90 pieces of art, indexing, and Kickstarter

As the light at the end of the tunnel becomes clearer, it appears that to make the book I want to make, I’m going to need art.

Lots of art. (“a Picasso or a Garfunkel!”)

I’m far enough along in the writing process that while I can clearly see that I have a lot to do, it’s a very bounded lot to do. I have setting ideas and I need to put them to paper. I have some more character classes and backgrounds to work out. I have a couple rules to finalize, but mostly they’re done. I have to migrate a few things that my first-round playtesters have brought up (like variant shield sizes and more-detailed rules for relative strength of creatures) into the alternate rules appendix in the back of the book.

+Luke Campbell pointed out a neat alternative to Microcope that’s both free and a bit more on-point for what I want to do for the history part of the project too, called Dawn of Worlds (that link is a direct download, not a landing page – fair warning).

So now I need to start thinking about money. Because for a book that will likely be 200-250 pages when done, sourcing full-color artwork (plus some monochrome) is going to be expensive. So while I’m thinking about budgeting, I started thinking about where other Kickstarters can and have gone wrong. I’ve got a good source for that in +Erik Tenkar, of course, who has kept track of enough kickstarters that he can probably give me a good list of “don’t do X” behavior.

One thing I think I know to avoid is the promise of “goodies” like custom dice or T-shirts. I may well eventually do that, but I think that my first crowd-funding option will be simple. Judge interest, establish a funding base for a company and secure the right IP for what I want to do, and give me the right budgetary outlook so I can look at printing the books. Lulu is clearly an option, but I have to imagine that a full-on printing house will do it for less money, which helps everyone. My (hopefully existent) audience, because a lower price offering will be under more people’s casual spending threshold, and me, because I can still ensure that a profit is made from this, even if it’s a low one. But with nigh-on 100 pieces of artwork needed to fit the bill for the kind of game I want to make, that’s looking like a near five-figure art budget.

I do OK in my day job, but not so much that I can just shell that out casually on my own hook. Well, unless my job lays me off and they give me “a package,” but that opens up an obvious other can of worms. As the old joke goes, the best way to make a small fortune in the games publishing industry seems to be to start with a far larger fortune . . . 

The other thing that I will need to look at is things like indexing. While a good index seems to provoke a satisfied nod from the buying/gaming public, a bad one brings out packs of deinonychuses. Hungry ones. And deservedly so, because nothing is more frustrating than having to look up a rule, checking the index, and then spending the next five or ten minutes of game time bouncing from place to place and just not finding what you know is there somewhere.

I’ve got a good partner in layout, and his preliminary efforts have been very good. We’ve got a suitable first-round cover that I think can be improved but probably doesn’t need to be. 

So I’m kicking off a game, run by me and with as many of my first-round playtesters as possible. The rules aren’t “frozen,” but at this point we’ll be playing the existing 130,000-word draft as-is, with notes on rules changes only impacting the play of the game if the entire table says so, because the current draft is 6.5.7, and the players deserve a non-shifting set of expectations to play in.

But it’ll let me see what the team wants to do. Do they want to hang out and adventure in town? Guess I need a town. And residents. Try and make it through the early levels using the town or nearby fort as a base of operations? That seems reasonable, and so I’ll need maps, bad guys, and a few areas of play. What about if they want to either bring on hirelings or, perhaps, become hirelings themselves? I’ll need some of both in the NPC chapter, then. 

I’m even tempted to break that into two games, running every two weeks interleaved, so that I can see what more than one party will do.

Then, as things get fleshed out, eventually I’ll want to let other people take what can only be described as a beta release and play it without my help or direct consultation. That will probably coincide – or even be part of – the Kickstarter process, where either heavy contributors, the first N contributors, or some combination of both become my broader playtest pool. I won’t be able to get 100,000 playtesters like Fifth Edition, I suspect (and if I do . . . gulp), but a few dozen to even as many as 100 would be spectacular. 

But putting my day job skills to use, the process/project will go according to a definite schedule that I expect to hit, with beta copies, art, layout, and final copies and printing and delivery like clockwork, because project management is what I do for a living, as a manager of $5M capital equipment design and build, process transfer and troubleshooting. I’m not afraid to ask for help and advice (and if you get the feeling that this post is doing exactly that in places, you’re not wrong) from a wide variety of people, and I expect to act on that advice. 

So buckle up, because this is going to be a wild ride.