NextCastle Party 2015: how I showed my game
A month ago, I took part in the indie showcase at the St. Petersburg festival NextCastle Party 2015, and I would like to share with you my experience and impressions. I am an amateur igrodel, to get to such a relatively large event is a serious achievement for me. Let's see if I could properly dispose of the chances given to me and show my game as I should have.
Photo - Mikhail Evstratov
NextCastle Party is the annual festival of indie and retro games held in St. Petersburg. It emerged recently, in 2012, but 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 from the last one.
To become an indie showcase participant, it was enough to submit an application with a description of the project and wait until two weeks left before the festival opening. To this significant day, the organizers selected 30 of the many announced projects, including mine, and distributed them between two exhibition days. I got the second one - Sunday.
')
To make it clear what will be discussed, I will show a video-cutting from the final part of the post. If you are going to read everything entirely, 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 of anonymity about the project. You already saw the picture in the teaser, right?
Next, I will meticulously describe the process of preparing this demonstration, all my findings and conclusions: how I put logos on clothes, what equipment I needed, how much money I spent, what I wanted, what I received and the like. Many details that are likely to be of interest to those who develop games or who will have to face the organization of an exhibition stand.
After the first euphoria of the favorites has gone, the time for insidious plans has come. Inspired by last year's report from the developers of the game "12 is better than 6", I began to prepare. The organizers provided me with the following resources:
Here is a complete list of Sunday indie show projects:
The organizers shared the expected number of visitors: 1000 people in two days. We divide in half, and we take into account that, apart from indie, the festival is also dedicated to retroshtukam and cybersport. It turns out about 100 people of the potential audience that can be attracted to the stand. My game takes some time to learn, you canât play it for less than three minutes, so there will obviously be more potential players than opportunities to introduce them to the gameplay.
In the process of preparation I was driven by several desires. Utaya nothing and do not palter, I post them all in order of magnitude and importance to me:
For simplicity, we will take my goals as satisfaction of my desires. To achieve these goals, I set myself the following tasks:
As you can see, quite a solid list. Looking at him, I realized that in the evenings I would not have time to do all this. I took 4 days of vacation at work - from Tuesday to Friday, at which time the train to St. Petersburg was waiting for me at midnight.
One big two-sided rollap and distributing flyers were required. Rollap is a vertical banner with a roll to be rolled. When folded, it is a compact but heavy parallelepiped (I was very much like a hunting rifle in a wardrobe trunk and weighed 14 kilograms). Once laid out, a rectangle stably standing on the floor without unnecessary details. The minimum size of rollap is 80 Ă 200 cm, the wider options go further, but in my case, the extra width was useless - the table was small. Rollaps are one-sided, then there is an image in the front, and a blind inside is seen from the back and a support stand is visible, but there are two-sided, then there is no roll-up inside - there is a canvas on both sides. My roll-up stuck in the middle of the exhibition hall, so there was no choice - it had to be two-sided.
I considered the main purpose of the roll-up to draw attention to the stand and demonstrate the brand. The more information on the banner of the husk, the worse it will perform this function. I decided to move all the information to the flyer, and make the roll-up just a big flag: a logo, a name and nothing else.
The project has long grown out of my programmers art, for pumping the graphic component of the game is now responsible for the great and terrible weilard . My task was to prepare sketches. To save Andrei time and energy, I decided that the artist is needed for one job: creating a roll-up model in high resolution. I will make the flyer myself using rollap fragments. It was the right decision, since we spent quite a lot of time on the coordination of the roll-up layout, and I managed to print it with a stock of just one day.
The central element of the roll-up was the logo, followed by the name of the game. Nothing more meaningful, splashes from below in order to fill the empty lower part. The layout was made under 80 dpi, but it could have been less - at the output when printing on banner fabric with a resolution of 720 dpi, it turns out that it is not at all that you can think of comparing the layout resolution and print resolution. I donât know how much exactly the resolution could be omitted, but just keep in mind that banner fabric is not paper, small details are eaten.
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. Two centimeters of these five were in the visible zone (the roll-up model was a little higher than the standard), if there wasnât anything there, a bright white underside would come out. This question is definitely worth finding out in communicating with the printer.
Flyer format chosen A6 (105h148mm), as the most common. Most likely the other participants will be the same. You can show off and make a Euro-format, under the envelope, but if visitors collect packs of flyers, then mine will stick out and interfere, maybe it will be folded, breaking in half.
On the back are four screenshots from the game, two short paragraphs with the essence and links to contacts, the main of which is the VKontakte group. The link to the group is duplicated by a QR code. Not sure that it works, but everyone hangs up, and I hung for solidity.
The flyer printed on thick paper with a density of 300 g / m2, density practically had no effect on the cost (printed here ). Good flyers turned out nice as cards from some board game. Is that on the edges of sloppy places - when pruning sometimes the edges are lifted and a loose cardboard on the cut becomes visible. However, this is irrelevant.
More important is that when printing colors are distorted. The print flyer fell into the blue, the roll-up too, although not so much, the announcement of the photo contest went into green.
If anything, I did a color proof, and I was printed out my roll-up in miniature. Color proof was a waste of time. The colors are distorted in different ranges in different ways, just make the layout a little greener after the color proof does not work. Moreover, the rule will have to be blindly, because there is no possibility to repeat the color proof again and again after each edit. All I did was spend 2 hours on traffic jams to get to the print shop and was upset about getting the result. Next time I will not deal with this nonsense. First, the departure of flowers is strongly noticeable in sunlight and weakly with artificial, and secondly, the audience did not see the original and are not aware of the ambush. You can compare rollap on the photo and its source above in the text.
Photo - Mikhail Evstratov
At first I talked with printing houses like this: I found some suitable ones for the cost and range of services, and sent them letters to all of them with questions, pictures and other things. Then I looked at the reaction rate and adequacy. The difference in the reaction rate was sometimes per day, the difference in the approach and the timing of implementation is also very significant. This approach worked well in quiet mode. When deadlines began to tighten, I had to overcome my fear of phone calls. The call turned out to be much quicker and more efficient.
The bustle of preparing layouts, searching for printing houses and traveling back and forth is very unsettling. There could be no talk of any parallel development with the code of the game. I tried several times, in the end I still fell for anything, just not the game itself. Even the business card itself has rolled into a heavy attack of procrastination. It is good that my wife dissuaded paper to waste. Get rid of the unhealthy polygraph excitement happened only after the last order was placed.
The setting of the game is a laboratory, and the whole game process takes place inside the terrariums. Characters who communicate with the player, this gray-haired professor and his lab technicians. Laboratory dressing gowns as stand team clothes were taken without options: a white coat can be seen both in a monotonous and colorful crowd of visitors, it is working clothes and adds to the specialistâs charm; In general, we take!
The game logo is very convenient. It's nice a few years after its creation to make sure that you did everything right: monochrome, outline, inscribed in a circle, a short one-syllable name. If there was no suitable logo, it would have to be invented urgently.
Visitors, who should be attracted by a dressing gown, see mostly his back, since the face of the person wearing the dressing gown is usually turned towards the interlocutor. Therefore, a logo with the name of the game should be placed as large as possible on the back, and as far as it will go in front. Most likely, the robe will be unfastened, we are not in the hospital, so the options âfor the whole breastâ fall away. In front there are only small areas on the floors.
A bathrobe is not a T-shirt, in printing houses they are not printed, so the simplest and most effective way of applying a logo is spraying spray paint through a stencil. Having some experience in homemade stencil making, I made such a sketch on A2 sheet:
I assumed that the stencil would be cut from a thick film or plastic. The stencil should be one solid design, so I had to use the logo reversal (otherwise, the round timber under the eyes hung 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 glued stencils. I did not need a hard reusable stencil, it was more practical to use several disposable adhesive ones. The adhesive stencil does not have any limitations related to its integrity; âhangingâ elements are simply glued onto fabric on a temporary substrate before use. Layout stencil returned to the original logo:
Paint used MARABU Textil Design, this is a special aniline aerosol for textiles. It is not required to fasten it, it is not suitable for everyday wear. Before spoiling real clothes, I tried to put a small logo on a pillowcase:
Four dude short robe froze in horror. After analyzing the situation, I came to the conclusion that I was too generously sprayed paint, seeking a wet gloss fabric. It is necessary to stop at that moment when the painted surface is just beginning to cease to be dull. After taking into account the negative experience, the final application of the logos was quite successful. For each dressing gown it took about 20 minutes, of which the process of applying the paint did not take a minute.
At first, the robe is fixed, the lower substrate is separated from the stencil and it is glued to the site of application. The areas of the robe outside the stencil are covered. I used the pages of old magazines.
Then the most difficult stage - the separation of the upper substrate. The white parts of the stencil should remain glued to the fabric and the transparent backing should be separated. The substrate is durable, it bends all over, displaces the stencil, sticks to your hands and generally interferes in every way. Enrages awful! But sooner or later, on the battlefield, only a battered working stencil layer remains, which needs to be glued to the fabric as tightly as possible.
Painting takes place quickly and easily, the main thing is not to pour paint (do not allow wetting of the fabric) and spray it perpendicular to the surface, otherwise it blows under tightly adjacent places.
The best part is to unstick the stencil when the paint has dried a little. Never without artifacts, but the nightmare that appeared on the test pillowcase never repeated.
I had one monitor, I took the second one from work with a laptop. For both monitors, I had brackets (cool black home and work is easier):
In principle, it was possible to do with regular supports, but the bracket allows you to adjust the screen height, make room on the table and, most importantly, take the screen beyond the table dimensions, increasing the size of the stand.
On the free space under the screens, small household speakers and a pack of flyers fit perfectly. In the depths of the table was a laptop from which the image was broadcast on one of the screens, the base for wireless headphones and the base for wireless gamepads. Under the table was a box of my desktop, a keyboard and mouse for him, two pilots with sockets.
Completed the composition Ikeevsky bar stool for the player. Convenient thing. The chair allows you to sit down and relax, putting your hands with a gamepad on your knees. In addition, a seated person is slightly lower than a person standing, so viewers who do not have to crawl from the sides can stand behind him.
Photo - Mikhail Evstratov
Photographed with a Nikon D80 camera with a 50mm lens-fix, tightly clamped aperture 1.8 (in A mode) and a raised ISO. Light is still not enough. How did you get photos like the one above, ask her author, I donât know such secrets of kung-fu. For the video was the usual household camera Panasonic HC-W850.
Both devices were managed by one person - my wife.Lena, in free mode, photographed or filmed what was happening on the stand, and her task was also to photograph people for the competition. And the camera and camcorder had to buy more voluminous memory cards. The camera has 16 gigs (in our case it's about 3000 photos), the camera has 32 gigabytes (about five hours of video). This volume was quite enough.
With batteries a little more interesting. The camera does not need much, but a regular video camera sags the battery in an hour. Taking into account that we forgot to charge it, after 40 minutes she had already demanded to retire. The old Sony worked with the purchase of a bulky Chinese clone of its battery, but this one verifies the authenticity of the battery, refusing to work with counterfeit. The solution turned out to be very simple: the camera was charged via USB, and I bought a used 16000 mAh external battery (Xiaomi Mi Power Bank 16000), which Lena just carried in her pocket, connecting the camera with her own cable.
For the camera was a tripod, which, alas, my wife did not use for its intended purpose, it was too unusual. Another light tripod taken for the illuminator. I assumed that in the light show will not be enough in advance and bought videosvet YN-160 the S . It was very useful to me for shooting applying stencils on bathrobes, but it turned out to be inapplicable at the exhibition - there were always people around us all around, the illuminator would inevitably make someone blind. As a result, we did not use it, and his tripod worked just as a stick for a 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 simply interested visitor a free robe and offer to portray Professor Nimnul against the background of our rollap. Photo - Mikhail Evstratov Looking ahead, I will say that the competition turned out to be quite a good idea. It was attended not only by the players on the stand, but also by simply passing visitors to the festival. Rollap without too much information, the 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 recording. Thus, when parsing photos after a series of shots of one person, a frame with his contacts was sent. Moreover, we numbered the contacts in the list, and both the current record and several previous ones got on the photo - this helped a lot to sort out confusing situations. Found all.
At first I self-confidently assumed that two people on the stand would be quite enough. I was mistaken. How nice that the world is not without good people! Thanks to the help of our St. Petersburg friends, the stand team grew to five people, and no one was doing anything. It turned out to quickly deploy the stand, impromptu to organize a second gaming point (an additional gamepad with a base magically appeared) and replace the braking laptop (as if a spare laptop materialized from the air). Flyers began to disperse like hotcakes, and not only players began to drop in at the contest, but also visitors just passing by. And it only looked like a miracle, in fact it is the result of coordinated team actions. Friends, thank you! Here are 40 minutes of booth installation, down to one and a half minutes:
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 âXGM recommends!â Label is his initiative. There were three projects with XGM at NextCastle Party: my worms, Princess.Loot.Pixel.Again and Doors, which are better not to tear off. We all united before the exhibition in a general chat and during the whole festival shared information and even some equipment (they showed games on different days). Cooperation - indie developer's secret weapon, which is difficult to overestimate. I ask you to consider this an urgent recommendation - in this case all the participants benefit from the merger. If you are interested in amateur game development, and I somehow can be useful to you - just let me know!
I so wanted to have time to implement in the game hot! Split the screen in half so that you can play the game together for one computer. Well, that had time to stop! He limited himself to the implementation of control using a gamepad and a set of demonstration levels. And then barely had time. On the one hand, the exhibition is an excellent reason to shrink into a spring and, finally, to do something important, which was not solved before. On the other hand, the printing house and the props are very distracting, as a result, there is no enough decisiveness for serious chips - because of procrastination, I mainly did refactoring, debugging and polishing trifles.
In moments of nervous tension I want to break and play something. The week before the final week and flew out: colleagues from Message QuestZarelizilis, I decided to support them with the ruble and set a long-removed Steam. Along the way, I stumbled upon an old acquaintance - the old Kingdom flash drive, installed for Steam . Four evenings I later did not find. Apparently, they rolled under the sofa. Maybe someone can develop games by playing other games, but this is definitely not me. Once again, he took Steam from the company entirely. Once again, it helped.
I finished the demonstration set of levels all the way, made changes to them both just before leaving for the show, and right on the stand. All the stages of the preparatory plan, which I optimistically set after preparing the levels, flew into the pipe.
Just below is a table with financial costs. The second monitor and laptop I was kindly allowed to snitch from my workplace. I already had mounts for monitors, headphones and photo equipment, I do not include them in the estimate. In the plate only additional expenses:
In some cases, it was possible to save money by buying used items from ads on Avito.
I will not bore a complete list of junk, which had to carry, but I can not fail to mention its weight. The backpack with the main part of things weighed 46 kg. A box with two 24-inch monitors, weighing 10 kg, was attached to it. His wife had to pull apart a folding bar stool, a photo and video camera and an armful of packages with personal belongings that did not fit in the backpack. The most ergonomic option would be to go to St. Petersburg by car, but would have to lose the extra two days on the road, so I decided to moan a little. The hardest point was to drag this belongings 500 meters to the subway after the festival. I will never do this again. Such heavy-lifting things need to be transported by car. Quite enough Challenge with dragging things inside trains, train stations and subways.
By the way! On the way, the folding bar stool turned out to be just an indispensable assistant - on it we sat waiting for the train, I put a backpack on it, putting it on or taking it off my back, and most importantly, I could stand on it by pushing the backpack on the upper shelf in the reserved seat.
Both game points worked almost all the time, in just six to seven exhibition hours about 60 people played in the game. On average, a little less than 10 minutes per person. Out of solid exhaust - 20 new people in the project group VKontakte. 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 video from the entry:
Next, briefly conclusions that I made on the results of the show. These are not recipes for all occasions, this is a dry residue of my thoughts about the demonstration of my game.
Whenever possible, you need to organize two game points. The person playing the stand attracts others who want to play, the second game point allows you to use this effect and halve the waiting time for those who lacked a gamepad.
Two game points require two people to accompany. According to my own feelings, when you play a game, while communicating with the developer, and he abruptly switches from you to a nearby player, itâs unpleasant and you want to leave.
The chair increases the time of the game session, it is more convenient for a seated player to play than a standing one More and longer played on the game point with a chair.
An increase in a gaming session is good only up to a certain limit, at some point it begins to reduce the carrying capacity of the stand.
It is very important to have a tutorial, the game should tell about itself, while the developer forcedly or specifically left the player alone and alone. In addition to the presence of a tutorial, the sequence of levels is important - at the exhibition everything should be shorter and brighter. I had nothing to put before the exhibition an additional stupid level for a smoother increase in complexity - this level ate up precious time of attention and shaping the impression of the game.
Hardcore is not for the exhibition, it is better to reduce the complexity in the exhibition build. Most of the players stuck and fell off at the fifth level, where I had an erroneous, too sharp leap of difficulty 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 homely thoughtful leisurely acquaintance.
After the tutorial, short and tight levels are best. If the level is short, and the delay between the death of the character and the beginning of a new session is minimal, then some increased complexity is excusable. When I just switched the jammed player to further shorter levels, it worked.
A special exhibition demo level was just a salutary decision. It was a level, with almost all game content, and almost no challenge for the player. Sooner or later, I offered to switch to this level to all players. Most agreed and stuck on it just crawling the worm on the map and eating helpless enemies. Tellingly, the hardcore refused, and with more fury they rushed to the level where they were stuck.
The suit helps to overcome the constraint. When you feel disgusted, it is easier to go in contact with others. On the other hand, with people who were also suits, it was more difficult for me to communicate than with the rest. I hadnât been at such events before, I was embarrassed about meeting with cosplayers, tried not to meet their gaze, and generally disappeared. I felt that I had to play along somehow, and at the same time I didnât understand how I could do it. I concluded that extravagant costumes set an excessive distance, you just need a uniform with a chip. Bathrobes were perfect in this regard.
As soon as the game point is released and there are no active applicants, the first thing to do is to make contact and invite viewers or passers-by to play. Sometimes a person lacks decisiveness and reason for moving from the viewer to the 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 have some problems with communication. :) Perhaps itâs not However, everything can be easily solved by the initiative of the developer. Especially well this moment for my contest. She has been playing with the game. Virtually no one refused.
If the sound is allowed, then it is necessary 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 remains only a silent movie. For the basis of the game point used small household speakers, they turned out to be quite enough.
The second game point was voiced by headphones in order not to make 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 around his neck, but everyone had to somehow solve this conflict.
Headphones, like gamepads, were wireless. Sennheiser HDR 170. They are convenient to use at home (turn around, go wherever you want), and at the exhibition this convenience is multiplied by the number of gears the device from person to person. Wireless stuff is easy to offer, transfer, transfer and temporarily put on a chair, without fear that someone passing by will dump everything on the floor. I experienced it during my work, I even had spare wired headphones on hand, but I had enough batteries for all six hours.
The camera confuses and irritates people, itâs better to shoot players from somewhere from a distance and with a tripod. We have not done either one or the other, so there was nothing to take from the pile of footage. Most of all moments rejects camera dangling in hands, unsuccessful zoom and frame transfer. With a tripod would not be so dynamic, but more freedom for installation and a completely different level of quality. I think a monopod or a 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 own light was too aggressive to use it all the time. In general, with post-processing, the pictures were pulled out, but I would like more.
Photo - Mikhail Evstratov
Be sure to collect the stand still at home. This is the conclusion on their own mistakes. Test switching was in the plans, but I decided to put the chain at the demonstration levels first, and then the time was over. Having already arrived in another city, I found that in order to adjust the bracket for a heavier monitor, I need a set of hex socket keys, and my laptop does not converge on the interfaces with the monitor intended for it. The PC supports DVI, HDMI and VGA, laptop VGA and HDMI, one monitor VGA, HDMI and DVI, and the other only VGA and DVI. Here I am also confused.
The expansion of the VKontakte group is almost entirely due to the photo contest. Three-quarters of new people subscribed to the group after I published their photos, contacted and gave a link to the group. Also, the photo contest was well-sold repost and worked perfectly as an information channel.
It was quite difficult to disassemble the participants' contacts written in words. Next time we ask to write in block letters.
Immediately after the exhibition, I planned to release a new full release, localize it and start the Greenlight campaign. No matter how wrong! The initiative is a renewable, but rather quickly exhausted resource. The forces are finite. Barely summed up the results of the competition, as it is laid out the exhibition build and almost a month desperately prokrastiruya wrote this report.
I really hope that my experience at least something will be useful to you. The nuances turned out to be much more than you can afford to describe in the article, so the missing is ready to gladly reveal in the comments. Just ask!
Photo - Mikhail Evstratov
NextCastle Party is the annual festival of indie and retro games held in St. Petersburg. It emerged recently, in 2012, but 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 from the last one.
To become an indie showcase participant, it was enough to submit an application with a description of the project and wait until two weeks left before the festival opening. To this significant day, the organizers selected 30 of the many announced projects, including mine, and distributed them between two exhibition days. I got the second one - Sunday.
')
Flashforward
To make it clear what will be discussed, I will show a video-cutting from the final part of the post. If you are going to read everything entirely, 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 of anonymity about the project. You already saw the picture in the teaser, right?
Next, I will meticulously describe the process of preparing this demonstration, all my findings and conclusions: how I put logos on clothes, what equipment I needed, how much money I spent, what I wanted, what I received and the like. Many details that are likely to be of interest to those who develop games or who will have to face the organization of an exhibition stand.
Initial conditions
After the first euphoria of the favorites has gone, the time for insidious plans has come. Inspired by last year's report from the developers of the game "12 is better than 6", I began to prepare. The organizers provided me with the following resources:
- Round table (Ă70 cm, height 110 cm) in the middle of the indie showcase zone (B3, highlighted with an orange frame on the plan).
- The mandatory show time is from 12 to 18 o'clock, but you can start at 10:30.
- Permission to use one roll-up banner.
- Socket 220v.
Here is a complete list of Sunday indie show projects:
| A1 Box Life A2 Reflection Of Mine A3 Message Quest A4 Steam Panic A5 (no one came) | B1 Rotacube B2 Knighttron B3 Niss 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 separate stand as last year's winners. | ||
Targets and goals
In the process of preparation I was driven by several desires. Utaya nothing and do not palter, I post them all in order of magnitude and importance to me:
- The embodiment of sweet dreams, as I shine on the stand of my own game, like Phil Fish from Indie Game: The Movie .
- Expansion of the audience, an attempt to at least grow a group of the project VKontakte.
- Getting some nice status from the organizers, which can then be boasted in the trailer for Steam Greenlight.
- Creating infopovod for publishing news about the game on different resources, take photos and videos for its (infopovod) operation.
- Operation of the exhibition deadline to enhance development.
- Watching how different live people play my game and analyze their behavior.
- Meet other developers and interesting people.
- Getting feedback from players.
For simplicity, we will take my goals as satisfaction of my desires. To achieve these goals, I set myself the following tasks:
- Due to the location of the âin the surroundingsâ, the stand should have three faces and only one back side out of four.
- You need two monitors, one of which is gaming, and on the second there are constantly video clips about the game.
- You need a high roll-up banner attracting attention to the stand. Together with the monitors, he should ensure the work of the stand in three directions out of four. Something like that (red side to the windows):
[1], [2] - monitors 24 '
[3] - a laptop to monitor 2 (which is just a video)
[4] - roll-up banner (85 Ă 200 cm)
[5] - working side of the stand
[6] - disabled side of the stand - Looking for handouts with the address of the VKontakte group.
- The team on the stand must be at least two people, as it is impossible to shine and shoot it on video at the same time.
- Video and photos should be shot in the maximum amount, 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 to attract attention. Clothing must contain the logo and the name of the game. Setting the game is a lab, so lab coats will be a win-win option.
- We need some kind of competition among the players with the award in the VKontakte group, to gather contacts of the players and motivate them to look into the game group after the festival.
- It is necessary to extend the gaming 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 the control from the gamepad and the reassignment of the functions of its buttons on the go in the user settings.
- In addition to the usual âlongâ sequence of increasingly complex levels, a game requires a pair of levels that have the main features of the game and no special tasks for the player. Easy and enjoyable levels for familiarization that can be turned on by stuck in training or rushing players.
- You need to get to St. Petersburg from Moscow, where I live, with all the belongings, perekantovatsya one night, then deliver the inventory to the exhibition itself, then collect and make the way in the opposite direction.
As you can see, quite a solid list. Looking at him, I realized that in the evenings I would not have time to do all this. I took 4 days of vacation at work - from Tuesday to Friday, at which time the train to St. Petersburg was waiting for me at midnight.
Polygraphy
One big two-sided rollap and distributing flyers were required. Rollap is a vertical banner with a roll to be rolled. When folded, it is a compact but heavy parallelepiped (I was very much like a hunting rifle in a wardrobe trunk and weighed 14 kilograms). Once laid out, a rectangle stably standing on the floor without unnecessary details. The minimum size of rollap is 80 Ă 200 cm, the wider options go further, but in my case, the extra width was useless - the table was small. Rollaps are one-sided, then there is an image in the front, and a blind inside is seen from the back and a support stand is visible, but there are two-sided, then there is no roll-up inside - there is a canvas on both sides. My roll-up stuck in the middle of the exhibition hall, so there was no choice - it had to be two-sided.I considered the main purpose of the roll-up to draw attention to the stand and demonstrate the brand. The more information on the banner of the husk, the worse it will perform this function. I decided to move all the information to the flyer, and make the roll-up just a big flag: a logo, a name and nothing else.
The project has long grown out of my programmers art, for pumping the graphic component of the game is now responsible for the great and terrible weilard . My task was to prepare sketches. To save Andrei time and energy, I decided that the artist is needed for one job: creating a roll-up model in high resolution. I will make the flyer myself using rollap fragments. It was the right decision, since we spent quite a lot of time on the coordination of the roll-up layout, and I managed to print it with a stock of just one day.
The central element of the roll-up was the logo, followed by the name of the game. Nothing more meaningful, splashes from below in order to fill the empty lower part. The layout was made under 80 dpi, but it could have been less - at the output when printing on banner fabric with a resolution of 720 dpi, it turns out that it is not at all that you can think of comparing the layout resolution and print resolution. I donât know how much exactly the resolution could be omitted, but just keep in mind that banner fabric is not paper, small details are eaten.
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. Two centimeters of these five were in the visible zone (the roll-up model was a little higher than the standard), if there wasnât anything there, a bright white underside would come out. This question is definitely worth finding out in communicating with the printer.
Flyer format chosen A6 (105h148mm), as the most common. Most likely the other participants will be the same. You can show off and make a Euro-format, under the envelope, but if visitors collect packs of flyers, then mine will stick out and interfere, maybe it will be folded, breaking in half.
On the back are four screenshots from the game, two short paragraphs with the essence and links to contacts, the main of which is the VKontakte group. The link to the group is duplicated by a QR code. Not sure that it works, but everyone hangs up, and I hung for solidity.
The flyer printed on thick paper with a density of 300 g / m2, density practically had no effect on the cost (printed here ). Good flyers turned out nice as cards from some board game. Is that on the edges of sloppy places - when pruning sometimes the edges are lifted and a loose cardboard on the cut becomes visible. However, this is irrelevant.
More important is that when printing colors are distorted. The print flyer fell into the blue, the roll-up too, although not so much, the announcement of the photo contest went into green.
If anything, I did a color proof, and I was printed out my roll-up in miniature. Color proof was a waste of time. The colors are distorted in different ranges in different ways, just make the layout a little greener after the color proof does not work. Moreover, the rule will have to be blindly, because there is no possibility to repeat the color proof again and again after each edit. All I did was spend 2 hours on traffic jams to get to the print shop and was upset about getting the result. Next time I will not deal with this nonsense. First, the departure of flowers is strongly noticeable in sunlight and weakly with artificial, and secondly, the audience did not see the original and are not aware of the ambush. You can compare rollap on the photo and its source above in the text.
Photo - Mikhail Evstratov
At first I talked with printing houses like this: I found some suitable ones for the cost and range of services, and sent them letters to all of them with questions, pictures and other things. Then I looked at the reaction rate and adequacy. The difference in the reaction rate was sometimes per day, the difference in the approach and the timing of implementation is also very significant. This approach worked well in quiet mode. When deadlines began to tighten, I had to overcome my fear of phone calls. The call turned out to be much quicker and more efficient.
The bustle of preparing layouts, searching for printing houses and traveling back and forth is very unsettling. There could be no talk of any parallel development with the code of the game. I tried several times, in the end I still fell for anything, just not the game itself. Even the business card itself has rolled into a heavy attack of procrastination. It is good that my wife dissuaded paper to waste. Get rid of the unhealthy polygraph excitement happened only after the last order was placed.
clothing
The setting of the game is a laboratory, and the whole game process takes place inside the terrariums. Characters who communicate with the player, this gray-haired professor and his lab technicians. Laboratory dressing gowns as stand team clothes were taken without options: a white coat can be seen both in a monotonous and colorful crowd of visitors, it is working clothes and adds to the specialistâs charm; In general, we take!
The game logo is very convenient. It's nice a few years after its creation to make sure that you did everything right: monochrome, outline, inscribed in a circle, a short one-syllable name. If there was no suitable logo, it would have to be invented urgently.
Visitors, who should be attracted by a dressing gown, see mostly his back, since the face of the person wearing the dressing gown is usually turned towards the interlocutor. Therefore, a logo with the name of the game should be placed as large as possible on the back, and as far as it will go in front. Most likely, the robe will be unfastened, we are not in the hospital, so the options âfor the whole breastâ fall away. In front there are only small areas on the floors.
A bathrobe is not a T-shirt, in printing houses they are not printed, so the simplest and most effective way of applying a logo is spraying spray paint through a stencil. Having some experience in homemade stencil making, I made such a sketch on A2 sheet:
I assumed that the stencil would be cut from a thick film or plastic. The stencil should be one solid design, so I had to use the logo reversal (otherwise, the round timber under the eyes hung 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 glued stencils. I did not need a hard reusable stencil, it was more practical to use several disposable adhesive ones. The adhesive stencil does not have any limitations related to its integrity; âhangingâ elements are simply glued onto fabric on a temporary substrate before use. Layout stencil returned to the original logo:
Paint used MARABU Textil Design, this is a special aniline aerosol for textiles. It is not required to fasten it, it is not suitable for everyday wear. Before spoiling real clothes, I tried to put a small logo on a pillowcase:
Four dude short robe froze in horror. After analyzing the situation, I came to the conclusion that I was too generously sprayed paint, seeking a wet gloss fabric. It is necessary to stop at that moment when the painted surface is just beginning to cease to be dull. After taking into account the negative experience, the final application of the logos was quite successful. For each dressing gown it took about 20 minutes, of which the process of applying the paint did not take a minute.
At first, the robe is fixed, the lower substrate is separated from the stencil and it is glued to the site of application. The areas of the robe outside the stencil are covered. I used the pages of old magazines.
Then the most difficult stage - the separation of the upper substrate. The white parts of the stencil should remain glued to the fabric and the transparent backing should be separated. The substrate is durable, it bends all over, displaces the stencil, sticks to your hands and generally interferes in every way. Enrages awful! But sooner or later, on the battlefield, only a battered working stencil layer remains, which needs to be glued to the fabric as tightly as possible.
Painting takes place quickly and easily, the main thing is not to pour paint (do not allow wetting of the fabric) and spray it perpendicular to the surface, otherwise it blows under tightly adjacent places.
The best part is to unstick the stencil when the paint has dried a little. Never without artifacts, but the nightmare that appeared on the test pillowcase never repeated.
Stand equipment
I had one monitor, I took the second one from work with a laptop. For both monitors, I had brackets (cool black home and work is easier):
In principle, it was possible to do with regular supports, but the bracket allows you to adjust the screen height, make room on the table and, most importantly, take the screen beyond the table dimensions, increasing the size of the stand.
On the free space under the screens, small household speakers and a pack of flyers fit perfectly. In the depths of the table was a laptop from which the image was broadcast on one of the screens, the base for wireless headphones and the base for wireless gamepads. Under the table was a box of my desktop, a keyboard and mouse for him, two pilots with sockets.
Completed the composition Ikeevsky bar stool for the player. Convenient thing. The chair allows you to sit down and relax, putting your hands with a gamepad on your knees. In addition, a seated person is slightly lower than a person standing, so viewers who do not have to crawl from the sides can stand behind him.
Photo - Mikhail Evstratov
Photo and video shooting
Photographed with a Nikon D80 camera with a 50mm lens-fix, tightly clamped aperture 1.8 (in A mode) and a raised ISO. Light is still not enough. How did you get photos like the one above, ask her author, I donât know such secrets of kung-fu. For the video was the usual household camera Panasonic HC-W850.
Both devices were managed by one person - my wife.Lena, in free mode, photographed or filmed what was happening on the stand, and her task was also to photograph people for the competition. And the camera and camcorder had to buy more voluminous memory cards. The camera has 16 gigs (in our case it's about 3000 photos), the camera has 32 gigabytes (about five hours of video). This volume was quite enough.
With batteries a little more interesting. The camera does not need much, but a regular video camera sags the battery in an hour. Taking into account that we forgot to charge it, after 40 minutes she had already demanded to retire. The old Sony worked with the purchase of a bulky Chinese clone of its battery, but this one verifies the authenticity of the battery, refusing to work with counterfeit. The solution turned out to be very simple: the camera was charged via USB, and I bought a used 16000 mAh external battery (Xiaomi Mi Power Bank 16000), which Lena just carried in her pocket, connecting the camera with her own cable.
For the camera was a tripod, which, alas, my wife did not use for its intended purpose, it was too unusual. Another light tripod taken for the illuminator. I assumed that in the light show will not be enough in advance and bought videosvet YN-160 the S . It was very useful to me for shooting applying stencils on bathrobes, but it turned out to be inapplicable at the exhibition - there were always people around us all around, the illuminator would inevitably make someone blind. As a result, we did not use it, and his tripod worked just as a stick for a 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 simply interested visitor a free robe and offer to portray Professor Nimnul against the background of our rollap. Photo - Mikhail Evstratov Looking ahead, I will say that the competition turned out to be quite a good idea. It was attended not only by the players on the stand, but also by simply passing visitors to the festival. Rollap without too much information, the 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 recording. Thus, when parsing photos after a series of shots of one person, a frame with his contacts was sent. Moreover, we numbered the contacts in the list, and both the current record and several previous ones got on the photo - this helped a lot to sort out confusing situations. Found all.
Team
At first I self-confidently assumed that two people on the stand would be quite enough. I was mistaken. How nice that the world is not without good people! Thanks to the help of our St. Petersburg friends, the stand team grew to five people, and no one was doing anything. It turned out to quickly deploy the stand, impromptu to organize a second gaming point (an additional gamepad with a base magically appeared) and replace the braking laptop (as if a spare laptop materialized from the air). Flyers began to disperse like hotcakes, and not only players began to drop in at the contest, but also visitors just passing by. And it only looked like a miracle, in fact it is the result of coordinated team actions. Friends, thank you! Here are 40 minutes of booth installation, down to one and a half minutes:
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 âXGM recommends!â Label is his initiative. There were three projects with XGM at NextCastle Party: my worms, Princess.Loot.Pixel.Again and Doors, which are better not to tear off. We all united before the exhibition in a general chat and during the whole festival shared information and even some equipment (they showed games on different days). Cooperation - indie developer's secret weapon, which is difficult to overestimate. I ask you to consider this an urgent recommendation - in this case all the participants benefit from the merger. If you are interested in amateur game development, and I somehow can be useful to you - just let me know!
Finishing the game
I so wanted to have time to implement in the game hot! Split the screen in half so that you can play the game together for one computer. Well, that had time to stop! He limited himself to the implementation of control using a gamepad and a set of demonstration levels. And then barely had time. On the one hand, the exhibition is an excellent reason to shrink into a spring and, finally, to do something important, which was not solved before. On the other hand, the printing house and the props are very distracting, as a result, there is no enough decisiveness for serious chips - because of procrastination, I mainly did refactoring, debugging and polishing trifles.
In moments of nervous tension I want to break and play something. The week before the final week and flew out: colleagues from Message QuestZarelizilis, I decided to support them with the ruble and set a long-removed Steam. Along the way, I stumbled upon an old acquaintance - the old Kingdom flash drive, installed for Steam . Four evenings I later did not find. Apparently, they rolled under the sofa. Maybe someone can develop games by playing other games, but this is definitely not me. Once again, he took Steam from the company entirely. Once again, it helped.
I finished the demonstration set of levels all the way, made changes to them both just before leaving for the show, and right on the stand. All the stages of the preparatory plan, which I optimistically set after preparing the levels, flew into the pipe.
Budget and Logistics
Just below is a table with financial costs. The second monitor and laptop I was kindly allowed to snitch from my workplace. I already had mounts for monitors, headphones and photo equipment, I do not include them in the estimate. In the plate only additional expenses:
| Title | Costs (rub.) |
|---|---|
| Short white scrubs 4 pcs. | 3,900 |
| Stencils for applying logos 6 pcs. | 2,000 |
| Paint for putting logos on bathrobes | 800 |
| Rolllap 80x200, 75 DPI | 8,000 |
| Rollap printing | 6,100 |
| Printing flyers 300 pcs. | 2 450 |
| Photo Illuminator / Backlight Banner YN-160 S | 3,300 (avito) |
| Printing and lamination ads for a photo contest | 400 |
| Prize pool for the photo contest | 1,000 |
| SD card for camera 16 GB | 1,200 |
| SD card for 32 GB camera | 2,000 |
| Powerbank for autonomous operation of the camera 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 |
| Bar stool for player | 1,500 (avito) |
| Additional festival ticket for the wife | 800 |
| Railway tickets Moscow-Peter for two there and back | 4,000 |
| Total: | 41 150 |
In some cases, it was possible to save money by buying used items from ads on Avito.
I will not bore a complete list of junk, which had to carry, but I can not fail to mention its weight. The backpack with the main part of things weighed 46 kg. A box with two 24-inch monitors, weighing 10 kg, was attached to it. His wife had to pull apart a folding bar stool, a photo and video camera and an armful of packages with personal belongings that did not fit in the backpack. The most ergonomic option would be to go to St. Petersburg by car, but would have to lose the extra two days on the road, so I decided to moan a little. The hardest point was to drag this belongings 500 meters to the subway after the festival. I will never do this again. Such heavy-lifting things need to be transported by car. Quite enough Challenge with dragging things inside trains, train stations and subways.
By the way! On the way, the folding bar stool turned out to be just an indispensable assistant - on it we sat waiting for the train, I put a backpack on it, putting it on or taking it off my back, and most importantly, I could stand on it by pushing the backpack on the upper shelf in the reserved seat.
Results and conclusions
Both game points worked almost all the time, in just six to seven exhibition hours about 60 people played in the game. On average, a little less than 10 minutes per person. Out of solid exhaust - 20 new people in the project group VKontakte. 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 video from the entry:
Next, briefly conclusions that I made on the results of the show. These are not recipes for all occasions, this is a dry residue of my thoughts about the demonstration of my game.
Two game points
Whenever possible, you need to organize two game points. The person playing the stand attracts others who want to play, the second game point allows you to use this effect and halve the waiting time for those who lacked a gamepad.Two game points require two people to accompany. According to my own feelings, when you play a game, while communicating with the developer, and he abruptly switches from you to a nearby player, itâs unpleasant and you want to leave.
The chair increases the time of the game session, it is more convenient for a seated player to play than a standing one More and longer played on the game point with a chair.
An increase in a gaming session is good only up to a certain limit, at some point it begins to reduce the carrying capacity of the stand.
From tutorial to mayhem
It is very important to have a tutorial, the game should tell about itself, while the developer forcedly or specifically left the player alone and alone. In addition to the presence of a tutorial, the sequence of levels is important - at the exhibition everything should be shorter and brighter. I had nothing to put before the exhibition an additional stupid level for a smoother increase in complexity - this level ate up precious time of attention and shaping the impression of the game.
Hardcore is not for the exhibition, it is better to reduce the complexity in the exhibition build. Most of the players stuck and fell off at the fifth level, where I had an erroneous, too sharp leap of difficulty 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 homely thoughtful leisurely acquaintance.After the tutorial, short and tight levels are best. If the level is short, and the delay between the death of the character and the beginning of a new session is minimal, then some increased complexity is excusable. When I just switched the jammed player to further shorter levels, it worked.
A special exhibition demo level was just a salutary decision. It was a level, with almost all game content, and almost no challenge for the player. Sooner or later, I offered to switch to this level to all players. Most agreed and stuck on it just crawling the worm on the map and eating helpless enemies. Tellingly, the hardcore refused, and with more fury they rushed to the level where they were stuck.
A uniform
The suit helps to overcome the constraint. When you feel disgusted, it is easier to go in contact with others. On the other hand, with people who were also suits, it was more difficult for me to communicate than with the rest. I hadnât been at such events before, I was embarrassed about meeting with cosplayers, tried not to meet their gaze, and generally disappeared. I felt that I had to play along somehow, and at the same time I didnât understand how I could do it. I concluded that extravagant costumes set an excessive distance, you just need a uniform with a chip. Bathrobes were perfect in this regard.
Communicative initiative
As soon as the game point is released and there are no active applicants, the first thing to do is to make contact and invite viewers or passers-by to play. Sometimes a person lacks decisiveness and reason for moving from the viewer to the player. I felt this moment when on the first day of the exhibition I briefly tried to play on the stands of other developers:
- To approach an empty stand requires effort, since this is a direct initiation of contact and, moreover, you risk getting stuck in a conversation when the game is already bored, but it will be awkward to move away.
- When someone finished playing and in theory you can get out, you worry that you will play worse than its predecessor. It is better to let someone else play, and I will see.
- The situation goes to point (1).
As you understand, I have some problems with communication. :) Perhaps itâs not However, everything can be easily solved by the initiative of the developer. Especially well this moment for my contest. She has been playing with the game. Virtually no one refused.
Sound
If the sound is allowed, then it is necessary 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 remains only a silent movie. For the basis of the game point used small household speakers, they turned out to be quite enough.
The second game point was voiced by headphones in order not to make 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 around his neck, but everyone had to somehow solve this conflict.Headphones, like gamepads, were wireless. Sennheiser HDR 170. They are convenient to use at home (turn around, go wherever you want), and at the exhibition this convenience is multiplied by the number of gears the device from person to person. Wireless stuff is easy to offer, transfer, transfer and temporarily put on a chair, without fear that someone passing by will dump everything on the floor. I experienced it during my work, I even had spare wired headphones on hand, but I had enough batteries for all six hours.
Photo and video
The camera confuses and irritates people, itâs better to shoot players from somewhere from a distance and with a tripod. We have not done either one or the other, so there was nothing to take from the pile of footage. Most of all moments rejects camera dangling in hands, unsuccessful zoom and frame transfer. With a tripod would not be so dynamic, but more freedom for installation and a completely different level of quality. I think a monopod or a 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 own light was too aggressive to use it all the time. In general, with post-processing, the pictures were pulled out, but I would like more.
Photo - Mikhail Evstratov
Pre-switching
Be sure to collect the stand still at home. This is the conclusion on their own mistakes. Test switching was in the plans, but I decided to put the chain at the demonstration levels first, and then the time was over. Having already arrived in another city, I found that in order to adjust the bracket for a heavier monitor, I need a set of hex socket keys, and my laptop does not converge on the interfaces with the monitor intended for it. The PC supports DVI, HDMI and VGA, laptop VGA and HDMI, one monitor VGA, HDMI and DVI, and the other only VGA and DVI. Here I am also confused.
Competition
The expansion of the VKontakte group is almost entirely due to the photo contest. Three-quarters of new people subscribed to the group after I published their photos, contacted and gave a link to the group. Also, the photo contest was well-sold repost and worked perfectly as an information channel.
It was quite difficult to disassemble the participants' contacts written in words. Next time we ask to write in block letters.
Plans
Immediately after the exhibition, I planned to release a new full release, localize it and start the Greenlight campaign. No matter how wrong! The initiative is a renewable, but rather quickly exhausted resource. The forces are finite. Barely summed up the results of the competition, as it is laid out the exhibition build and almost a month desperately prokrastiruya wrote this report.
I really hope that my experience at least something will be useful to you. The nuances turned out to be much more than you can afford to describe in the article, so the missing is ready to gladly reveal in the comments. Just ask!
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/272007/
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