good work to everyone who went to tokyo game dungeon 4! i showed a game again this time.

there were some things that went well & some i want to do better on, so i wrote them up in this report.

tokyo game dungeon report

i showed my in-progress gameboy game at tokyo game dungeon 4. (the same game as last time... development is slow...)

i made merch this time. i think it's rare for an event to have a focus both on demoing & selling merch, so i'm grateful for tokyo game dungeon for that! thank you to everyone who played the demo & bought merch too!

things that went well

• changed my merch layout

  • i always try to bring merch for events that allow it, but by changing the layout i think i got more people to come by & pick stuff up

  • mainly i made a merch list on one piece of paper that showed all my merch! (printed in colour!) last time i just had individual prices near each item which made things a bit confusing.

  • i also put a sample in front so that people could pick it up themselves.

• improved non-cash payment methods

  • when i brought the square reader to dejige haku last year it was useless in the afternoon, probably because there were too many people & the bluetooth got wonky, so i felt it was kind of useless...

  • but starting last year square's smartphone app started supporting paypay & tap-to-pay, so i used that this time & it was super easy! unfortunately it doesn't support ic cards like suica, but i don't have to worry about bluetooth or the reader battery level so i think i'll just use the app for the future.

  • i felt like more people used paypay than credit card tap-to-pay

• pop-up message showing demo playtime

  • i made a pop-up message to show the demo playtime! this time i had two demos with different playtimes, so for people who preferred longer/shorter playtimes they could choose the one they wanted

• (unrelated) i talked a lot about itch.io

  • i release my games on a platform called itch.io, but it's more well-known overseas & not very known in japan... but it's a reeeeally nice site to use & i hope more people find out about ith ere! so i talked a lot about itch.io this time.

  • (if you want to try using itch.io but feel it's too confusing, please feel free to just dm me or message me on discord or something... i am very grateful to itch.io as a game platform... i want more people to use it...)

things i want to work more on

• had some stuff sold out

  • some merch sold out in the afternoon...

  • normally i just sell on booth (for within japan) & ko-fi (for outside japan), but usually only people who already know what i'm making will go look at those pages, while a lot of different people come by at events. by not having enough merch prepared, i lose the chance to show those people the stuff i'm making...

  • next time i want to think more about how much merch i want to bring

• using both non-cash & cash makes it hard to see how much i've sold

  • normally i keep track of sales on a small notebook, but since i wrote both non-cash sales & cash sales in the same notebook, it was hard for me to calculate how much was actually sold. square sends money with their fee taken off on the next business day, so i couldn't just tally up the numbers in the notebook to say how much was sold right away.

  • next time i think i'll use a different colour pen for non-cash payments so i can keep track better (or try using square's app to keep track of all sales since it's possible to log cash payments on it too)

how to sell stuff at events more for demoing

i can't say that i'm particularly good at selling merch at events for demoing games, but i generally make enough to cover my fees for attending at least.

for events like comitia where selling is the main point, most everyone there is there to buy stuff, but for events that are for playing game demos, a lot of people just go to play games & don't really think about spending money. tokyo game dungeon lets people sell merch, but many booths only have game demos, so many attendees don't actually plan on spending money when they go.

that means that if you want to sell merch, you have to make it very clear that you even have merch at all first! & after that there's the hurdle of actually trying to sell.

stuff i tried to do...

1. put merch front & centre!!!!!!!! make sure anyone who walks past the table will see it & go "oh yeah that person's selling stufF"

2. let people who played my game demo that i'm also selling game stuff

3. show samples of merch to people who look interested

to be honest, for somebody who's super socially inept, 2 & 3 are very hard to do!!! after every event i go to my brain is much & i'm pretty much down for 1-2 weeks. but doing this really does have an effect...

everyone who comes to an indie/doujin game event is there because they like indie/doujin games, but they won't pick up your merch if they don't even know you have any!

(also there are socially inept people like me... sometimes i'll see a table with merch that i'm interested in but then since the person at the table doesn't say anything about it i'm not sure if i can ask about it so i'll just walk away & not buy anything... but if the person at the table says anything at all i'll feel like i have permission to buy stuff...)

i want the stuff i make to reach people who are interested in so i want the same for other people too - i wrote this hoping it might help...!

next event is...

undetermined as of now!

currently i'm busy with my game dev so i might not go to events for a while! (if i go to too many events, i don't have time to make games...)

but i'll be releasing stuff as usual on itch.io & also putting stock for physical merch on booth as it comes along, so i hope you'll keep an eye out!

until next time~