RouteVN at BAGFest

We just wrapped up two days at BAGFest.

BAGFest brought together two communities: board game fans and book enthusiasts. The organisers were also open to adjacent activities, which made room for RouteVN and Visual Novels.

This was the first BAGFest, and it drew around 1,200 attendees over two days, with nearly 40 exhibitor booths. Overall, it was a relaxed and pleasant event.

This was the first time I set up a proper booth. I had to prepare several things:

• A black tablecloth. I got one much bigger than the usual booth table size because I wanted to reuse it for both large and small tables. For smaller tables, it has to be folded many times, which can be troublesome if it is not done properly.
• A logo table runner.
• Sign holders.
• A monitor stand from home.
• Laminated paper. I actually wanted glossy paper, but I got the terminology wrong and had the printed pages laminated instead. It worked well for display quality, but it was more expensive.

Setting up the booth took around 30 minutes. Most of that time was spent figuring out how to fold the extra-large tablecloth.

I did forget to print out the payment QR code. It was not a big issue because I could show the QR code on my phone to people who wanted to pay.

The booth unfortunately did not have a power outlet, so I had to hope that the laptops would last long enough. Luckily, they lasted until the end. The event ran from 10:00 to 19:00, and the laptops had just enough battery. I used a phone power bank to charge the tablet.

In the end, the setup was good enough, and it all worked out.

One minor mistake I noticed was that I printed the catalogue with the event name and booth number. For the next event, I plan to cover that part with black tape so I can reuse the same catalogue.

I expect to have more merchandise in the future, so the catalogue will need to be updated eventually anyway.

I also saw that many other exhibitors had 2m-tall stands. I might get one of those for larger events once I am more confident about what should go on it.

@routevn

One thing that surprised me was how many attendees had already tried to make a Visual Novel.

It felt like almost everyone had attempted to use Ren'Py at some point. No matter how I introduced RouteVN, the question people always asked was: "How is this different from Ren'Py?" I have an answer for this in the website FAQ, and I repeated it to the people who asked.

People understood the difference quickly once I gave a short demo and showed how to write lines, change backgrounds, add choices, and build a small scene.

One interesting thing the organisers did was a stamp system. Attendees could get rewards by collecting all the stamps.

At our booth, attendees could get a stamp either by trying RouteVN Creator or by reading one of our Visual Novels.

For the people who tried RouteVN Creator, I had them write a few sentences to continue a story.

Below are some screenshots of the stories they made:

Seeing how users picked up the application in a few minutes and where they ran into difficulty gave me more insight into what works well and what can be improved.

There was one user who really got hooked and spent around 20 minutes creating a story with RouteVN.

Thanks also to everyone who bought merch!

The other way to get a stamp was to spend a couple of minutes reading Two Straws or DiaLune. A few more serious readers sat down for more than 10 minutes to read the Visual Novels.

It was also great to have the artists at the booth. @bunnibambiiart was there on Saturday, and @sqewree was there on Sunday.

It must be interesting to see people read your Visual Novel in front of you. You can see how they react and how they make choices. Some of the readers also left useful feedback.

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Talking to exhibitors and attendees gave me more ideas for RouteVN use cases:

• Make a short Visual Novel to explain the rules of a board game.
• Make a short Visual Novel as promo or marketing material for physical books.
• Use RouteVN as a quick prototyping tool for narrative design professionals and schools, using a template project that contains hundreds of placeholder assets.
• Build a point-and-click map that shows booth details for exhibition events like BAGFest.

The video below shows an idea for using RouteVN to create an exhibition booth exploration system. It could help visitors explore the exhibition before the event or preserve an archive after the event.

Feel free to reach out if you need something like this.

Here are a few unexpected funny moments from the event:

• One bookstore shared that its best-selling genre was BL books. After hearing that, I thought maybe RouteVN was in the right place after all.
• One attendee said he saw that RouteVN was coming to this event from a Reddit post. I told him there are about three weekly visitors on r/routevn, so he must be one of those three.
• One attendee told @bunnibambiiart that he was not into female characters. @bunnibambiiart answered that she actually has a VN with guy characters. And she does, for real.

Thanks again to BAGFest, Sing Lit Station, and Origame for organising the event, and to Singapore Chinese Cultural Centre for the wonderful venue.

We might be there again next year!