We're just back from an amazing weekend exhibiting We'll always have Paris at AdventureX in London. It was inspiring to meet so many narrative game lovers and just generally lovely, like-minded people! We're immensely grateful to the organisers and to anyone who stopped by to chat to us and play our game. We had a ton of fun and hope to do it all again in the future.

As it was our first time exhibiting our work at an in-person event, we thought we'd share a few things we learned about exhibiting a game.

Things we're glad we did:

• Brought a screen Clearly this is not always possible if you are travelling, and some events will provide their own display set-ups, but using a screen rather than a laptop enhanced the players' experience, and freed up our personal laptops during the event
• Printed bookmarks to hand out: Everyone likes a freebie! We were often busy talking to people, so having something to hand out was an easy way to hand out our details, even if we were short on time
• Stayed hydrated: It turns out talking all day is tiring. Water and coffee kept us going!

Learnings for next time:

• Have an easy way to restart the game Ideally, when a player is done, we can press a button and it is ready for the next person. Manually exiting to menu and starting a new game every time was cumbersome, and chained us to our table at all times. Also, we had not tested our build for multiple playthroughs without rebooting. We found out that this was causing some lag issues which we could have avoided if we had tested the show build specifically in the way it would be used
• Limit demo length We'll always have Paris is a short game meant to be played in one session, so we allowed players to play through if they wished. Certainly if we had a longer game, we would want the demo to run through a time-limited loop to allow as many players to try it out as possible
• Attract mode Most of the studios around us had a system in the game so that if it was left for some time at the title screen it would jump to an Attract mode, and play itself. It looked great, and we would do that in the future
• Pull up banners Most exhibitors used pull up banners, which have the advantage of being freestanding and therefore do not need to be secured to a wall. We managed to forget to bring pins to attach our poster, which led to a mad scramble in the rain around the shops in Greenwich, minutes before the event started. Best avoided! Our friends and neighbouring exhibitors from Galdra Studios had a beautiful backlit poster to showcase their work, which we thought was a real show-stopper. Digital art is often best displayed on a lit screen as opposed to print, so definitely worth investing in a backlit option if budget allows