Its been a little more than a month since we participated in the Seattle Indies Expo (SIX for short) as exhibitors with Hope: A Sky Full of Ghosts and, now that the dust has settled, I would like to share with you all our learnings, what went well and what didnt go so well. SIX is a one-day in-person celebration of independent games made in the Pacific Northwest. At SIX, indie game developers can showcase their games (no matter if theyre released or a work in progress) to thousands of attendees that also have the opportunity to ask devs questions, play demos and give feedback.

Some stats

The event ran from 12pm to 9pm. During that time we had 39 people playing the game with an average play session of 20 minutes, accrued 23 wishlists, 68 visits to the Steam page and 50+ people stopping by to know more about the game.

What went well

We brought two machines for people to play the demo and it paid off. There wasnt a second where any of the machines were idle. As I mentioned above, the amount of people that played the game and the length of the sessions were astonishing (considering our game is a point & click with lots of narrative and a big expo like this is not particularly the best setting to enjoy it). We also brought a retractable banner (78" x 33") with the name/art of our game and a huge QR code. This gave us enough visibility around the other booths (pretty much everyone had one) and people were able to scan the code easily to get to our Steam page. Lastly, networking! We were able to reconnect with other gamedev friends and meet a lot of cool people. From streamers looking for short & sweet indie games to play to journalists interested in reviewing games from the Pacific Northwest.

What didnt go so well

Since both of the machines were busy with people playing the demo, we didnt have anything else to play the trailer. An extra monitor with another device to put the trailer on loop would have been a great addition. A handful of people completed the demo (~1 hour of gameplay) and we didnt have anything special to reward them. It was really humbling and flattering that, even with a one-day badge for PAX, these people decided to spend so much time with our game and our story. Ultimately, we had some prints about a proof of concept for an in-game propaganda and we gave them away to the last 3 but it would have been awesome if we had this planned from the beginning with something more cool or meaningful. Despite the fact that the banner gave us great visibility and helped us point people towards our Steam page, we didnt do a very good job at promoting our Discord server. We didn't even have the link handy and had to improvise to share it with some folks interested in following the development of the game. We like to keep the player logs when we do play testing for debugging purposes. However, we couldnt automate this process for SIX and we found ourselves spending precious minutes between sessions preserving these files (closing the game, rename log file with the player number, restarting the game). What we learned We confirmed that nothing beats playtesting to understand how people approach your game (even more if they have never heard about it) and expos are king in this regard. During the GeekFest West 2024 we learned that in-person events are terrible for wishlists and SIX 2024 was just the confirmation of that. Even though we had zero expectations for the number of wishlists, Id say that 23 is not too shabby. Another thing we learned is that is very risky to arrive at a big expo like this one with a build that significantly changes the way players interact with the elements within the game (the interaction system, basically) without enough testing. I generated the build the day before at 3PM and was a bit scared the first couple of hours. Luckily, everything worked like a charm and people reacted really well to the new changes. But, what if that wasnt the case? What if the game wouldve exploded and people couldnt pass the tutorial scene? We had a fallback build from a month ago but, still, we were playing with fire. We definitely need to automate the log rotation between player sessions. We could go even further by adding timestamps to the logs (Unity doesnt do it by default) and keep metrics of the time spent on each scene. Thats really useful to understand player behavior and see if our assumptions about the game design are working as expected. Last but not least, keeping your enthusiasm throughout the day is really important. Towards the end of the day, we were exhausted, thirsty and hungry but we kept talking about our game with the same love and passion we did in the morning. This was apparent for the people and made them want to explore the game further.

Final Thoughts

This was just our second event and the experience was incredible. If youre a gamedev and have the opportunity to join an in-person event near you, do it! It will be, without a doubt, an amazing learning experience. I cant thank all the organizers, judges and volunteers from the Seattle Indies community enough for putting together such an incredible event and for giving us the opportunity to participate with Hope: A Sky Full of Ghosts. I'm super proud and grateful to be part of this community! If youre still reading, thank you! Im more than happy to answer any questions or provide more details about our experience in this event. Take care, and fly free!