bitsummit event report

now that i'm finally back home and had a bit of time to rest, i wanted to talk about how bitsummit went!

just for a bit of background, bitsummit is an indie game event held in kyoto every year (normally but the past few years it's been online/hybrid due to covid). i had the chance to show a pet shop after dark there and i've concluded that i don't think my games are really a good fit for game events, hahaha.

the good:

• i got to talk with a lot of people which was interesting since i haven't had the chance to do so since ... probably before covid, back when game events were still happening
• seeing everyone else's games was really inspirational! it's cool seeing what people are making and it makes me excited to make games too (the one i'm most excited for right now is novect's new game project m and if you haven't taken a look at the trailer yet i highly recommend it - https://novect.net/m/)
• i got to see people playing my game for the first time ever, since i've never shown a game at an event before, and it was honestly just very weird but also a good way for me to see directly how people play my games (and gave me a lot of points to think about)

the bad:

• it's really hard showing narrative games at shows, wow! it's hard to draw people in first of all because it's not very 'exciting' watching people just read, hahaha. then people generally want to play things that are more exciting too, i think, and narrative games usually take a bit to get to the 'good' parts as such, and this makes them not great for demoing. my steam demo takes about 20 min to play through i think and that really would not work for an in-person event so i cut it down to 10, but a lot of people still definitely clicked really quickly through the dialogue to get to the 'gameplay' which was... not very good for my narrative game hahaha
• i also just feel like game events in general are very... consumer-y. i talk about it a bit in this twitter thread (https://twitter.com/npckc/status/1556792377360420865) but i think ideally i'd much rather have people experience my games in a different way that game events allow
• also i had absolutely no time to actually really look around properly because i was really busy at my table (i'm happy lots of people wanted to play my game demo though!) and i wish i could have had more time to actually sit down and play some other people's demos too

i don't know if i'll show at bitsummit again currently but i think it was a good experience for me to have overall. i plan on applying for digital game expo which happens in november because i have a feeling it'll be a better fit for me and my games, but i'll let you all know if that happens!