A Successful week in America

I spent most of last week in America for work, what little time I had in the UK was spent with my family and my parents who had come up for the weekend to help with the kids while I was away.

Monday I had an hour in Newcastle airport which I spent writing last week’s blog post and then an hour’s flight to Amsterdam where I was delayed for an hour and a half. I used my layover to work on the FlickFleet box illustration, starting with the smallest ship, trying to come up with a style that I though would scale up well to the larger ships. I do most of my game art as vector art (in InDesign and Illustrator) which is more forgiving as you can constantly tweak the vectors until you’re happy with them. Consequently I’m not very au fait with Photoshop - the pixel art part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite. As such I spent a large part of that time referring to Google or online tutorial videos to work out how to use the tools which are all subtly different from the other apps.

My flight was delayed and then my taxi to the office broke down, which meant that I missed the meetings I was supposed to attend on arrival, but to be honest that was a blessing as I’d been up since 10pm Sunday (US time) and been travelling for 16 hours, instead I could have a quick dinner and go straight to bed at 7pm!

I expected that, so I had booked a podcast interview with Jack Eddy of The Cardboard Herald for 2am on Tuesday (which felt like 7am to me and was 10pm for him in Alaska! We’d done the same thing on my previous trip in January and it was great to have a catch up chat covering a wide range of topics. Jack says the interview will be released in a couple of weeks, so keep an eye out for that.

When that finished at 3am I spent a few more hours on the box illustration before heading into the office. Tuesday and Wednesday were a customer meeting with dinner on Tuesday evening, but I had Wednesday evening off, so I had arranged to nip into Cambridge (just across the river from Boston, where I had lived in the winter of 2000-01). I managed to get a lift from the office into Boston with a colleague after work and on the way in we chatted and I explained I was going to a games club. When we arrived at her house she invited me in to wait for my Uber over to Cambridge and as I waited she introduced me to her husband - a gamer! We chatted about games and the club I was attending for a few minutes and then I got the Uber to Pandemonium Books in Cambridge. After a brief stroll round the store I ambled over to the games club and grabbed some dinner in a cafe next door.

The club was a spin off of Beantown Gamers, specifically comprised of people who like lighter games - what an awesome fit for Zombology (10 minutes) and FlickFleet (10-20 minutes). It was an unusually busy session with about 25 attendees so we quick split into multiple groups. We started with Crossfire a super quick social deduction game that was alright, and then since I’d posted a comment in the meetup page that I was there to demo games we played Zombology, which we had a full team of eight players for. After a couple of games we split up again but not before I’d sold a couple of the six games I’d brought with me.

A second group of six wanted to play, so we played again, this time four times, and I made a couple more sales. Then another shuffle and a final group of five, one of whom bought a copy. At that point someone wanted to play FlickFleet, but it was 10pm and I was shattered and faced a long ride back to my hotel, so I called it a night. Five sales in an evening - what a great outcome!

Thursday morning I did another early morning podcast, this time with Brian Schneider of Behind the Indies. Fortunately Brian and I were both in the same time zone, so we chatted at the much more reasonable time of 6am, which was good after a late night and continued jet lag. Brian’s podcast will apparently be available tonight!

When I reached the office I told the colleague who’d given me a lift that I’d survived the evening (we’d joked about meeting internet strangers and the associated risks!) and that I’d had a great evening and sold all but one copy. Which she promptly snapped up as a birthday gift for her husband! I went home empty-handed :-)

With the large Sale or Return stocking order I got from Travelling Man at the Expo and now this I only had 1.5 finished copies of Zombology in stock. I sold two via twitter on Friday evening, so Sunday night I had to finish the second one so I could post them both at lunchtime today. Saturday I rang round the Travelling Man stores to find out how many they'd sold so I could invoice them for the sales. They'd sold five (including two in a store that had only received their stock that week!). So June (which was looking rubbish for sales when I went to the US) ended up being my best month for sales since I finished fulfilling the pre-orders!

The Zombology stockpile is empty!

I'm now completely out of Zombology stock - so crafting is called for! I also need to finish the FlickFleet preview copies and get those in the post to give the reviewers as long as possible to form an opinion and review it ahead of our Kickstarter.

Lots Going On

After last week's Kickstarter revelation I've had a week of many different tasks.

Before I can Kickstart the game I need to get the rules finished, the ship dashboards done and do the box art. I've a rough cut of the ship dashboards already, and a first stab at the rules that are currently being blind playtested in three separate countries. The box is very much a rough sketch though.

This week, during the hours of 5-6:30 I've taken The Baby downstairs a couple of times to give The Wife a bit more sleep. A couple of times The Baby has gone back to sleep so I've had an hour or so sat on the sofa in the dark with my iPad. I bought the Procreate drawing app and I've been having a play with that to flesh out the box art. One of its coolest features is that it automatically builds a time-lapse video of your work. It's so cool I've created an Instagram account to share it!

Started sketching out a #FlickFleet box illustration

A post shared by Jackson Pope (@jacksonpopeeg) on Apr 11, 2018 at 11:44am PDT

I'm not an artist by any stretch of the imagination (to the chagrin of my father who was an art teacher for nearly 35 years), but one of the ways I'll keep costs down on the hand-made run of FlickFleet is by doing the art myself (possible stretch goal if it's wildly successful: professional art! By an actual artist!). Using an app like Procreate that lets me tweak things as I go is definitely my best chance of coming up with something acceptable. I've invested in an Apple Pencil to allow me to do the finer work (my large hands aren't designed for fingertip art on a tablet!). I've also taken to watching/listening to Procreate tutorials while washing up! Now that's multi-tasking!

In addition to this early morning shift I've been using my lunch breaks at work to revisit my website. It was a pretty hurried effort last autumn while simultaneously trying to get Zombology off the ground and when I showed it to my friend Wilka he described it as 'retro', which clearly meant old-fashioned and a bit rubbish. I've not had much time to work on it recently, but I've been refreshing it a bit this last week. Hopefully there'll be a refresh coming in the next week or two.

All in all, pretty busy!

Crowdsourced Art Direction!

I'm currently on holiday in Bristol, so I'm auto-posting this post that I wrote last week. Over the last couple of weeks I've started to make a more 'finished' looking set of ship dashboards for FlickFleet. These dashboards serve two purposes - they remind you what actions each ship can take and they show the status of the ship in terms of whether the shields are still up and which bits of the ship are currently damaged and inoperable. There are three types of large ship in FlickFleet - destroyers, carriers and dreadnoughts. Each has different capabilities, strengths and weaknesses. Here are the latest versions of their dashboards, I would really appreciate any feedback you have on the look, and also the clarity of information.

The destroyer - a heavily armed but flimsy gun boat

The destroyer has two shields (damaged on a 1-10 die result), 3 guns (damaged on 1-3), plus shield generator (5) and engines (6). A result of four will destroy them once their shields are down. They can be moved by flicking the rear three surfaces, as long as the engines are not damaged. They also have an engineering location that cannot be damaged that allows you to repair a damaged location.

The carrier - weak by itself, but it carries a lot of fighters and bombers

The carrier has two shields (damaged on a 1-10 die result), a gun (damaged on 1), a fighter bay (damaged on a 2 or 3) that allows you to launch a couple of fighter wings during the game, a bomber bay (4) that allows you to launch a bomber wing, plus shield generator (5) and engines (6). They can be moved by flicking the rear three surfaces, as long as the engines are not damaged. They also have an engineering location that cannot be damaged that allows you to repair a damaged location.

The dreadnought - fear its might

The destroyer has four shields (damaged on a 1-10 die result), nuclear warheads (damaged on 1), two guns (damaged on a 2 or 3), a fighter bay (damaged on a 4) that allows you to launch a couple of fighter wings during the game, plus shield generator (5) and engines (6). They can be moved by flicking the rear three surfaces, as long as the engines are not damaged. They also have an engineering location that cannot be damaged that allows you to repair a damaged location or repair the hull. In addition to the locations above, dreadnoughts also have three hull points.

How clearly do you think that information is portrayed? Do you like the look? Any thoughts or comments?

Final Zombology Art Review

My parents have been up this week, so I've had a chance to pick the brains (how appropriate!) of my dad, a retired art teacher. I've been trying to finalise the artwork for Zombology ahead of getting a proof copy done by the printers to check the colours look OK and that the lamination works on top of the new art (if there's too much ink the lamination doesn't adhere). Over the last couple of weeks I've been crowdsourcing advice on the art/graphic design, from dad, The Wife, BGG, Google+ and twitter.

First up is the box designs. I've run three polls on BGG (1, 2 and 3). In the comments of the first and second I got some other ideas and JPotter came up with something that looked like this:

Which I really liked, so I tried to mimic it (see above). I've also adopted a similar style for the back of the box:

In addition to that, I've also updated the card art (after my last attempt here which got feedback here and on Google+). I tried to incorporate all the feedback I got, reducing the number of colours, swapping the icons on the Guru, making the text bolder on the sides of the cards, getting rid of the gradient fills and generally tidying things up a bit:

What do you think? Let me know any comments you have in the next couple of days - that way I can act on them before it goes to the printer.

Feedback Wanted on New Zombology Look

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I've been working on the Zombology artwork for the next version I'm making. The picture below shows the art for the version I released in November 2015 as part of NaGa DeMon. Along the top are an example of each of the therapy cards (one of each number and suit) and along the bottom are the Guru, Pay Rise, Overrun, Army Perimeter cards and the back images for the two decks:

There were a few things I wanted to improve for the next version. The art was pretty rushed for the NaGa DeMon version - it was essentially prototype art, compounded by the fact that I'm not actually a very good artist and I couldn't afford to hire one either. In particular I was unhappy with the Army Perimeter card and although I quite liked the scientist icon on the back of the Epidemic cards, it was not in keeping with the rest of the art.

In addition, a few things came up during testing:

• the Homeopathy background was a bit too dark, 
• the Guru cards were too similar to the corresponding therapy cards, 
• it was easy to confuse the Pay Rise and Overrun cards,
• the Psychotherapy suit was confusing as it was the only real therapy included.

To address these issues, I've spent a decent chunk of time over the last few weeks trying to improve the art to fix these problems and just give it a better look:

I'd really appreciate any feedback on the new versions. Are they better or have I made things worse? Anything specific you like or don't like?

Zombology Art Upgrade

So I'm one week into my paternity leave and one week into parenting a newborn (again). This week has been school holidays in the UK, so The Eldest (nearly five!) has been off school all week and we've had my parents here for the week to help with the new baby (and childcare during the birthing hospital visit).

As you can imagine (or if you're a parent, vaguely remember through the sleep deprived haze), we've been pretty busy, but in the evenings I've managed to snatch a few minutes to work on improving the Zombology artwork for the second limited edition.

To my mind, the priorities were:

• differentiate Pay Rises from Overruns
• improve the Army Perimeters
• and, make the Guru/scientist more in keeping with the zombie.

I started with the first two of those and this is the progress I've made so far:

Any thoughts or feedback?

Dragon Dance Art and Playtesting

I've mostly been focussed on Dragon Dance again this week. After a busy January finishing off the physical copies of Zombology it felt good to crack on with Dragon again.

I made a second version which replaced last week's hand-scribbled version on the train on Tuesday on my way down to Sheffield for my now six-monthly hospital visit. It was pretty much the same as the hand-scribbled version, with a couple of tweaks based on the games I had at Newcastle Playtest and then again with Gav in the office.

On Thursday I got to try out the new version with Amaury, who had played the 2014 version a couple of weeks ago. Unlike Gav (who preferred the new version), Amaury preferred the old one, he found the new one less strategic. In a good discussion after our three games we came up with some ideas, in particular to give the dragon more exciting options (the dragon cards are the moment are all pretty similar).

Interestingly, giving the dragon more exciting options was some of the feedback I received back in November 2014 when I was making the first few versions during NaGa DeMon. Clearly, I need to pay more attention to the feedback I'm getting.

Later in the week I had an evening to myself while The Wife was out and I started getting to grips with some artwork for the new version. With separate cards now for long and short range I can make the card backs a bit more informative, so I want the cards to represent what your opponent sees when you initially play them face down. So the short range cards are a knight's helm (see below) with the eyes peering out, and the dragon's eye up close, while the long range cards are a full view of the knight and the dragon.

Obviously this is a very early work in progress version, but I'd like any feedback you have.

In other news, I'll be in Milford, Massachussetts all of next week for work. I've set myself a goal of getting the Print on Demand version of Zombology finished in February. Thanks to being up around 6am (or slightly before) most days in the UK, I'm likely to wake very early while I'm in the US, so I reckon I can finish off the graphic design on the computer in my hotel room between the hours of 3/4 and 7am every day, so hopefully that might be a second goal successfully ticked off this year! I've not got any travel this week, so I can try to either do another version of Dragon or get a headstart on the Print on Demand Zombology one night this week.

Zombology Almost Final Art!

As I mentioned last week, things have been picking up pace over the last couple of weeks, the combination of a bit more focus and having Adobe Creative Cloud on my decent laptop (as opposed to InDesign CS3 on my prehistoric, slow laptop) have meant that I've been able to really apply myself.

Last week my trip to Manchester for work was a rare one on my own, so I took my laptop and went to work on the rules and the box art, they aren't finished, but they are definitely taking shape now. I also 'finished' the card art:

When I say finished, I mean I'm happy with it now, pending feedback that I receive from wiser minds. Now I need to get try the latest version of the rules, get some feedback from playtesters and get a test game printed by the printers I'm going to use.

There's a couple of potential printing pitfalls I might run into:

• The game box wrapper might be too stiff to wrap around the box
• The artwork may have too much ink coverage to laminate

So the next step is to try it out as if it was the final print run, but with just a single copy, so I don't blow a load of cash to find it's all wrong. I also need to get a quote for the 20 copy run, I'm expecting it to be a chunk more expensive than the 50 copy minimum I've previously been quoted (which was about £7.50 a copy), but I'm hoping I can still sell it for £9 a copy, even if I have to make a small loss - the print on demand price can include a small profit that might eventually offset the loss!

Please can you provide any feedback you have on the card art above, and anyone who fancies proof-reading or trying out the rules, you can get the current version here.

Art: Looking for Feedback

It's been another busy week, I've been in London Wed night, Thursday and Friday and I was babysitting for a friend on Tuesday. So little time at home. As a result, I chose to stay home on Saturday and miss Newcastle Gamers.

The busyness doesn't mean no progress however. I took my laptop round on Tuesday when babysitting and spent that evening finishing off the Zombie head that I showed last week:

Then (due to conditioning by The Daughter) I was expecting a couple of early starts while down in London. So I took the laptop again, and spent my mornings sat in my hotel room bed doing some more art too. I've done this (can you guess what it is yet?):

And also these:

These bacteria images are intended to be a very feint background pattern on some of the cards and the rules sheet, the next thing to do is to actually get that together.

What do you think of these? I'd appreciate any feedback you have.

Art Evolution

So I'm pretty much done with the game Zombology. The feedback from the blind playtesters was fairly critical and hence very useful. Most of them played the game 'right' (i.e. they played the rules as written and intended) but didn't follow the spirit of the game, as a result, they didn't enjoy it.

Most of my other playtesters do really enjoy it, so clearly I need to improve the rules to make it clear the 'real' way to play the game.

One of the other main criticisms was that the game was too random. They didn't like that aspect of it all. However, it's intended to be a 10-15 minute chaotic drafting game, it's meant to be random. If you don't like short chaotic games, then you are not the intended audience. I wanted it to feel a bit like 6 Nimmt! in that you've got a little bit of control, but your opponents' actions can complete scupper you. I think it has a similar vibe.

With my new plan for route to market, I want to get it out there as soon as possible, rather than radically changing the game to cater to a different audience. Before I do however, I want to improve the art, which in some places is quite nice, and in others is really quite pants. So I want to boost the art a bit before making the tiny hand-made run or uploading the print on demand files.

I've made a tiny bit of progress on that this week (I got back from holiday on Monday, was in London Tuesday and Wednesday and then went away for the weekend, so not much time available) and this week is going to be another busy one (I'm in London Wednesday night through Friday night), but I'm babysitting for friends on Tuesday, so that'll be a chance to make some decent progress, I should have three or so hours of concentrated art time.

As a little teaser of where I'm going, here's a quick look at the new Zombie:

The rest of the art of the game is quite simple and iconic (not unlike 6 Nimmt!), so I wanted to improve the current (really bad) Zombie icon and knock it up a notch. This is clearly a work in progress, but I think the direction is clear (above the nose!).

Let me know what you think...

Iconic

This week I've done nothing particularly relevant to the blog at all. This weekend (today is a Bank Holiday in the UK) we've had lots of family up for The Daughter's second birthday and we spent most of last week preparing for the visitors and the party.

So, what to talk about? I've arranged a playtest this week on Thursday with my colleagues at lunchtime, as much as anything to force me to finish off the next version of Zombology ahead of the next Newcastle Playtest session on the following Tuesday. There's a bunch of graphics stuff to do in InDesign ahead of printing that out, so that's how I hope to spend the beginning of next week. It's been several weeks (maybe even a couple of months) since I last played it at work, so there have been a few changes since my colleagues have last played it. It'll be interesting to get their feedback on the changes and see what they make of the new version.

The new version also features some artwork that I've actually got permission to use. The previous version featured a hotchpotch of random images culled from Google, which seeing as it was just for personal use, I figured was alright. But the game looked a bit of a mess and the lack of rights concerned my puritan views on copyright, so I've finally got around to sourcing some legitimate artwork. Seeing as it's all come from the same place it all looks similar too, which ties the game together nicely.

So what is this source of free art I hear you ask? www.game-icons.net. It's got over 1,300 icons that are freely available for use under Creative Commons, that you can even modify to better suit your particular project. These files are available as pngs or SVG vector art which make them easy to modify in a tool such as Adobe Illustrator (which I got as part of the InDesign Creative Suite while I was running Reiver Games for laying out and submitting art to the printers). I've tweaked almost all the art I've got from there, but without the starting point they provided I'd never have ended up with anything that looked half as cool. It's plenty good enough for prototyping, playtesting and submission to a publisher.

And Low He Was Welcomed Into The Fold

Well, my three weeks of enforced exile are over and I've been re-united with my family :-)

The last three weeks have been really weird. The house has been very dark and quiet. I've been living a bachelor lifestyle of constant gaming and basic food, I've been watching my daughter change noticeably between our video chats every few days. Aside: Anyone who tells you that we're not living in the future because cars don't fly, we don't have personal jetpacks and we don't live on the moon hasn't appreciated the full wonder that is video conferencing with your one year old offspring. One the phone she silently holds it then either hangs up or puts me on hold accidentally. Over video she gets really excited to see me and interacts with me as if I was there (pressing my nose on the screen and saying 'beep' is my favourite!).

It's been hard being away from them for so long, having to hear about the new skills she's learning second hand and knowing there's nothing I can do to help when she has a bad night or is ill. It's going to be tough to re-adjust to the bad nights and early starts after three weeks of late nights and lying in, but it'll be totally worth it and I'm glad it's finally over.

That's not to say I haven't put my exile to good use. I had to keep myself busy to distract myself from the loneliness, so I played a lot of games. I've made it to Newcastle Gamers twice (once all day!), Newcastle Playtest once, been down to see my mates Terry, Andrew and Graham in the south for a day's gaming and played a 10 hour game of Twiglet. In total, 54 games in 18 days!

Now that my family are back I'm going to have a break from gaming for a bit and concentrate on spending some quality time with them.

Having said that, I'm still working on getting another Codename: Vacuum version together, incorporating the ideas I've had over the last few weeks and at a lower priority I've got some more Zombology ideas to get together too.

In related news, I've started getting art for the NaGa DeMon competition winners' copies of Zombology from the artist :-)

NaGa DeMon 11: Entering the Final Straight

So there's just under a week to go until the end of NaGa DeMon. I've now created four different prototypes (including the first one which I didn't make available P&P, and played with five different sets of rules. All in less than a month. Next up are some changes to the scoring suggested by @pidaysock via email (that's two PIPs for you Konrad, congratulations, you've unlocked the MSc achievement!).

Determining the best treatments stays the same, but instead of each player scoring face value for the cards they've collected, they score one point per positive card and minus one point per negative card. These are reversed for cards in the least successful treatment. Because the scores will be lower and ties are more likely, there's now a tie-breaker: The player with the highest face value card in a successful treatment wins (further ties are broken by next highest card, etc.).

There's no Newcastle Playtest session this week, so I can only try it out on my lunchbreaks at work and at Games Night on Thursday, I'll let you know how it goes.

Because the game is print and play and will remain available after NaGa DeMon draws to a close at the end of November, I've been trying to think of a way to make the TGWAG prize of a signed and numbered handmade copy of the game from me more interesting. My mate Wilka has a friend who's a good artist, so I'm trying to see if he'll be interested in me paying him to do some artwork exclusively for the TGWAG winners (and me of course!). I'll let you know whether he's interested too.

Finally, if you have printed out a copy to playtest, please let me know in the comments, I'm interested to know how much interest there has been from people who aren't playing TGWAG. To make that easier, I've (hopefully) undone the change whereby you need a Google+ account to comment on the blog. That snuck in under the radar with linking my blog to my Google+ account. I don't want to force commenters to use Google+, nor restrict my commenters to only those with Google+ accounts.

Playing the Percentages

After printing out the next version of Codename: Vacuum last week, I got it to the table on Thursday lunchtime. The new version had some minor tweaks to reduce the Population strategy's dependence on capturing locations, and some changes to the Trade strategy to the same end. To reflect the new trade rules I also changed several of the advanced decks to make them fit better with the new Trade rules.

The new version was well-received by my playtesters, Chief and Dave though due to the selection of advanced decks available to us none of us chose to pursue the Trade strategy - so it's hard to say how well balanced that one is.

Despite getting no feedback here last week on the new level three art, Dave was appreciative (though Dave is very excitable, so his responses need to be calibrated to take his general excitement into consideration). Certainly I prefer it to the really crappy last version, and the new art didn't detract from the game or make it harder to comprehend.

Anyway, to the subject of this post. I've now played 60 games of Codename: Vacuum. It's predominantly been played with Chief and Dave (probably 40-odd games each), plus a bunch of other people have played it I'd imagine on average five times or less. Pretty much all the players have been close friends of mine, so any feedback I get from them is coloured by their friendship with me. If I had to grade them into three categories, I'd say that two of them really aren't fans (though apparently it's not their sort of game), one (the aforementioned excitable Dave) is a big fan, and everyone else is ambivalent. They've usually played it a few times but there's little interest in playing it again. Clearly it still needs lots of work (though in fairness, most of the ambivalents haven't played the last few versions).

I'm keen not to try to publish (either self-publishing or trying to get someone else to do it for me) unless I think it's genuinely great. I've some experience publishing games that didn't get enough people excited and the last thing I want is to be the proud owner of games mouldering in a warehouse for years again. I could make a hand-made run - I'm pretty sure I could sell one hundred copies of the game as it stands - but I want to be really proud of it, not just publish it for the sake of publishing it (I've done that already!) and spare time is precious now that I'm a father. So I need to keep working at it to change those percentages. It needs to be simpler and quicker and more fun. It needs to leave you wanting another game, and then another. It's not there yet. I need to work those percentages until most of the people who play it are big fans or hate it. Ambivalence is the worse of the three!

In other news, I've decided to make a little app for my Windows phone. It'll pick me a random selection of advanced decks for a game and I'm also thinking of making it store and explore the data I collect for a game so I can investigate how balanced the decks are by querying their popularity and how well they score. I'll need to get a few dev kit things together and then spend some time on it. It shouldn't be that hard though, it's programming in the language that I use for my day job!

Procrastination of the Highest Order

I've not made much progress on anything the last couple of weeks. The week before last ended with us all coming down with norovirus, one after the other (which for the record was awful, I can't recommend it!). This week, it's been a game of catch up as The Wife and I have tried to regain our strength while washing everything that we own, since The Daughter was sick on it all, followed by a weekend away with old friends.

Rather than putting the limited time I had to good use and re-writing the rules (which I still haven't done!), I've been fannying on doing unimportant stuff like art (which doesn't really matter for a prototype) and getting another version ready for printing (of rules that I'm not sure will work). My tenuous excuse for putting off writing the rules is that I'm still trying out a few new rules ideas, so things are in flux, but if I'm honest, it's a big job and a hard one, and I can't be arsed at the moment.

Monday was potentially a good night for Game Design, since The Wife was out at the theatre with a friend, but in the end once I'd finished cleaning up I was so knackered I just went to bed.

What little time I've had available I've put into doing a couple of things, re-doing the artwork for the level three (futuristic) cards, and getting another version ready for printing out and assembling. As I've mentioned over the last couple of weeks I've been messing with the trade strategy rules in an attempt to decouple them from needing to own lots of locations. Since I ought to be knocking up a new version this month anyway, I've taken the opportunity to take the new Trade rules I'm trying out and re-jigged all the advanced cards so that they fit with these experimental rules. I've also folded in the new artwork.

All I need to do now is get the new version printed, cut out and tested to see how it all works.

In the meantime, any feedback on the new Eclipse iPad game-inspired level three art? Old version first, with the new version below:

Artists! How does this sound?

If you've been reading my blog over the last few months you'll be keenly aware that the one thing Codename: Vacuum is missing is art. The cards have some rudimentary graphic design done, but no illustrations whatsoever.

Needs some artistic love, methinks.

The main reason behind this is that while I have limited graphic design skills, I have no art skills and at the moment my money is going on tiny clothes and nappies rather than hiring artists. Having said that, it would be great to have some art on the game before I send it out for playtesting. How do I reconcile these two positions?

I've been considering that question for a while now. I mentioned it to my Dad when he was up a few weeks ago (he's a retired art teacher and artist, though in a completely different style) and he started sketching out a few things. In addition, an old friend from junior school offered to help, but he's a professional animator and has a young family and needs to focus on earning a living not helping out a mate he's not seen in 25 years for free. So what to do?

I've had a slightly bizarre idea over the last couple of days, and I've no idea how it sounds so I'm going to run it past you guys to get some feedback before I actually try to implement it. So what's the idea I hear you ask?

I get aspiring board game artists to do it for me for free!

And there's my problem. How much of an exploitative arse do I sound about now? I'm thinking an unacceptable amount. But maybe not. I'll flesh out my idea, and then you can let me know in the comments whether I sound like an arse or not.

The problem of no art is compounded by the fact that I need a lot of it. I need:

• A card back design
• 50 location designs
• 7 location back designs
• 65 card front designs

That's an enormous job for one person, especially when I can't afford to pay them, so finding people to share out the work between would be a more realistic way to go. But I don't know many arty types, and certainly not enough to get that amount of art done for free out of personal goodwill.

Clearly, I would need to offer these generous hypothetical artists something in return for their hard work, even if it can't be real folding money. Otherwise I'd appear like an arse and I'd end up with an unenviable reputation and still no art.

So the idea I've been tossing around in my head is this:

I post on BGG a list of all the art I'm looking for and ask for aspiring board game artists to knock something up for some of those briefs for free. In return, they would get: an artist credit on the card(s) they've illustrated and a link to their portfolio in the rulebook. I'd also do artist profiles here on Creation and Play of the artists whose submitted work I most admire.

I'm hoping at some point to get Codename: Vacuum into print. If that never happens (a reasonable risk), then that would be the end of it. But if I decided to hawk it to other publishers then the artist's work and their portfolio link would go to those publishers in the setting of a real game. Alternatively, I might decide to try to KickStart it myself, in which case the artists whose work I like the best would stand a reasonable chance of getting their art into the finished game, and more importantly, I'd be paying them for it at that point (the KickStarter budget would include paying for art). If I end up publishing the game myself, I would only use art submitted for the prototype with the artist's permission if we could agree a price that I would pay them for it.

What do you think? Does that sound like a promising idea? An exploitative idea? An idea which is extremely unlikely to work?

(Lack of) Art in Prototypes

A couple of weeks ago, I posted some pictures of a few cards from the last three versions of Codename: Vacuum. The pictures showed small incremental changes to the cards over time with functionality disappearing to later reappear, or subtly changing over time.

But what was probably most noticable about all three versions was the lack of artwork. The cards were 90% white. Why the lack of art?

The name's Bland, James Bland

It's a combination of reasons, but the most relevant is that I don't have the skills, and nor do any of my gaming buddies in Newcastle. I enjoy doing the layout and pictography, but I just can't draw to any reasonably level. I could download some vaguely relevant clip art from the internet, but I'm not a fan of copyright infringement and for a lot of the cards I have a pretty good idea in my head what they should look like, and finding those images through a Google search would take days - time I don't have to spare.

For some designers, doing the art is as much a part of the game design as coming up with the rules and components, but not for me. Nor do I have anyone who can do the art for me as a favour or for fun.

As a workaround I could rustle up some home-drawn crappy art, but I figure that would look worse than none at all - at least a compelling name and a blank page will conjure up a picture in the players' mind's eyes, whereas a badly drawn and coloured picture that would cause my dad to disown me (he's an artist and retired art teacher, though sadly not in a relevant style) would just turn the players' stomachs.

I could get someone with the chops to do the art for me, but there's a lot required, and I don't have the funds to pay someone for that work (my money's going on nappies at the moment). I can't expect an artist to work for free, or for the promise of future funds if I publish the game because that's not fair to them - especially as the game may never get published and they may never get paid or get to see their art get published. I don't mind working for free for something I'm passionate about (as evidenced by five years of running Reiver Games), but I can't expect the same from others.

So Codename: Vacuum languishes in its stark, white beauty. I've had a chat on Twitter with an old friend from my childhood who I've got in contact with again recently, he's a professional animator (and hence artist) and has offered to lend a hand in his limited free time, but again, I don't want to abuse his generosity - he has a family to support too.

It's important to get art in there before phase 3: i.e. testing and blind testing in front of real gamers.

Something else to think about is:

• if the game ever reaches a 'finished' state
• and, if it meets the required levels of awesomeness
• and, if I decide to self-publish it
• and, if I decide to use KickStarter or IndieGoGo to raise the funds for that

I'll need at least some teaser art before I start the campaign to raise the funds, I'm sure seeing awesome art on the KickStarter page helps people to decide to part with their hard-earned dough.

You Know You've Been Neglecting Your Blog When...

You get emails asking if you've died.

I've been busy. And not busy. Last weekend The Wife and I went to Newcastle for a couple of days break. It was great, we got to hang out with our friends up there and just chill out for a couple of days. On our return we've been busy sorting out stuff for the house we're buying and I had to make an unscheduled trip to York.

Wednesday I had to go to York to collect the white sample of Sumeria which had been sent to my old address (I'd forgotten to inform the German manufacturers that I'd moved house). The white sample is a box, insert, punchboards and gameboard all covered with the correct paper. The punchboards aren't punched and there's no printing done, but it gives you an example of the size, weight and finish of things. Sumeria will be in the same size box as Carpe Astra and the board and tiles will be on the same 2mm thick, linen-finished card as the Carpe Astra pieces. I was really impressed by how professional Carpe Astra felt - the Germans really do a great job.

To make the trip up to York worth the effort, (there's six hours driving involved) I spent the night at Paul's, got to hang out with him and Lisa, play some prototypes and then the next morning I popped in to Travelling Man (the comics and games shop in York) and went to their Leeds head office. I used the trip as a sales trip - introducing Carpe Astra (which neither store had picked up yet) and Sumeria and enquiring how It's Alive! was doing. In the York branch, It's Alive! is apparently a regular seller - they always re-order it if it's sold out and it sells out fairly often. Since moving from selling copies personally at conventions and through my website to selling to distributors I've no idea how well things are doing - so it was nice to get some positive feedback from the shop floor. It was also good to be able to tell them that Carpe Astra had spent most of the last two weeks at the top of the BoardGameGeek Hot Games list.

On my return an email from Ted informed me that Carpe Astra has been added to Bruno Faidutti's Ideal Game Library and got an honourable mention in Mike Siggin's Sumo Awards. Two more pieces of information that would have been good to be able to mention had I known about them one day earlier! Still, I'm planning to do some more sales trips early next week and I'll be able to use that information then.

Things are now very busy - I've got to send the box art and the rules for Sumeria to the printers today (though I'm not going to be able to send them all today - the box bottom will have to wait until Monday :-( ) and my parents are coming to stay for the weekend this evening - so I've some preparation to do for their visit too. My dad used to be an art teacher, so I'll be able to rope him into helping with the box bottom design and the photo of the game over the next couple of days.

Feeling Chipper!

It feels like Spring today. The sun is shining, it's fairly warm and most importantly I can get out in it! My course of steroids at the hospital finished today and already I'm walking better, which is great, I was beginning to feel a bit confined to the house.

On the work front there's not been a whole heap of progress, what with all the trips to hospital, though I have managed to read several books. The good news on the payment front is that most of the late payments have now arrived, and those that haven't, I've spoken to and so I'm less worried about the money not turning up.

I've also received the finished artwork for Sumeria from Harald (the artist). It looks awesome - I'm really pleased with it. This means that next week I can do the graphic design, laying out the art ready to send to the printers.

I've also got to do a few chores next week (the books for February) and some more marketing (sending out the next quarterly newsletter).

It'll be nice to be able to get stuck in again properly.

Sumeria Sketch

I've just received a sketch idea for the Sumeria box cover from Harald (the artist).

As usual, click on the image to see a larger version.

It's a first draft idea for the cover of the box. I love it. Especially the rich, red colour scheme, the Sumeria font and the hieroglyphs in the background at the top. What does everyone else make of it?