away and actually did that and it works it's amazing because then they're like well might as well try it now so yeah I get I guess you have to get creative with how you make your game seem not intimidating Thanks thank you any other questions cool I guess that's about it thank you very much again

Channel: GDC

Views: 98,949

Rating: 4.9397707 out of 5

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, pax, indiecade

Id: gB8CvsOjDvg

Length: 28min 19sec (1699 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 02 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/Pizzaeyes9000]

Excellent talk.

[u/headlessk]

very interesting, lots of great advice! thanks for sharing.

[u/liva]

its very informative, and since I'm going to the indie prize event to showcase my last game its right on time

[u/Hegor59]

Wow that's really useful thanks a lot!!