Fantastic Arcade: Fun Size Edition! is an indie video game festival that took place last weekend on October 26th, 2024. I showed no signal there and it is the last event this year I plan to be at. There's only one event left -- Toronto Games Fest, which is happening in a little over a week as of this writing -- but I won't be there. Instead, the artist Tanuki will be there.
It's been a long time since Fantastic Arcade has been held. The last Fantastic Arcade event, Fantastic Arcade Retro(spective), was held before the pandemic on November 16th, 2019 (although it was just a re-run of games previously shown at Fantastic Arcade). To me, Fantastic Arcade: Fun Size Edition! is the first time that an actual Fantastic Arcade event has been put on by its new owner, the Museum of Human Achievement.
There were between one and two dozen other developers tabling at the event in the Cafetorium of the Baker Center. At the end of the event, since the Baker Center was previously a school, there was a small graduation-themed event where all of the developers received a certificate award for participating and two awards for "Most Fantastic" and "Audience Choice" were given out. This year, the game TrashCan Dreams won both awards.
plays
During the event, I received 33 plays. This was quite an achievement, as this was significantly more than the single-day records of 25 plays at 2D Con and 18 plays at San Japan despite having a much smaller attendance. I would say this is due to the fact that Fantastic arcade is specifically designed for indie games, and it shows in the engagement from attendees.
The player count was even about half of the average number of unique players per day from Steam Next Fest, which was 62. Half! Imagine that, a local event having about half as much traffic as the biggest digital distribution platform (which is practically a monopoly) in the world. Not to mention just the physical limitations of the fact that I only had two stations where people could sit down and play the game. Well, granted, I could have had much better performance at Next Fest on the order of magnitudes if I was better at marketing.
This was also the first time I tried to keep track of how far along players got as they played:
Event
Count
Started playing
33
Turned on room lights
28
Entered the reactor room
10
Turned on the reactor
8
Entered the elevator chamber
1
Unfortunately, no one played long enough to see the cinematic. The demo is simply too long -- I'll have to make a shorter demo for my next game.
It was pretty hard to keep track of how far players get, though it certainly did help me stay engaged during the day. I really ought to implement a system into my game to automatically record how far people get... maybe I'll do that for the next game too!
Wishlist activity was also quite good, with 14 wishlists on the day of the event:
Sa
Su
Mo
Tu
We
Th
Fr
14
1
3
4
1
3
2
Although Steam Next Fest just ended the previous weekend, I think this is a pretty good read on the number of wishlists from the event, as most of the wishlist activity appeared to die down by the time of the event.
conclusion
I also handed out copies of Gender Dysphoria for free, mostly because I want to get rid of them. I'm not sure I would have had the permission to sell them even if I wanted to. However, one person did donate $10 for one, which I was surprised and happy to see.
This event went remarkably well. The fact that I got 33 plays in one day was, well, pretty _fantastic_. I'm also happy to see that the event is finally back and I enjoyed meeting some of the other developers who had flown in from out of state.
As an aside, I also ran into more problems at the event with powering the portable monitor using the official Steam Deck Dock. It appears that the USB power supply from the Steam Deck Dock isn't as stable as it needs to be for my portable monitor. It would occasionally lose power and connection to the Steam Deck, requiring a quite involved process to reconnect it. Thankfully, I still had an alternate power source in the form of a backup battery with USB ports, so I was able to give it an alternate power source. This fixed the issues.
Unfortunately, the event was incredibly noisy. The Cafetorium in the Baker Center is almost entirely hard surfaces, so it was almost impossible for me to distinguish anything anyone was saying, so I didn't get to collect very interesting feedback like I was able to do at 2D Con. For most of the day, people would play, make hand signs at me when they were done while quickly thanking me, and depart on their way to check out more games. It was pretty consistently loud throughout the entire event -- in addition to people talking, they broadcasted the talks that were happening in a different room and competitions (replete with commentary) were taking place on the main stage.
When I got home, I was so tired from all the noise that I just laid down, watched the show _Archer_, and went to sleep. I would still do it again though; great event.