Hey guys,
I
mentioned that I think we’re the first game developer to ever have a booth at
Sac Anime. Now that it’s all over and I've
caught up on sleep, I understand why.
The number
one thing, something that never would have occurred to me to prepare for--the
overwhelming majority of people had no idea what was going on. Maybe a thousand people walked by and looked
at our booth. Many of them said, “Granny
Wars?! That’s hilarious,” and kept
walking. But many also said, “looks like
some guys sitting around playing games,” and never bothered to ask us who we
were, what we were going there, or what was going on. I heard, “I haven’t seen this game yet,” as
if we could have been playing Marvel vs Capcom in the middle of the vendor’s
hall and people would have been more accepting of that. One guy even didn't believe me that Granny
Wars was a real game so I had to show him I really was controlling Rose with
the controller. One guy was even irritated that we didn't have his favorite game nor willing to let him sit and play whatever (other people's) games he wanted to.
While most
seemed interested once we actually told them what was going on, I’d say we
missed a good 95% of people that didn't stick around to talk to us because they
were just so confused by what we were doing or too shy to ask. I thought it was obvious we were game
developers showing off our games in development, as we've done before at other
(game related) conventions, but I genuinely believe absolutely no one got that
this is what’s going on. I think people
generally assumed our booth was some kind of rest area provided by Sac Anime
and we were annoying people that sat on our sofa and chairs into playing games
when they just wanted to rest.
I was really
not expecting such confusion. But yeah,
I think this is an easy fix. Next time,
we’ll have signs posted or make a new banner that states we’re a Sacramento video
game developer. Having flyers that are
more accessible without people having to talk to us, would also be useful. I'd considered having one TV that just showed off our games like a looping trailer. Maybe we need to do that and mix it in with information that explains what's going on.
The main
goal was to make mistakes and learn from them.
Mission accomplished. But going
forward, we needed to have a better outlined idea of what we were trying to
accomplish--Facebook Likes, feedback on our games, Beta testing sign ups,
talent recruitment, industry connections, etc.
We got a
little bit of all of the above, but again, we could have done a lot more to
better attract what we were looking for.
All that aside,
we had a lot of other issues. The
programmer for Granny Wars made it clear weeks before Sac Anime that he would
need a lot of time to get the hit boxes working for each animation and would
need time to test it. He got
neither. Many of the final animations
came in at the last minute by the artists, and the lack of time to test things
before ended up meaning a really bad bug where the character from the previous
game was not getting destroyed for the next.
So if you played 13 rounds, there would be 13 copies of the character
moving around. The hit boxes were mostly
working, but a bug caused the game to crash due to one of the hit boxes having
a problem and so the programmer disabled them all. That meant that the game had to be reset for
each round to avoid duplication problems, and that without hit boxes, you
couldn't damage each other. If you can't damage each other in a fighting game, the game isn't playable.
Raygun
Rocketship was much more stable. It was
also the hardest build ever, and very, very few people were able to beat level
1. I did it once. Kaila and Quinlan, who are otherwise fairly
antisocial and therefore volunteered to demo the game the whole time to avoid talking to people, beat it
about a dozen times each, but even with all that practice, they died a
lot. For the “tutorial planet” this is
way too hard. This resulted in passer byers
watching players die over and over in the same spot and not seeing the other
80% of the game.
I guess the
only other negative thing was the lack of press. We got some interest from a game news site
and a game blogger, both who were shocked to find a game developer at Sac Anime. I made a couple other good connections. But had this been a game convention, we’d
have gotten a ton more press since they would have been ready for us.
So that’s
the negative. I think one of the most
positive things is seeing the crew actively talking to people and being excited
about telling them about the games we’re working on. I’m also glad they got to hear an unending
stream of people telling them how hysterical Granny Wars looked and how people
can’t wait to play it. When you’re
working without funding, it’s hard to keep plugging away at something without
getting encouragement from potential fans.
So I’m hoping this really helps to motivate the team. It also gave me an excuse to finally buy
shirts for everyone.
We’ll have
to decide what to do from here. Two
other Convention organizers contacted us and asked us if we’d be interested in going
to their convention. I have to decide if
this is the wisest use of funds. I think
that Facebook ads would have likely been far, far more cost efficient if we were
only looking for more fans. Then again,
some tweaks in our booth presentation could make the difference. So it’s something we’ll have to talk about.
