Salute 2019 - The Day

2014 - contributed to a Salute game.

2016 - co-designed and contributed to a game on the Hasslefree table with the great guys at Random Platypus.

2017 - designed and built a game of my own on the Hasslefree table.

2019 - designed and built a game of my own on my table.

So this could be anywhere between my fourth and first Salute game, but for very many reasons it certainly feels like the start.

I'll go into the game itself (Third Person Shooter) and the build in future posts, but just to get started - and while it's fresh in the mind - I wanted to cover the event itself. I'm writing this as notes to myself, but also for the benefit of anyone who might like to run their own game one day. (I hope you're reading this!)

Friday

Drove up the previous day, fighting one of those nebulous M25 delays but arrived in time to be of limited help to the Hasslefree lot setting up stall. For anyone who hasn't seen the behind the scenes, well it's a giant hangar full of diesel fumes:

Yay for confined spaces.

And that's all. Kicked out at 4pm, over to the hotel with the HF and RP guys and god damn I am bored of the Travelodge menu.

Saturday

Awful travelodge breakfast (why were there no forks?), wristband on, checked out of hotel, hiking boots on for comfort and into hall by eight.

Lesson #1: Always have a plan. I did not have a plan. Modular layout right? Shrug. Well that took me an hour or so to get a functional layout. In my defence, I was supposed to have a couple more pieces than I did but rain stopped play.

9.30am til 9.59am - Tearing around the stands doing my shopping as best as possible.

Lesson #2 (I actually knew this from prior experience but it's important for any of you who are looking to do this in future): Nobody at all plays games before they've done shopping. Hall opens at 10am and you are going to be bored and looking on pathetically at potential punters for at least an hour. This means you may as well get your shopping in now (and most stalls are ready to sell by 9 so it's a nice fringe benefit to be able to guarantee you get stuff before it runs out of stock).

Lots of people to talk to about the board, lots of photo's taken which I hope to find somehow. I think I talked to Big Lee of the blog (?) about the game itself for 2 mins or so on video.

Lesson #3: sell yourself! I really wasn't prepared to talk about the game and actually sell the wares when asked questions. Ridiculous I know, but I was just so into the execution I didn't think about the pitch. I should have had a board of some kind up on the table explaining what it was and I should have had business cards out (not that I had anything to link to but I do now!) and I should have been better at promoting. Lesson very much learned, and I will try to be less of a bumbling idiot next time.

11.15 am - first game! A friendly solo traveller got talking about the game at the same time as a couple of Dad's and their sons turned up lookign interested. Do you fancy a game? You do? Awesome. The game itself was designed to be very very simple, and it worked - the kids got it readily and it was great to see them conniving and scheming and doing ridiculous stuff to kill their dad's off, and one of them was my first winner.

Lesson #4: always have prizes to hand out! (sorry kid, I didn't prepare enough)

Sometime o'clock (I'd already lost track) - game two, another two Dad's and their kids - one kid was a bit younger so his Dad and him paired up, which left the other Dad and his daughter in a three player game. What's the aim of the game? To kill your opponents repeatedly. Even my Dad? Yep. <Grins.> Turns out the layout really wanted four players but I was able to spawn things and move the teleports around to support it and daughter slaughtered the table 3-0-0. I feel like I should have put more into this one, as they barely got started before it finished but I hope you had fun guys.

Lunch o'clock ish - I'm pretty drained now. The hall gets much quieter around lunch and the punters dry up a bit for obvious reasons. I knew that from before so I took the opportunity to drink and eat...

Lesson #5: Bring infinite water bottles, you can never have enough.

And I took the opportunity to go buy a Deep Cut Studio mat. Sadly they'd run out of one design I wanted, but I got something. Apparently I did this at the same time Mel the Terrain tutor went past the table so that was less good. It feels kind of crap to stay at the table the whole day in case you miss a blogger or, y'know, one of the competition judges, but shrug.

2pm ish (I know cause of the photo timestamp) - game three with a group of really friendly guys from some club who I'd actually run a game for in 2017. I know one of you is a Nigel and one is a James, if that's you please reach out guys :) They got right into it again and proceeded to kill each other meaningfully and with spirit with one of them making a late run literally tearing around the board with a chainsaw so they ended up in a next kill wins situation where all four of them managed to be in the exact same board space punching each other to death for minimal damage. Comedy gold. It's the reason I put on games.

3pm I guess - I separately talked about the boards and the bits sourced and construction details to what I assume were a couple of LAF'ers who of course I did not get names from. Australian guy and other guy :) Whoever you were it was great talking to you.

Lesson #6: Introduce yourself you idiot. You don't know what connections you missed.

3.30pm ish - game four with a group of three guys and Cait Sidhe from Random Platypus who had helped me with the minis. A fun group but seemed to enjoy racing clockwise around the board and utterly refusing to fight each other despite my pleas for violence. Eventually I started spewing out quad damage and chainsaw spawns and they reached a consensus point of tooling up and then finally the chaos. Second big comedy moment, player one Lagged player two who Lagged player three in response who Lagged player one in response, allowing player four to happily drop a grenade amongst them and the explosive barrels they were stood next to.

Followed shortly by comedy moment number three where finally someone played out the Keyboard Mash card to gain the winning kill.

And that's it. 4.30 and everyone is leaving. Your game is only good for display photos now. Pack up, try and beat the car park expiry, and back to the joys of the M25 with a sketchy burger king at some services en route.

I didn't win any prize (I had some faint daydream hope I might have had a shot at the innovation prize), I didn't even get a mug or the event mini, and I only got half the stuff I'd planned to buy. Despite that and despite the scorn some pour on the salute games I had a good time and for the first time I felt like I'd achieved what I set out to do - give some people a fun time. I have every intention of being back for 2020 and I hope SLW give me the opportunity. I have high aims.

Thank you punters - see you next year?