In what feels like a truly spectacular whirlwind, Akupara Games announced its attendance to the Indie Megabooth at PAX East 2020 on February 11th. For several weeks before and since, we’ve been consumed by it. What are we presenting? How many machines? Where are we going to find the hardware? What kind of configuration are we going to set up? How are we going to field press? What are we going to eat? I can assure you that from the day we committed to attending, we have been consumed with questions exactly like these in every meeting and at every opportunity. But the one question I’m going to focus on today might be the most important for any indie with a ten by ten ready to go to one of the biggest conventions in gaming: How do you demo a game?

In a nice coincidence, this year’s Akupara presence at PAX East provides an exemplary answer, one that I’m intimately equipped to give now that the four day cyclone is just behind me. At PAX, we featured two games, Gone Viral for the PC and Relic Hunters Zero: Remix for the Switch. Each demanded a different style of demo, which for the purposes of simplicity I’ll name “Hands-On” and “Hands-Off.” With the former, a member of your team is parked with a player, guiding them through the experience moment by moment, hopping in every thirty seconds or so to break down a specific mechanic, offer a little advice, answer questions and generally provide a guiding hand through the experience such that someone walking up on the show floor and playing something brand new doesn’t hit an obstacle that encourages them to leave. With the latter, though, you hang back. You trust the game to guide the players, because it’s intuitive or straightforward, you created a strong tutorial experience or some combination of the two. If someone has questions, you take the time to answer and you give them a dense onboarding process. You’ll give them answers both to the problems they can see now and the problems they’ll have ten minutes from now. Hopefully, when they complete the demo in one fashion or another, they’ll leave with a positive experience because you didn’t crowd them and you weren’t overbearing. You let the engagement of the game sell itself.

As a roguelike brawler with complex mechanics and a deep library of different items and mutations to earn, Gone Viral should be a nightmare for the convention floor. Players are picking up items like the bubble wand or the rocket launcher which drastically change the playstyle of their combat. They’re earning mutations from a pool of dozens, each of them offering unique mechanics in and of themselves as well as passive bonuses and penalties to the basic stats of the game. Moreover, the underlying mechanics of the title are thick with complexities only discovered by players on their hundredth run. All of this is intentional, it is a deep, complex game demanding depth and complexity from its playerbase. When members of the Gone Viral discord brag about their playtime in the beta, they are doing so because it is a game that always has something more, something deeper to uncover. But in a convention setting, when players have a short tutorial and a single run to get aclimated and that’s it? For many it would be daunting. I say “would be” because with the hands on demo run by Skullbot Games and Akupara, we were able to get dozens of players through their first run with a grin on their face.

The Hands-On demo wants you to pace yourself, but be vocal. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and you have all the time in the world to dole out nuggets of wisdom when they’re appropriate. First, in the tutorial, it’s the controls. Each weapon has a different right and left bumper mode, typically melee and ranged. Carnage is the basic currency of the game and as you earn carnage, you’ll earn fans, which will in turn earn you items, mutations, health and other resources to help you progress. Your fans have different moods and attitudes. Some of them want you to be wacky, others want you to be quick, still more want you to slaughter absolutely everything with as much brutality as possible. Keep your fans happy and they’ll reward you. Get on their bad side and, well… you might want to expect a lot of bombs to drop sometime soon. Breaking all of this down to its component parts and slowly showing your demo player each one is the essence of the Hands-On demo and was absolutely a requirement of the game for the convention floor. When players only have a single run to feel out the experience, you can’t afford for them to get killed in the second room because they couldn’t figure out what was killing them.

At the same time, you don’t want to be too reactive to the choices of the players. Sometimes, you want to clue them in on how best to handle threats to come rather than explain those threats when they arrive. An integral part of our Gone Viral demo was a short, concise breakdown of the weapon damage rules. We call it “Pinball Combat.” When you strike an enemy, that enemy then takes one instance of weapon damage. If that enemy hits another solid object, it takes a second instance of weapon damage. If that solid object is another enemy, it will also take an instance of weapon damage from the collision. Part of mastering the game is mastering pinball combat, where you’re using one strike with your shock sword to deliver damage to two, three, four enemies all at once! Offering that to players in your demo upfront helps them prepare and set goals for themselves. It’s no longer “Swing my sword until everything in this room dies,” which is a fair, if basic strategy. Now, it becomes “how can I hit this enemy into that group of enemies and take them all out in one, fell swoop?” In other words, the Hands-On demo allows you to help steer players on the convention floor away from peril as well as give them skills, tactics and strategies to master!

And if all that’s the case, you might be saying, why would you ever choose to demo a game Hands-Off? Wouldn’t it make sense, given the manpower and resources, to fasten a guiding light to every player’s experience? Surely, every game has something to offer that’s deep and complex, otherwise your game wouldn’t be compelling enough to hold players for the long run in any case!

Relic Hunters Zero: Remix combines the twin-stick shooter’s tight gunplay and colorful characters with the accessibility and portability of the Switch. Moreover, it brings two player local co-op to the title and there was no feature that we wanted to show off more than Remix as a co-op experience. If long-standing fans came to the booth, co-op immediately snatched their attention. They’d played Relic Hunters for weeks, months, even years, but never had they experienced it with a good friend by their side. On the other hand, if new players stopped by, it was much easier to invite them into the experience. Compared to most of the other booths in our immediate vicinity, Relic Hunters was the only option that would allow two players to experience the game simultaneously. And whether that was two friends, a father and son or even two single riders who’d never met before, that’s an experience that you don’t want to shove yourself in the middle of.

When a game is intuitive, when it isn’t too difficult, and especially when you want a group of people to experience it together, you’ll want to be Hands-Off with your demo. When a member of your team hovers between a pair, chiming in every minute or so to give a little direction or advice, you demand attention and shut off conversation. You are the teacher and they are the students, so they’d better shut up and listen. If you’re running a game like Relic Hunters Hands-On, this means that the conversation constantly shifts out from under your players which creates an ultimately negative experience. In many situations, one player would figure something out and share it with his compatriot, so the insight you’d be offering would be moot in either case!

On top of that, Relic Hunters Zero: Remix is a game for all ages! Many of our players were parents coming with children as young as six to come play the game and these kids were some of our most enthusiastic players! The game certainly has its depth and complexity, like Gone Viral, and is something that millions of players have enjoyed deep runs in. But when you’re setting the game to beginner and letting players run wild with everything unlocked, it’s not incredibly different for them to figure out how to defeat wave upon wave of enemies.

One feature to the Hands-Off demo that I don’t want to leave out, though, is how dense your initial explanation has to be. For Relic Hunters, we needed to give an overview of each of the seven characters, go in depth on the two different characters that the players chose, run them through the tutorial to learn the controls, outfit them with weapons and relics before finally turning them loose to blitz through Ducans. That process needed to be quick enough that players could get into the game and start having fun, but it also needed to be light enough that they didn’t become overwhelmed as so much was thrown at them. My pitches tended to last between two and five minutes before players got into the gameplay and took control of their own gameplay, depending on how concise I could be, how many questions got asked, and how long it took players to acclimate to the controls. Those that had played titles like Enter the Gungeon implicitly understood the controls, for instance, but others needed a walkthrough of each of the buttons necesssary to end the Ducan threat. Children especially required a unique pitch all their own, since few of them had the base understanding of a twin-stick roguelite experience that my default pitch would otherwise rely upon.

The truth is, the needs of your game will need to be answered in how you demo them and not every type of experience will be appropriate for every strategy. For emotional, narrative driven experiences like Mutazione or Whispering Willows, for instance, Hands Off is probably correct to protect the player’s immersion in the world. For deeply technical games with understated mechanics like Etherborn, Hands On might be the right approach to make sure players can get through the experience without frustration. Either way, the demos we put up for two very different games at PAX East 2020 were incredibly successful because of all those meetings, all that planning, and having a good strategy to helping players get the most out of your demo experience.

If you’d like to chat a little more about Hands-On and Hands-Off demos, please feel free to reach out on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or Discord! We hope everyone had a great PAX East and can’t wait to see you all at the next con!