Hey gang! Erin here.
It’s somehow been two weeks since the beginning of PAX East and C2E2. Running two booths in the same weekend required a lot of planning and organization, not to mention stress. We’ve all done a few conventions together before, but never without the whole team present – there’s only 3 of us, so splitting up was kind of a big deal. We ended up with only two people at each booth – Ian and I at PAX in Boston, and Bryan and our close friend Michael at the booth in Chicago at C2E2.
When we first heard the news that we would be in both conventions, I started doing a ton of anxiety-driven research and came across a few other dev blogs that went into great detail about how their teams planned their booths with a similar amount of space. For reference, these were the ones that were the most helpful to me:
http://juicybeast.com/2015/03/17/giving-away-17000-worth-of-toto-temple-deluxe-at-pax-east/
http://www.zoinkgames.com/plan-convention-booth-pax-east/
http://blog.astroneer.space/uncategorized/astroneer-pax-east-2016/
These were SO helpful, so we’ve decided to pay it forward with a few posts of our own on the subject! I was mainly involved with planning the PAX booth, so Bryan will be writing a more in depth look at their booth at C2E2 in the next post.
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I’m a huge planner. If I don’t have a clear vision of what something is going to look and feel like going into it, I become an anxious mess. I found an easy solution to this by making a 3D scale model of our booth in Maya and moving all the parts around until they felt right. The monitors on the table were the correct size for the ones we were planning on bringing. The other two monitors (up on the stands) were kind of thrown in there to test whether that kind of thing was even worth talking about. They were to scale for some of the cheaper TVs/monitors I found online, but we ended up going a slightly different direction anyway.
Since we didn’t have a corner booth, I was really concerned that people walking by wouldn’t be able to see what the game was. Cosmo’s is the kind of game where it’ll stop people in their tracks because it looks like nothing else on the floor, but it would be so easy to pass by if someone didn’t see the game in action. For that reason, we decided that our best bet would be to show a looping video explaining some of the things going on in the game.
To make this happen, we ended up waiting until we were in Boston to buy a TV from Target and rented a TV stand from the convention hall for the cost of an arm and a leg. Although this was really expensive for our tiny studio, it really was the best decision. For one thing, TV stands are SUPER heavy. We had the opportunity to borrow one from the co-op we sometimes work out of, but shipping costs alone would have been crazy, especially if we got it shipped right to the convention center. And if we didn’t get it shipped right to the convention center, we’d be stuck without a car, lugging this thing around a city we weren’t familiar with. As far as the TV itself goes, we found a relatively cheap 43 incher that did the job perfectly. Because of union rules, the convention hall even set up the stand and the TV for us, which we were so grateful for after a long day of traveling and load-in. All-in-all the looping video was a great decision – I would say it was the main reason people would stop by to learn more.
The last piece of the booth was the monitor stand near the front, which we bought from Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B01IINGWZC/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1 . This worked so well to grab people’s attention…but only if someone was playing. We had heard some great advice a few months ago about having a video start playing automatically if there’s no one playing for a minute. Our plan was to pre-record a video of us playing multiplayer on extreme mode, just to show how crazy the game can get. We just didn’t have the time to get this implemented this time around, which was a shame.
Here’s the final layout of the booth on day 1
Something that worked really well for us was having our brochure holder up at the front corner of the booth. This location was perfect for people who were in a rush walking past the booth, but still wanted more info. We ended up having quite a few people come back later after doing exactly this! Right next to the brochure holder was our mailing list signup sheet, which ended up being a fantastic location. People would naturally stop by that table right after playing the demo and sign up without us having to awkwardly ask them to. The little table all of this was sitting on was actually fantastic to have as well. We were doing a poster giveaway if someone scored enough points in the game, so we would hide all that stuff under the gray tablecloth – it kept our small space tidy and everything we needed was easily accessible.
Let’s talk about what could have gone better! Having the two demo stations set up on the table was great, except that people walking by from the angle below couldn’t see what they were playing. However, if we put that table along the back wall instead, I think the monitors would have been too small to see from outside the booth anyway. If money were no issue, we might have replaced those monitors with bigger screens and arranged them in the back of the booth facing the aisle.
One other thing that we should have planned better was the giant mess of cords and computers and luggage under the table. I don’t think any of the attendees knew about this – we kept it pretty well hidden. Just as a side note, we take all the computers home each night during a convention for security reasons…the laptops we use are our actual work laptops and our livelihood, so it would be a huge loss to have them stolen. For the next convention, we’re planning on bringing some collapsible plastic or wire boxes to put the laptops on, and then using gaffers tape to secure all the wires to it in their proper positions, which would make setup a breeze.
One last thing that I would have changed is only having 2 people at the booth. PAX is a huge convention and Indie MEGABOOTH has a great location in it, which means traffic, traffic, traffic. Press could show up any time, and if someone was taking a break, that means that during an interview, no one could help players who were playing the demo and no one was answering questions about the game from the passing crowd. I doubt we’ll ever be in the position again where we have two conventions going on in the same weekend, but on the off chance it happens again, I think the plan is to bring a friend.
Other than that, we were super happy with how the whole weekend went. We got to connect with a lot of awesome people – devs and attendees alike. One fantastic part was getting to meet the Cook, Serve, Delicious! 2!! team, who was only 2 booths down from us! Cosmo’s was heavily influenced by that game, so it was such a treat getting to know them. There was a ton of talent in the Indie MEGABOOTH this year, and we were so happy to be a small part of it.
