Hasty

I've spent the last week fighting with my bank.

Mano-a-telephone.

Toe-to-handset.

I lost.

Despite last week's blog about how we would pay royalties that week I'm still in limbo.

Eventually I pulled the money from PayPal, rather than pushed from the bank.

It's left the bank.

And now it's in the ether.

The bank says they have fond memories of it.

PayPal say we await it patiently.

It'll arrive in a week or two.

Where the hell is it?

The ether.

So the royalties are still pending. Until the money is in the warm embrace of my PayPal balance.

Which could be another week or two.

I can only assume someone is carrying it on foot.

In the meantime, I've been working on my third print at home roll and write again.

And the troll game.

And planning 2025.

This weekend we're going to York to spend 'Fauxmas' with Paul and his family.

There will be food and presents and games and playtesting.

And more work on the next FlickFleet campaign.

Royalties

Box of Flicks 2 was largely designed by fans of the game.

A fan contributed to Box of Flicks 1.

There was lots of fan content in the Box of Pirate Flicks too.

We make a big thing about how we credit them and pay them royalties.

Their names on the boxes.

We've been meaning to pay the last lot for a while.

It includes the last year's reprint and this year's Box of Pirate Flicks.

So it's quite a lot of money.

Things started going wrong at the beginning of the year when we ran out of FlickFleet for a few months.

So web sales tanked as we had nothing to sell.

And overheads started eating into the profit from the Pirate Flicks campaign.

Website sales were pretty slow all summer.

The pot dwindled further.

When it came time in August to ship the Pirate Flicks games to the US we had three options.

We choose the fastest.

And most expensive.

Then VAT bit us.

The quotes were excluding VAT. I forgot that.

We had to pay them, and another £1,500 in VAT.

We'd get most of that back. In early December.

We've been almost out of cash for five months.

I've had to lend the company money a couple of times to pay the bills.

We've just got the VAT back!

And had our best ever week of website sales. And another really good one.

It's time to pay the royalties!

A weight off my mind. I hate owning people money.

I've spent most of the weekend trying to sort it out. 

The transfer to PayPal was blocked by the bank as a suspect transaction.

I'm hoping I'll have the money available to pay out this evening...

Seven

This week has been bizarrely good for website sales.

Last three weeks have been within 50p of each other.

This week was more than double them!

And I’ve no idea why!

Not complaining though.

That’s eased our ongoing cashflow issues.

And it’s, in combination with the VAT rebate that’s coming shortly, means we can make some long over due payments :)

But that’s an aside.

The main focus of this week has been…

FlickFleet SEVEN.

Our seventh FlickFleet campaign.

The campaign is created.

There’s a very basic holding page.

Which already has over 100 followers!

In addition to starting work on the campaign, I’ve been reviewing the fan submissions.

Starting to shortlist them.

Playtesting is next :)

Sirens

This week has been all about sirens.

The Ancient Greek kind.

I had an idea for a Siren themed game a couple of years ago.

I wanted it to feel like Guillotine and 6 Nimmt.

Funny. Chaotic. Sweary.

I made a first version.

Tried it.

It was bad.

Made a second after chatting with Casey at work.

Better, but the cards were way off.

Then it languished for a year or two.

At Newcastle Gamers a couple of weeks ago there were six of us and that second version was the only six player game anyone had brought.

So we played it.

The cards were still way off.

So I started on a new version.

Got that ready last weekend.

Played it at work on Tuesday.

It went better.

New ideas for cards.

Made a new version Friday.

Soloed it Saturday.

Made a new version Saturday night.

Very quick turnaround.

Hopefully I can play this one at work tomorrow…

Despondent/Enthused

It’s been a weird week.

I’m still trying to get to the point where web sales cover overheads and we have a viable business that doesn’t rely on Crowdfunding to keep us afloat.

I’ve upped the ad spend, hoping to boost sales.

Now sales are just covering ad spend instead.

And with Trump on the horizon our games are about to get 20% more expensive for Americans.

That’s half of our customers.

Could have been worse: at least we don’t make them in China.

I’m feeling a bit despondent about it.

On the plus side, I finally joined Bluesky.

Come find me!

I moved from Twitter to Threads a while back.

It’s been fine.

But I missed my gaming chums.

The vast majority of the #CraftWednesday crew weren’t there.

Within hours of joining Bluesky, it felt like I’d found most of them again.

I’m feeling enthused.

I’ve found my team again.

Roots

I started computer programming when I was ten.

Both my degrees are in it.

Almost all of my day jobs have been doing it.

For the second time in my life I'm now a manager of a team of programmers.

I don't program at work any more.

I've been doing some for Eurydice Games this week though.

I had to get the books completed up to the end of October so our accountants can do our VAT return.

That included 102 Gamefound orders for Away Team Bingo.

I can download them from Gamefound as a spreadsheet.

I need to get them into our accounting software.

I can import them to it as a spreadsheet.

A different spreadsheet.

Over the last few years I've written a few programs to move orders between the various spreadsheet formats we use.

This week I've been tweaking them to support the latest changes.

And then getting those orders into the books.

Around that I've been tweaking my Sirens game.

We played it at Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday.

There were six of us, and it was the only game present that went to six players.

I knew it needed work.

So we played it.

Needs some work!

Now I have some ideas of how to work out the kinks...

YorCon

I’ve spent the weekend in the middle of nowhere.

Playing games with an awesome bunch of people.

Lots of new games.

My favourites were Lord of the Rings Duel and Space Base.

We went for a couple of walks in the countryside.

I played a couple of games of Jotunsaga.

Gaming designing in progress

With other designers.

It got really good feedback.

And spawned a bunch of new ideas.

I took a Sharpie, a pen, and some blank cards.

So I could make a new version.

And try that too.

And there’s Newcastle Playtest tomorrow.

It’s coming on nicely…