Exhibition

Showcasing your work is, naturally, tough. That goes regardless of the audience - it was tough for me the first time and it continues to be so. There are a lot of considerations - know your audience, for one. I wish I had more time to go around and engage with everything, but I fell into the classic trap of getting a bit overwhelmed and sticking to my station, and before I knew it the exhibition was being packed down.

Despite my anxieties, what I did see was very interesting, and I’m very thankful that we at least have the conference proceedings so I can look into the other works. Here are a couple extra reflections on the exhibition:

Business Cards

At Gamebridge, I had an issue where if I wasn’t currently at my station, nobody would know who I was. Additionally, even if I was at my station, I had to just hope the person I was talking to had a business card, or I would have no way to contact them! Printing off some nice business cards helped solve this problem, designing them gave me experience in Adobe Illustrator, and I found out that printing services are pretty affordable (at least when it comes to getting 200 glossy pieces of paper).

Exhibition Mode

Another issue I ran into at Gamebridge was that my project is an anthology, but if somebody entered a game, played for a bit, and then walked off, there would be no indication that I’m not just showing off the world’s most primitive Where’s Waldo-like. With that in mind, I created a special build of the project that quits to the title screen if there have been no keyboard or mouse inputs in a game for about a minute and a half. I also took the opportunity to remove the ability to quit to desktop - just incase.

Bug Fixing

Immediately after setting up the laptop, I found a major bug I had never seen before. This was a bit of a problem. First off: the exhibition was imminent! Second: I had already not just submitted but had my work published in Indiepocalypse #56 (which is $15 and contains 10 other great alternative indie games!), so now I had a number of people out there in the world who would just run into a totally broken feature on the title screen! Luckily, my laptop is just good enough to run Unity, so I was able to spend about an hour during a session downloading the right Unity version, my project, hotfixing the bug, building the game, and then deploying it.

Future Considerations

In addition to business cards, it could be useful to have some table decoration (like a little stand I can set up with some information on the game), and small handouts like leaflets. Personally, I’d really like to produce physical copies of things I make on DVD, complete with printed inlays and booklets. At an event like Hypertext I wouldn’t be able to sell these, but I could give them away for free. Being able to give people things about the work being exhibited would be very handy in the situation where someone is interested, but somebody else is already playing the game, so you can say “hey, take a DVD!” or “hey, take a leaflet!”. Do academics like pins and buttons?