Getting Designers
After we secured space and decided on the date, I created a sign-up form in Google Forms and began promoting it on Facebook. I run the Eastern Michigan Game Designers group, and I am at least in touch with a few other groups that playtest across the state. I also reached out to Matt Riddle and Adam Hill from Motor City Gameworks (though Kevin is better friends with both of them). I even sent some messages to designers I hadn’t met before, but who I thought might be interested.
Within a matter of days I had about 10-12 designers signed up on an email list. We were covering a wide distance, with me an hour north of the event, designers coming from Ann Arbor, and one designer from the Toledo area. While they all didn’t commit to attending right away, their interest was enough to meet my minimum goal to move ahead with plans.
I’ll say that connecting our event officially to UnPub probably helped the most in getting the designers to pay attention. Calling it an UnPub Mini gave it credibility, even if Kevin and I were basically making it up as we went. Beyond that, I don’t remember getting any official support from UnPub, even though Kevin and I both were in touch with the Network.
Getting Playtesters
The next challenge was to be sure we’d get enough playtesters. Now, when it came to designers, I knew we could expect them to sign up. For playtesters, that would be too much to ask. I wanted to remove all obstacles. We just had to promote and promote, then hope people actually came to test our games.
I decided we’d do some drawings during the event for playtesters who submitted feedback from games. I asked my friend Jon Pehrson, who owns the Games4Life game store in Lake Orion, if he’d help us out at all with prizes. He gave me some store credit and a couple gift cards. With some of my own contribution, I ended up with $55 of gift cards from him, plus about $90 of games. I asked all designers to consider contributing to giveaways. Ultimately they came through in a big way, but I didn’t know what to expect in that regard until the day of the event.
One last thing I did as a promotion was reach out to my friend Dominic Crapuchettes, from NorthStar Game Studio. I asked if he had anything he’d want me to test for him. I figured that would be a bit of a draw for the event. Dominic supported us in a big way. He donated a deluxe copy of Oceans as a giveaway, and he sent me a prototype for his streamlined approach to the Evolution system, Nature, which he plans to have on Kickstarter later this year.
I originally planned to promote the event by showing off our prototypes too. I changed my mind on that eventually, mostly because of the look of my own games! I realized that unless we had some amazing looking prototypes, the rough state of the games might be a turn off to gamers who aren’t familiar with games in development. I did get some nice photos from some designers, though, so I made one post about the prototypes right before the event.
But with giveaways, a game from NorthStar to test (with some quality artwork to show off on social media), plus the guys from Motor City Gameworks coming with their prototypes, I felt we were doing well gaining attention. Our Facebook event for the UnPub Mini had 35-40 people marked as “interested”. What more could I hope for?
Just to keep me guessing until the end, I did get a message from the hosting game store saying our group might be too big for the space he was willing to allow us. That made me nervous, since we were committed in a big way by then. Next up I’ll talk about how all that panned out, including the event highlights.
