Norwich Gaming Festival 2017The festival is over, my wife and I survived the two days we were there and I think it went great. I'll talk about various aspects of it, and I'm happy to answer any questions as always.
General ThoughtsThe festival took place at the Norwich forum. It's a big open space with a high glass roof. Occasionally it got a little warm and the bright sun could be a little awkward for playing games - but on the plus side, it was a free event and felt very easy for the public to wander into. It's right in the centre of the city near the marketplace. The festival was on for about a week; Leilani's Island was only there for the last two days of the festival, Friday and Saturday. For me two days of festival was definitely enough, it's quite tiring!
Leading up to the festival, what I mainly hoped to get out of it was just to get the game playtested by a good number of people. I've done a bit of testing here and there but never anything on this scale. In the run up to the festival I put a lot of time into polishing the game and making sure it was as friendly as possible to get into. In some ways I feel like this process of polishing, and having the incentive to add little things that I wouldn't normally, turned out to be the most useful part of the festival! I made a lot of progress in a short space of time.
The first day of the festival was Friday, and it was half term (no school for a week) so there were a large number of kids at the festival with their parents. I hadn't previously given any thought to how the game might be for kids. They all seemed to enjoy it; I think the bold bright colours are definitely appealing! Kids' abilities to play the game varied greatly, especially in the 4-6 age range. I think it mostly depended on what kind of gaming experience they had at home - some had literally never held a controller before, having been brought up on tablet gaming, while some picked the game up really easily.
The biggest sticking point for people getting into the game was simply getting the roll mechanic across. The initial screen requires Leilani to roll to smash some boxes, and frequently I would have to explain this to players, especially younger ones. This is something that will need some very careful (but never overly intrusive) tutorialisation. A second similar sticking point came later on in the level where the player was required to do a rolling jump, which travels faster and covers a longer distance. I think it's useful to have this barrier in the game as it really drives home that rolling is a useful core mechanic for the player to make use of. However some smarter level design is needed that makes it clear that the player should roll.
The second day was a weekend so there were a lot more adults, and generally fewer problems with understanding. I had also made a couple of small tweaks to the game in the hotel room overnight which just helped to clarify where the player was supposed to go at the beginning of the demo.
The game fared very well in terms of stability; it ran solidly for 6-7 hours each day without any crashing, stuttering or other technical issues. The only real technical problem was that one of the young kids managed to accidentally turn on the "turbo" mode on my gamepad, which caused the jump to stop working properly. I was vaguely aware that my pad could do this but had never used it! I noticed the problem quickly thankfully; if I hadn't been keeping an eye on players it could have ruined a lot of experiences.
As mentioned above I went to the festival with my wife. It was pretty invaluable to have a second person there to help out, as taking occasional breaks to eat, wander around and play other games really helps to keep energy up throughout the day. I met a lot of great people at the festival, and chatting to new fellow developers was a very positive aspect of going. I'm looking forward to following their games on social media and hopefully it works the other way around too.
In terms of possible future festivals, I'm definitely interested in showing the game off more, but I want to progress the game's development more first. In many ways it's quite polished but there's also a *lot* left to do. For me personally I will get more out of focusing on development for a good while and getting the game closer to release before it's worth spending the money / energy to do another big event. However the whole process of preparing for, and going to the festival has made me much more aware of the marketing side of the game and hopefully I can do little bits here and there to make the game more visible. The first of these things is that I finally but together a good quality youtube video showing gameplay from the demo version of the game. It's at the bottom of this post!
StatsI added a simple feature to the game that would save a screenshot when certain events occurred, for example when a level is started, or the player dies. From this I was able to compile a few statistics.
I'm not really expecting to get much serious information out of these stats - I just thought it would be interesting to compile a few numbers.
It's pleasing to see that in 40% of level endings, the player hit the battery at the top of the tower (equivalent to reaching the top of the flagpole in Mario). Since there's technically no incentive to do this, especially in risky situations where you just want to finish the level without risking death, I'm happy that players understood the goal and went for it.
The water and fire powerups were intentionally hard to find in the demo, because I was more concerned about players getting to grips with the core mechanics of the game without layering extras on top. So it's expected that the numbers for collecting those powerups are so low.
The last point of interest is that on Day 2 more levels were played than on Day 1, but there were less deaths overall. I think this is due to the average age of players on the second day being older and more experienced at games. Also there were a couple of returning players from the first day, who already had got to grips with the game.
The Physical GoodiesAs mentioned in previous posts, we prepared various things to take to the festival. Prices listed below are rough estimates as I don't remember the exact costs.
- T-Shirts: These were not to give away, just one each to wear. Most exhibitors there wore t-shirts representing their game or company, I think it really helps members of the public and other exhibitors to identify you easily, so I would recommend this for any festival. Cost: £2 per t-shirt, £10 per printed logo. I accidentally bought a massive t-shirt for my wife but luckily she was able to cut and sew it into a rather nice dress!
- Fridge Magnets: These were a cool giveaway, most people were happy to be offered one. Our thinking was that badges / stickers would tend to get lost at the bottom of a drawer, but if a magnet gets put on the fridge door it'll probably stay visible there forever. Cost: £40 for 100. We gave away around 70 of them I think.
- Business Cards: These are really cost effective and it would be pretty unusual not to have any to give out I think. Especially useful for swapping with other exhibitors. Cost: £23 for 250. We gave away around 70 of these too, so got tons left over for future use.
- Leis: This one is obviously quite specific to the theme of my game! They really brightened up the Leilani table, so it stood out a lot. Of course some people didn't take one as they didn't want to wear it, but plenty of people found them really fun, and some said it reminded them of their holidays. It's also fun to see people wearing them around the festival long after they played the game! We didn't brand them with anything from the game; a good idea might have been to put a small tag on the leis, with a Leilani's Island sticker on it, so that people are carrying details about the game with them. Cost: £17 for 50. We gave all of them away!
- Laminated posters: We printed an A3-size game logo, and a few A4-size screenshots. The printing is cheap; most of the cost of these was in the laminating. But it helps to keep them in good condition so they'll be easy to reuse in the future. Cost: £10 for 4.
- Instructions in photo frame: I made a little controls / instructions diagram and printed it at 6x4" photo size. This makes it convenient to grab a photo frame from the house and stand it next to the TV. Lots of people ignored this but occasionally people would pay attention to it. Cost: 80p.
New VideoSome nice 60fps footage from the version of the game that I took to the festival.
Community
