Month: November 2018

PAX Australia post mortem: Part 2

Posted on by kipbrennan

Hello again. Welcome to part 2 of this PAX Australia post-mortem. This week: our day-to-day operations, running the booth and bump out.

The three days of PAX all ran in pretty similar ways, so I won’t go into any specific day’s events.

I arrived at the Convention Centre by around 9am each morning, bringing along our two Exhibitor passes.

Once inside, I would pull the two laptops we were using out from under our booth (where they were locked away overnight), plug them back in to monitors, audio and power and power them up. I also connected the controller to each computer, after changing in fresh batteries.

Then I got Level Squared running on each computer and played through a couple of times on each to make sure that everything was working properly and set up right.

By around 9.30 the other team members who were rostered on for the morning shift would usually have arrived, and we would finish putting out the pins and lollies and business cards and so on that we had ready to hand out to anyone who showed interest.

While all this was going on, the crowd would be building up within the queue room next door. In previous years the PAX Rising section was located in around the middle of the exhibition hall, but this year it had been moved to be right next to the entrance from the queue hall, so it was the first thing that people saw as they entered.

It also meant that we could hear the noise from the queue as we were setting up. And they were a noisy bunch.

But here’s the thing about the people who get in early to get to the front of the queue – very few of them are there to see the indie section. People who arrive and line up early are there to get into lines for AAA games or to get tables in the tabletop section. So the first half hour or so after the doors open was a stream of people rushing past your booth to get further into the hall.

It was a bit of an anti-climax really.

BUT, once that initial rush had passed, people started to filter through more slowly. And from then on our booth was pretty much constantly busy. As I said last week, we had two computers running Level Squared, and they were in use basically the whole time. And there were usually at least a couple of people standing and watching as well.

Working the booth was pretty non-stop. There were always people passing by to talk to and engage with and try to get to play. One big difference I noticed from last year when we were part of the Swinburne booth was the increased interest we had from people.

Last year we were seen as a student project so a lot of people dismissed us out of hand and had no interest in seeing what we had on offer. Whereas this year we were in among all the other proper indie games and seen as a ‘real’ game. This also meant that I didn’t have to do anywhere near as much work to get people to stop and check us out which made me considerably more comfortable. I am not a fan of the hard sell and really don’t like doing it myself.

Our timetable for staffing the booth was set up so that there were always two people there, and that no-one was rostered on for more than half a day at a time and no more than two shifts across the three days.

This was very good because after about four hours of talking to people my brain would start to turn to mush so the fact that we were able to get away from the booth for a good section of the day was appreciated.

We had a few things to give away at our booth as well, badges, lollies and business cards. We had repeated our orders from the previous year for pins and cards, thinking that we were going to need around the same amount. This was quickly proven incorrect.

By the end of the first day we were about half way through the supply of badges, and we were already getting low on business cards. Fortunately we still had plenty of cards from last year, but it was clear that we had ordered nowhere near enough of either to address the demand. This was probably exacerbated by the fact that we were giving away everything for free.

We made this decision because we didn’t have the public precence to sell our goods, and we didn’t have any of the needed infrastructure set up to process payments. I think giving things away was the right decision, we just needed more of everything to address the demand. Lesson learned.

And at the end of the day, once the Enforcers had shoo-ed everyone out of the hall, we would shutdown and unplug the computers, store the computers beneath the booth and generally tidy up the desk. Then go home and take it easy before the next day.

I generally skipped all of the evening events during PAX. While there were plenty I would have liked to attend, I thought it was a better idea to take it easy during the night to ensure I was ready to go and deal with anything that might crop up during the day. This was probably over anxious, but I’m OK with that.

Next week: What we learned and what I would do differently next time – if there is a next time?

PAX Australia Post-Mortem: Part 1

Posted on by kipbrennan

Hi again everyone.

First off, sorry that it’s been a while since the last post. While I was busy and distracted by various other jobs and uni, I also got a bit disheartened with the blog and everything and took a bit of a break. That went on for a bit longer than I anticipated, and I got out of the habit of writing each week.

But I’m back now, and I have plenty to catch you up on!

The obvious big thing that has happened recently is PAX Australia, and we had a booth in the PAX Rising section!

(Disclosure: I didn’t take this picture. It’s from David Rayfield’s excellent article on Junkee (PAX Australia Is Video Games, Minus The Worst Parts Of Internet) go read it, it’s tops.) 

We were part of the Swinburne booth last year, so this wasn’t technically our first time showing at PAX. However, this was our first time out on a booth all of our own, and our first time dealing with all of the planning and logistics that came along with that.

For the next few weeks I’m going to write up some posts going over what we went through, what we learned and what I think we could do better if we ever do this again.

The Application

First of all, you need to apply to be part of the PAX Australia indie section. There’s a form to fill out on the PAX Australia website that covers things like team size, the game (or games) you are working on and the release window for your game. We completed this application in April 2018 and have been going through the planning ever since. I imagine if you work on a team that does a number of shows over the course of the year, you could have someone working full time just on arranging and organising exhibitions.

Once we were accepted for PAX we had to choose our booth size (the smallest) and arrange for payment. Fortunately this was offered in an installment program. We’re operating on whatever the tier beneath shoestring budget is, so the fee was a pretty hefty outlay for us. In fact, it’s been our largest single expense to date. I’ll come back to this in the final wrap up, but the fee to appear at PAX is going to be one of the big considerations in the final weigh up of whether this was worthwhile or not.

Planning

Over the six months between getting accepted to PAX and the show, we had to do quite a lot of planning and organising.

I’m going to leave aside the fact that we had to get our game into order and have a workable demo. Obviously that’s important, but that’s not what I’m going to concentrate on here. Basically, I’m going to go into all the non-game development stuff that we dealt with in preparing for PAX.

The longest lead time was ordering all of the things that we needed produced in time for PAX, things like our pins, business cards, shirts and so on – everything that had to be shipped to us. We successfully arranged for all of this well in advance and had everything arrive in time. We were pretty well off in this regard, as we had already had practice organising these things for the previous year when we had been on the Swinburne stand. In fact, we even re-used our shirts from the previous year and ordered a re-print of the same badges. So that all went according to plan.

I wrote up a small spreadsheet going over all of the bits and pieces that we were going to need to run the stand. And started to organise who was going to volunteer their gear.

In a bigger company this would be covered by the company, either bringing along their own things, or buying stuff once they arrived at an overseas exhibition. But, again, less-than-shoestring budget, so we had to use our own equipment.

Item Number Required Electrical tag required?
Computer 2 Yes
Controllers 2 No
Monitors 3 Yes
HDMI cables 3 No
Chairs 2 No
Power board 1 Yes
Keyboard 1 No
Mouse 1 No
Speakers 2 Yes

That’s the table that I put together to track what we needed, where it was coming from, and whether it would need to be tagged (electrical saftey tagged) once we were at PAX.

There are a few things that were left off there, I now know. things like batteries for the controllers, back up controllers (for if/when something goes wrong), spare cables and such. Also it turned out that chairs are provided with the booth, so we didn’t need to take those along ourselves (didn’t find that out til I had already lugged the chairs into town though…).

I ran into a problem with the HDMI cables as well. Our design was to have Level Squared playing on two computers facing out at 45 degrees, with a single monitor in the centre playing a looped video of gameplay footage to draw people to the booth. It didn’t occur to me in advance, but there was only one HDMI port on each of the computers that we had, so I had to get another type of cable to run the remaining screen. Luckily I have a big box of cables at home, so I was able to grab one of those and sort it all out.

Finally, we needed to work out a roster for the booth, to make sure that everyone had a go on the booth and that no one person was there for too long each day. This is probably the one time that our team being so big is an advantage. We were able to arrange it so that no-one was rostered on for more than a half day at a time, and no-one had any more than two shifts across the weekend.

But in all, our planning and organisation went pretty well and we had everything that we needed arranged pretty well in advance.

Set up

…Except that there wasn’t anyone available to help with bump-in. So I ended up having to do that alone.

Which wasn’t all bad. I didn’t have to deal with anyone else mucking anything up. Though it would have been handy to have someone to send off to get things, or to help lift some things.

But I’m not going to lie, I was feeling pretty tense. There were a lot of things that I could see going wrong and I started to get a little bit lost in all the problems that I was trying to solve without making too much advance on the actual booth construction.

BUT, there were a bunch of other developers around who were also setting up their own booths, some that I knew and others that I met there. And many people dropped by to say hello and see how I was doing and offered to help with setting up. And that was really great, and it made me very happy to be part of such a nice group of people.

So it all worked out alright. Set up took around 4 hours all up, including a trip into the city to buy speakers. And once I was done, the booth looked like this:

Now all it had to do was last through 3 days of PAX…

I’m already over 1000 words so I’m going to break this up into a few weeks worth of posts.

Next week I’ll go over our day to day operations, running the booth and bump out. And then the week after I’ll cover lessons that we learned and what I would do different next time.

See you then!