I’m back from PAX Australia. What a huge event. The Melbourne Convention centre is massive, lots of people came though, lots of cool games that I wish I had more time to check out.

Scraps was in the ANZ Indie Pavilion area. Everyone in the Indie Pavilion had the same booth space with the two large banners provided.

Far left Galaxy tablet for email signup, then 2012 MacBook Pro, Surface Pro 2, and HP Pavilion for Scraps LAN gaming. One AI payer was also active on the map.

Wish I could have taken home those giant Scraps banners on the plane. They’re too thick to roll up and they’re 1mx2m each.

Video:

It’s hard to judge exactly how worthwhile exhibiting actually was, especially without a game for sale to directly gauge cost vs. extra sales (a booth in the Indie Pavilion cost $1,200AU this year). Everyone seemed to be enjoying it and often played for a while, and I met a bunch of cool devs and managed to play a few really interesting games (Expand is particularly impressive in person – a simple concept executed with wonderful creativity). So far I’ve seen a bit of extra traffic to the Scraps website but not much in the way of press etc.

This was my first BIG event, so I learnt a few things as well. If I went again I think I’d change a couple of things:

Get a big screen. Although we had people playing all three laptops just about the whole time (which was great), games with a big TV screen definitely attracted more crowds. I didn’t bring a big screen because of the logistics in getting it across the Tasman Sea, but I think I’d pay the cost of hiring something next time.

More interesting giveaways. People seem to talk about games they saw at PAX for two main reasons: The game was really unique and interesting, or the game had unique and interesting swag. The Swordy guys’ wooden LASER-cut badges were a step above the rest and gave people a reason to talk about Swordy in social media. Tearaway had paper hat things which was nice free advertising as people walked around PAX with them on.

It’d be awesome to have some little 3D printed Scraps vehicles or something. I had two big stacks of Scraps magnets, which went very quickly – bring like 1000+ of whatever you’ve got to PAX as well. After that I made a stack of budget hand-written Scraps cards and even those went pretty fast.

A few bugs also came up, as happens when hundreds of people play your unreleased game right after each other. One of them involves people grabbing an item on the build screen and not being able to drop it, and I cannot work out how to make it happen myself. Yet.

Edit: Before participating in any more big events, the current goal is get the game out.