Last weekend (29th and 30th of June) the Supanova Pop Culture Expo came to Perth.

Anthony Sweet from Handwritten Games had booked himself a table on the Artists’ Alley, but his table had more space than he had stuff to show off. So he put out a call to see if any other local game developers would like to join him for one of the two days. I figured it’d be fun to show Zombie Outbreak Simulator for iOS, so I said I’d come along on the Saturday.

I hastily printed out an A2 (16 x 23 in) poster, and a hundred A6 (4 x 6 in) flyers.

I took my mac to play an endless loop of an iZOS promo video, two iPads to demo iZOS on, and set myself up on the end of Anthony’s table:

And then it was on! I must have said “It’s a zombie simulator set on Google Maps, you can change the outbreak settings like number of zombies, number of civs, zombie speed, then watch the outbreak unfold, or drop some bombs on them” several hundred times :)

The expo was open from 10am to 6pm – I’d given away my hundred flyers by 2pm, only half-way through! After that I had to ask people to take a photo of my last remaining flyer, or I suggested they Google “zombies on maps” ;)

It was a fun day, and it was interesting to see people playing the game (I noticed a few things in the UI which I should possibly change to make them more obvious). A few people even commented “oh I remember this from a while ago”, which was cool to hear!

But besides being a fun day out, I thought it might be interesting to post some figures on whether it succeeded in promoting the game. Sales take a day or two to filter through the system from Apple’s reports, but rankings are updated every hour. When I got home that night from Supanova, the Australian rankings had definitely jumped up:

So clearly some sales had been made, although from the rankings it was impossible to tell how many.

Anyway, a week later here’s how total sales look in Australia for the last month:

So there was definitely a very noticeable jump. From a previous average of about $1.50 a day it jumped to $10 on the day of Supanova, and stayed higher for a couple of days. It looks like it is now heading back to its average, but might have a few extra sales still going on.

So, total extra sales is probably about $20. This works out to about 30 sales, which is a 30% conversion rate on my 100 flyers, which seems pretty good! Thanks everyone who bought a copy! :) Given that it cost me about $55 to print the poster and flyers, it works out to a net loss overall. But it was still a fun day so it certainly wasn’t a waste of time! And as a bonus I got Raymond E Feist to autograph my copy of Magician while I was there ;)

Thanks Anthony for inviting me along! To those of you reading this, you should totally check out his Handwritten Games website :) If you’re into Mafia-themed comics, you should have a look at his Grand City comic, the first edition of which was released on the day of Supanova. Also during the lull from around 5pm onwards Anthony and I played a game of his Halfling Heist board game, which was good fun. During Supanova Anthony collected a bunch of signups for his mailing list – if you’re into halfling-themed board games (?!) you should email him and ask to be added to his mailing list, so he can let you know when it gets published later this year!

cya!
Saxon