Tag: splody

Indie Exhibiting at PAX East

When preparing for PAX East I saw this article from another indie dev, found it quite useful, and thought I’d share my experience, also as a first time exhibitor, complete with lot of interesting numbers.

My Booth

I exhibited Splody, my multiplayer action game that supports any number of players. I wanted to showcase this, so opted for a larger 20’x10′ booth and planned on having both an 8 player station and a 4 player station. I used two 55″ TVs, hooked up to tiny, cheap UltraSlim computers, with wireless controllers for all. One TV I put farther in the back, on a lower table the convention provided, so that I could get 4 sitting and 4 standing in front of it. The other TV I put on a stand, as high up as is comfortable to look at, closer to the aisle, so that people walking by had something to look at.

The ones with cat ears are my volunteers

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Splody showing at GitHub / Ludum Dare GDC Party

Last night I attended the Ludum Dare / GitHub GDC party in San Francisco at the fantastic offices of GitHub.  I have no idea where their employees work (perhaps another floor?) but their gathering space was fantastic, and they even had a nice big TV with a dangling HDMI cable set up which I was able to snag for an hour or two of showing off my game, Splody.  I turned the TV over to Shnipers for the latter half of the night, as that was also a fantastic local multiplayer game, and had a chance to play a bunch of other indie games around the room as well.

The showing of Splody went quite well, often had 6 or more people playing at once, everyone seemed to be having fun, and quite a few were really excited about the game.  It was great to have so much positive feedback!  Everyone unanimously enjoyed my simultaneous multiplayer character customization/control test screen.

Simultaneous multiplayer character customization and control test screen

Now, I just need to channel as much attention as possible into getting Greenlit on Steam, so, if you have a Steam account, please go vote on my Steam Greenlight Campaign, every vote helps!

I did learn a few things that hadn’t came up with my previous demos – as this demo was to a bunch of random people at varying frequencies, and most of my previous demos have been to larger captive audiences.  I need a good way to show the game to just a single demoer – playing a 1v1 match against me, a tournament-winning Bomberman player, either doesn’t go well for them, or feels like I’m just committing suicide.  I think I’ll throw in an option to pad out a match to a fixed number with AIs, so if there’s just one person demoing, AIs can fill in so there is at least 4-6 players on screen for a better feeling of what a party game can be, though obviously playing against AIs isn’t as fun as stomping your friends.  The other thing was with one particular game mode, Mount Control, which currently has a bit of randomness in it which can lead to rather long matches, and I think I can do a little tuning so that the expected match time is a lot more constrained which would lead to much better conference-floor demo experiences.

Oh, and the other thing I learned, or, rather, already knew, but keep forgetting, is that I really shouldn’t play against a set of people and win 3 to 0 to 0 to 0 to 0 to 0… but some people playing the demo get really competitive and I have to give it my all to give them a fair fight, and the I forget to tone it down a notch for the next group.  Best solution is probably to continue talking about the game constantly, as me paying half attention is probably the right skill level for most people ;).