You Suck at Showcasing Your Game

"That game saw at the convention was so cool... As soon as I get home, I'm going to... wishlist it and wait for a sale."

Not really what I was expecting from the title, but a very useful presentation. I'm not in the game industry, but I do conventions every year, so let me add some points from experience: - Comfortable shoes over fancy ones. A sitting exhibitor is a bored exhibitor presenting something boring. So be prepared to stand a lot. If you are tired, go further away from your booth to sit. The same applies for using your phone for personal stuff. - Bring extension cords and splitters are a must, as there are never enough power outlets. The same applies to hotels. - Never plan your booth down to the millimetre, as they are temporary structures, so the corners are not always 90 degrees or lengths and widths can often be shorter than planned for. - Bring cleaning supplies. People love to touch everything, especially screens and prints on hard surfaces. Also, if you have your own decor, it often gets dirty during transport. - Bring small, hard candy or glucose tabs. As you are going to talk your tongue off, your mouth will be dry as a desert. The best way to get yor saliva generation going is to suck on some candy. Prepare different flavours as you will get tired from the same taste fast and they need to be small, so it doesn't affect your speech or they are easy to shallow. Candy will make you thirsty, but you will still drink less than relying only on water. It also have the bonus of dealing with bad breath. - Always take the long way to the toilet and try to take different route each time. Attending to a booth will make your world shrink without you realising, making you tired faster. Walking around will free up some of the stress. Also if you have a printed shirt, you are a walking advertisement. - Always have a promotional material in your hand. You will flail around less while you speak and offering it as a gift at the end of your presentation will add a positive reinforcement. People will also often approach you to ask for it, presenting you with an opportunity to hook them. - Lastly: don't smile all day like an idiot. It will not only make your face cramp up, but it will make anything you say seem fake. Also if you stand around and smile all day, people will avoid you as if you were a creapy clow.

To get people to your booth you can pay someone to stand near it and tell everyone "This game sucks, it's so bad it's hilariously bad." so they try it to have a laugh, then after they discover how glorious your game is they go and tell this person that they're full of shit, so they get in a fist fight. This fist fight will attract a lot of people and you just have to persuade one of them to play your game (You can pay them/get in a fist fight with them too, this strategy is incredibly adaptative).

One big tip I can offer to everyone is to make yourself a convention box. I used to grab my power strips, phone chargers, duct tape, etc. from my house every time I went to a convention. Spend a little extra money to get duplicates of all those things that are ONLY for conventions and put them away in a convention kit. It's also nice to put an inventory list inside the kit to just verify you have everything you need. This is also good to remember to get the things that you can't just get 'convention duplicates' for (i.e. a laptop or TV). Fantastic talk. This stuff is so important for people to hear.

That was 100 slides? It went by so naturally, I didn't even notice 30 mins had passed.

I like the idea of a "Convention mode" for the game. I imagine that would lock out most of the game's menus, stop people exiting completely and also subtly tweak the gameplay to make it easier/harder/faster whatever is needed to make the player not put the controller down after 30 seconds. I'd leave that in the final game too, maybe as an unlockable bonus or "arcade" mode. Also - QR Codes. Put them everywhere. In them put URLs to your game, discount codes, hidden messages, anything. People seem to habitually scan these things now... and if some YouTuber walks past and catches one in their video, people watching the video will try to scan it too.

Short and up to the point talk. Thank you for that!

I didn't realize from the title alone that this was going to be about event booths. I figured it was for steam store, your website, your press releases, or something like that. The description is just fine but I just saw the video title and hit play.

This might be super helpful for just-began indie game teams. Thank you for sharing.

This dude is GREAT at talking. Such good presentation, everything had sense and structure, there were no boring parts. GJ!

Direct and to the point. Great talk.

i love barbeque guy, very fast and on the point. Many good advices, definitely gonna keep notes

Events kind of make sales. They increase the interest for your game and plenty of people add it to wishlist to get it on sale afterwards

Kinda makes you wish you had a game in a state to do this stuff, seems amazing. Coming from a musician background it's almost like a live show. Well because it is actually. You spent all this time revisiting and honing your craft, refining it and then present it to an audience. Live.

Best talk I've seen in a long while! You obviously are a great designer, your slides show. You also had great ideas for your booths! I absolutely LOVE the drawing on blank characters contest thing. It's brilliant.

28 minutes of basically me saying " how the he*k didn't i think about that?! "

The amount of questions at the end of the video translates how condensed and effective his explanation was!

Am not a developer but still a very interesting presentation

really good talk my dude.

This is one of the best talks I've seen. Very straight forward, practical and explanations were backing up the content! Well done.