i69 - a retrospective

The What
The 69th Insomnia Gaming Festival at the NEC, or i69 (nice) for short.
While this was their 69th outing, it was my first - and I was pleasantly surprised. Living a stone's throw from the venue, I've heard of Insomnia in the past but always assumed it was a LAN/eSports event (it was), but somebody mentioned it to me and I gave the website a cursory glance... Indie Zone???

The Why
Events like EGX, Rezzed, and the newly formed WASD, have always been way out of my price range for exhibiting, so when I saw the Insomnia stall was FREE I threw that submission in so fast you'd think I used !boost (not a real feature...) 
SPOILER WARNING: They accepted and gave me a free spot at "the UK biggest and longest-running gaming festival". Now the pressure really was on, as I prepared to show my game to potentially 10s of thousands of gamers!

The Good
And...it went well, I think? I got speaking to some of the other indie devs that were there, and practiced a bit of "the spiel" on the Thursday night while setting up. Got some great first-timer advice as well as a bit of a wake-up call as to just how big the event was.
Early on day 1 we spoke to a small time streamer who was attending the BYOC and convinced him to commentate the first race of the festival. This set the tone, and my new goal, for the rest of the weekend - have streamers agree to come and run the races to both show the game to viewers in the best possible light and let the streamers experience the game first hand. In the end we had 7 or 8 streamers stop and run a race (albeit one accidentally) which felt amazing for me as I saw them enjoy following the little ducks down the river. 
We also spoke to a handful of Twitch Partners who have loved the idea, mainly because they're getting bored of Marbles ;), and have either purchased the game themselves or been gifted a key and streamed it for us - BIG shout out to TeenyGiant for the signal boost.

The Bad
So many things went wrong though! During setup on Thursday night, the BYOC arena suffered some technical issues so were granted priority over the rest of us. This meant we were waiting until about 9:30pm to have any internet at the Indie Zone. Fortunately I and a couple others had brought the game with them on a flash drive, but most were stuck waiting to be able to download their games from Steam. And once the internet was up? A 500kb/s download speed AT BEST.
So I rock up at the NEC Friday morning, confident that I can just plug my external in and fire up OBS, to discover all of the computers have lost their Windows installation! What's more, they only have ONE boot drive for 15 PCs. So a lot of standing around and waiting was done on Day 1.

Then there were MY failures. I vastly underestimated the amount of footfall we would see, so only having 150 flyers and maybe 50 or so leftover business cards from a past order was a big mistake. If I hadn't stashed half away, I'd have had nothing to give out for 2 days. This meant Sunday consisted of me offering a flyer up for photographs to most people who stopped by.
Then there was leaving the station. You know those bodily needs and functions you have? Thirst, hunger, full bladder... yeah they all need you to go somewhere else to achieve. People understand how games and PCs work, right? You can leave the OBS window open, and people will see that and not touch it...WRONG! While one guy gave us a great show after having a play (he understood how the game worked in an instant!) most people just looked baffled while clicking on anything they could find. 
Of course this also meant that while I was away, there was literally NO game for the punters to play or watch or anything. You'd think a 7-foot banner with a detailed but succinct description of the game would be enough but alas...
Overall the response was great, with streamers and gamers alike recognising the format and getting excited/involved to some level. But there was one person who stuck out - a lady who, after asking what the game was about, abruptly interrupted Bella (@Beebooberino) with "Oh its on PC!" and walked off in a huff. Like, do you know what event you're at? Piss off and go play your Switch or something.

The Takeaway
There is SO much I will be doing differently next time, I don't even know where to begin.

• MANY more flyers and business cards - We simply did not have enough of anything
• Fake racers to allow races to happen at any time - Letting players and streamers see how the game plays and controls when they're there is (obviously) a must. Also giving visitors something to play when I'm not at the booth gives me a bit more freedom.
• Record but don't stream ?? - streaming it was great and allowed for the game to work properly, but it added unnecessary complications. Though showing people their duck entering the race and being customised in real-time was a highlight for me...needs more thought.
• QR Codes to buy the game - why did I not already do this!?
• Videos and information - For if somebody doesn't want to sit and play, or if the game is left idle for too long. I now have a nice collection of races to cut together into a (hopefully) interesting video.

That's most of it I think, main issues were figuring out out to describe the game to non-streamers/people who don't use Twitch, but once I recognised that they're not my target audience it became easier telling them "its just not for you".

Also got a load of feedback and suggestions, so that will be posted behind the Patreon wall (queue evil laugh).