Avcon 2023
In a good stroke of luck our application to avcon was accepted and we decided to showcase Roving Rovers. This was an exciting start to the now continuous conventions that will crowd the rest of our calendar. Although we had only a week’s notice we had already had our fair share of conventions so we were prepared to take on the task of getting everything ready.
Preparation
Now to prepare for the convention Mini Mammoth focuses on 3 main aspects, these being: the game itself, marketing collateral and a little bit of merch to spice things up.
Now thankfully we had already built a player ready demo thanks to the Space Forum last year, but we still had the other 2 to take care of.
- For the marketing collateral we had 2 assets to create and order; a 2m tall pull-up banner and a smaller table top banner. Both showing off Roving Rovers but the smaller held a QR code to easily allow visitors to sign up to our mailing list.
- In regards to the merch we brought along a myriad of collectables; badges, stickers and some cards. The first 2 served the same purpose, to help spread awareness of Mini Mammoth Games and Roving Rovers. This meant that we had to create multiple designs for each, which we will show you below:
Will just like to shamelessly promote the fact that we made the badges ourselves, from design to actually hand pressing them together with a manual machine. This took a lot of time, but saved us a ton of money, though that was only because we knew someone with the manual machine beforehand.
The cards we designed to help visitors with easy access to everything Roving Rovers, this means the game, our socials, any community forums and so on and so forth.
Exhibiting!
With Avcon being at the convention centre it meant that there was plenty of (paid) parking around and underneath which meant that we didn’t have to haul everything from a distance. Though we will suggest making sure you have a trolley if you are bringing more than one trip’s worth of things. We had 2 trips to get everything inside however that was with us holding on to more than what we should have been comfortable holding. Including this it still only took me and 1 other approximately an hour to set everything up and have a short tour of the rest of the venue to see what other stalls were looking like.
Both Saturday and Sunday were an excellent experience for our staff and placements alike, we had offered them the opportunity to allow them to gain more experience within the industry that would otherwise be unknown without becoming an indie developer.
“Avcon was a fantastic experience for us to get Roving Rovers out there and get real feedback from players. It was great seeing all the talented cosplayers, artists and other game developers from South Australia.” – Tyler (Programming Director)
Thank you to everyone who attended Avcon and especially those who came to the indie games room as this is one of the few conventions that help to lift up the indie developers within South Australia. Furthermore this was a great way to show off Roving Rovers to the wider Australian community as this was a project that had mostly stayed within the space industry till now.
Conclusion
While we are lucky to be able to attend Avcon at such short notice, it still was a last minute push to get everything ready on time. Thankfully we had a small break before client work was set to start the week after, this being the main reason we were able to successfully prepare.
If you aren’t interested or unable to exhibit at Avcon we would still highly recommend attending as a visitor, however this was a great way to experience exhibiting a game for the first time.
Overall Avcon is a great convention to attend and helps to support a wide range of small and independent businesses from South Australia. We had a great time and apart from the last minute rush it was a rather chill time to prepare for and attend. If you are an indie developer looking to attend here are our tips for attending conventions:
- If you plan to showcase a demo at conventions make sure to add marketing collateral or merch assets into your pipeline; so that they aren’t done last minute.
- If any of these items are to be printed by a third party make sure to leave at minimum a week for printing and delivery.
- Officeworks is our recommendation for pull-up banners
- Make sure to leave QA time for your demo so that visitors to your table don’t spend their time finding every bug.
- Have your demo accessible to the public so they can play it even if they miss out at the convention, this should be something that you advertise while you’re there!
- Make sure to have a set plan; this will help to remove a lot of stress and allow you to enjoy the experience more.
Thank you to everyone who attended and we look forward to seeing everyone’s faces in the future, whether at next year’s Avcon or other conventions that help to celebrate Australia’s talents!