Engineering an Event
For the club’s first Game Fest, I don’t think we did that bad. Some things could have gone better, yes, but ultimately, we did good enough on most of our event work. For an almost 7-hour event, most things went smoothly and efficiently. The only major exception being the Blue Room’s Tournament. I would have to say the event was a success and I was personally happy with the results.
Set up for the event was much simpler than I predicted. The first classroom, for the Blue Room took about 20 minutes to clear the desks to the side and the cord and projector set up only took an hour. By 2:15 we were able to get the other classroom open for the Red Room and that set up was even quicker thanks to some of my personal friends assisting the set-up crew with moving stuff. By 2:55 we had the rooms completely set up and ready to go. So, as a note for the future, at least two hours set up time will be needed for large spaces or classrooms with a lot of stuff. I compiled a total of two hours’ worth of audio to put on loop in both the Red and Blue rooms. For the Red room I used the jazz soundtrack from Persona 5 and for the Blue room I used a variety of tracks from the synthwave genre to get a video gamey kind of sound. I had spent two days compiling all of this music, sorting through it and editing all of it to have reasonable volumes and logical cut off points.
During the event my room, the Matrix room, didn’t really have guests enter. So, it ended up becoming a sort of staff room where we organized material and plans. Because of this, me and my room partner, Keyshawn, ended up becoming assistants or managers of the other rooms. For the event I often went from room to room, ensuring everything was okay and settling any problems I encountered.
I managed to get flyers from Clegg Ivey from Savannah’s Chromatic Dragon to provide flyers and I also contacted Morning Star Games in Savannah for the same purpose, however they did not respond back to me. Being among the planning committee from the Exhibition project, I kind of took on a similar role for this project as well for this event. During the event I helped organized placement of materials in both the Red and Blue rooms while Keyshawn organized the Matrix room. This was a very fun event and I would love to come back and do the planning and hosting for this event again.
GameFest Retrospective
For anyone interested, here is an additional writing on the GameFest, listing out exactly what I've done.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/13oy1ujAUOnFRjI3kLEIp3Ps9ducUzW7g/view?usp=sharing