We attended our first convention a week ago and unveiled our game, We Slay Monsters. This post is going to be about what we did to prepare, how much we spent, what we learned, and how successful we were. A quick shout out to Chris from TRU FUN Entertainment, whose postmortem for their game Rad Raygun inspired me to take our game to SGC.

What We Did To Prepare

The first thing I did was read a bunch of other postmortems from other people who had done this before. There’s a lot of great information out there (Indie boothcraft is a great starting point, but some quick google-fu reveals lots and lots of posts on the topic). Some of the salient points I took from this research:

Don’t mess with your game during the show.

Bring water, and snacks.

Practice your elevator pitch.

There were lots more great things I read, and they were all helpful, but these three things were probably some of the best advice.

Next, we sketched up some ideas for how to layout our booth. Here’s the one we sort of ended up doing:

In this version, we imagined we could have 5 demo stations in a 10’ x 10’ area. We realized this would never work and trimmed it down to 3. The basic layout seemed solid.

Next, we created a Trello board to track all of the activities we needed to get done for the show. We already use Trello to track our work for the game, so this was a natural extension. On this board, we enumerated everything we needed to prepare. Here’s some of what was on our list:

Three large banners, one for the back of the booth, all the way across the top, and two for the front stands.

Two demo stations on wheels. Banners to wrap around the demo stations.

A big tv on a tall mount.

Postcards to hand out with fun graphics on the front and screenshots on the back.

Buttons to hand out as swag. We decided to do 10 different designs, 50 each design for total of 500 buttons.

T-Shirts. We knew we wanted shirts to wear ourselves, and we decided to get more done to give away as an incentive to join our email list. We planned on having drawings throughout the weekend.

Business cards. I wanted to meet and network with other devs and wanted to have something to give them, and also for any press folks we might meet.

We had a pretty good plan in place, and started executing (well, Ray, our artist, started executing. Most of the early up-front work was squarely in his court). Then we hit our first snag. We knew we wanted to get our LLC set up before we made our game available, so we started the process early so we’d have plenty of time. Unfortunately, there was a name conflict with another company, so we had to choose a new company name. We were all pretty attached to our old name (Will Work For Lunch Games) – Nik and I have been using that name for games for a long time– so this was very difficult. It took us a couple of weeks to come up with a new name for the company and for all of us to agree. Then Ray had to go back and change the art and other assets he had created to go along with it.

Since we were launching the game at SGC, we also knew we wanted to create a new website (we had also renamed the game). And, we needed a new website for the company, since the old one wouldn’t work any more. All of this took a lot of time away from other things.

Things finally started coming together, and we had a “dry run” of the booth, to make sure our sketches worked in reality. I taped off a 10’ x 10’ square in my garage and we set up the booth:

We didn’t have a table that was the right size, so we taped on an area for the table. The first thing we realized was it was pretty darn small, and cramped. Clearly our drawings were not to scale :) We figured we could make some adjustments at the show as it progressed if necessary, but there wasn’t much we could do until we saw the booth in situ. If worse came to worse, we would just lose the side demo stations and set up two on the table. The layout still seemed pretty solid in our minds.

How Much We Spent

In total, we spent $1,322 for our booth and booth supplies. It breaks down like this:

Booth Rental ($160 with $100 refunded afterwards) $60

Demo carts $157

Banners $233

Buttons $266

TShirts $356

Homemade stands for banners $66

iPad Stand $55 Anti-theft locks for macs $129

The swag we produced looked amazing. Here are our buttons:

And here are the shirts:

What We Learned

There were lots of things we learned from this process. I’ll start by re-iterating the three points I mentioned earlier.

Don’t mess with your game during the show.

You will want to. It will pain you to not fix bugs. You will find bugs, and they will suck. But at least you’ll know what’s broken and not introduce new things that might be worse. Plus, you’ll be tired and grouchy from talking and standing all day and it won’t be your best work.

Bring water, and snacks.

I personally drank about 456 bottles of water. Talking all day is very hard, and you’ll end up talking loud over the din of the people and all of the games being played. And bring some hard candy of some sort, or some throat lozenges. They help a ton keeping that sore throat at bay. And if you’re lucky (we were), you’ll be busy and won’t have time to stop and grab something, and you’ll get hungry, so the snacks were great.

Practice your elevator pitch.

You’ll get it down soon enough, but it would have been better to practice it in advance. Especially when it came to talking to the press. If this is your first time doing something like this, you will be nervous the first time you get put in front of a camera and asked “tell me about your game”. So, the more you have prepared, the easier it will be to slide right into your pitch. Don’t have an elevator pitch? Get one.

When you setup your booth and think it might be too cramped, listen to yourself.

When we setup the booth in the garage, we thought it might be too cramped. We should have redesigned it right then, instead of thinking “we’ll figure this out at the show!” No way would we be able to fit that much stuff in a 10’ x 10’ space. We were saved from this fatal flaw only by the fact that we were able to relocate across the aisle, and by the fact that no one was next to us on one side, so we expanded our booth to be much larger than it should have been. The next con we do we’ll have to re-design the booth, or get a 20’ x 10’ space instead. Here’s how it ended up looking:

As you can see, that’s way bigger than 10’ x 10’.

Don’t assume anything.

I have been to lots of conferences and shows for my day job (enterprise java developer), so I had a picture of what a “booth” looked like in my head. For example, I assumed there would be a curtain separating the booths (at least at the back of the booth; I knew there may not be curtains between them). So, we designed 10’ sign to hang across the back of the booth at the top of the curtain. Alas, I was wrong. We were given a “booth”, which was just an non-delineated area in the middle of the room. Several other folks had their own backdrops; most did without. Again, moving across the aisle saved us here and allowed us to hang the banner on the wall.

How Successful We Were

The answer here is really “I don’t know”, at least not yet. We launched our Greenlight campaign the week before the show, and we were (and still are) hoping to get a bump as a result. Here’s our traffic chart from Greenlight as of now:

We had a huge flurry of activity at the beginning, and then flatline. SGC happened on day 11 of being on Greenlight, and as you can see from the graph, no impact in the time since then.

We’re still hopeful. We did several interviews, and talked to lots of press folks about the game, and they are starting to show up on the web (a new one just got posted this morning, yay!). So we might still see a bump.

We did accomplish one thing: we got the game in front of actual gamers, watched them play and saw their reaction. And the result was overwhelmingly positive. We got tons of great feedback, found lots of bugs, and came out of the show with a long list of things we can do to make the game better.

I think we spent more than we should have, at least at this point in the development of the game, but it was a great learning experience.

One other area where we were successful was collecting email addresses. We offered people the chance to win a t-shirt in exchange for signing up for our email list, and gave away about 40 shirts over the three days we were there. We collected 161 email addresses, of which 154 appear to be valid (the rest bounced, or were illegible and we did our best). We sent a “thank you” email to everyone that attended, and it got a 30% open rate and a 5.7% click through rate, which far exceeds industry averages (at least according to Mailchimp).

Whew, that was a long post. Thanks for reading all the way to the end :)