TGWAG

Years ago, before I started Eurydice Games I took part in NaGa DeMon a few times.

That’s National Game Design Month.

In November.

Zombology was born that way.

In the last couple of years I’ve really struggled with game design.

COVID hasn’t helped.

But a full-time job, young family and running a company in my spare time doesn’t leave much time.

I’m going to do it again this November.

Focus.

I'll be running a little competition.

The Game Within a Game - TGWAG.

Giving out pointless internet points.

To people who help me.

By playtesting. Or proof-reading. Or providing ideas.

I’ll keep a weekly leaderboard.

There’ll be a prize for the winner.

It kicks off tomorrow.

I started a Roll & Write in January

Follow along on the blog to join in…

Deliveries

This week we're expecting stuff.

A lot of stuff.

We've already got 3/5 print runs (Xeno Wars, the freebies, and FlickFleet).

And the main acrylic order.

And the first wooden bits order.

We assemble the games at home - proper indie!

This week we're expecting the playmats.

And the rest of the acrylic.

And the fourth print run - both Boxes of Flicks.

And the all the cardboard boxes.

Which leaves just the packaging, Scenario booklets, the Big Boxes and the FlickFleet wooden bits.

Almost done.

We'll be able to ship a bunch of simpler orders once this week's orders arrive.

Maturity

Daughter the Second is five.

She can read to herself at bedtime. Do maths. Even speak a little German.

She’s maturing rapidly.

We got our logo re-done a couple of years ago

Eurydice Games is five too.

It’s a very immature business.

We’ve got as far as we have due to being very tight.

I do the books. In Google Sheets. It’s free. 

I also do the marketing, advertising, business planning, website. All badly. But for free. Or near enough.

I do lots of work. Lots of unnecessary work. Lots of bad work. Because I can kludge it for free.

It works. Kinda.

We’ve survived five years. Grown rapidly.

It’s now time to start thinking about our maturity. 

Spending a little money to do a better job. Or an easier job. Or pay a professional to do it.

I’m spending a lot of time on this at the moment.

Investigating an accounting package.

Approaching professionals to redo our website. Properly.

Speaking to professionals about advertising.

Hopefully it’ll free up some of my time for game design.

Plates

Lots of spinning plates at the moment.

Paul's trying to make room for all the deliveries. And cutting FlickFleets and Expansion 1s.

I'm trying to finish last year's books.

And work out the new costs for all the things we've ordered.

And get the fulfilment spreadsheet ready for Paul.

And place the last few orders.

We're meeting on Tuesday so Paul can take the Xeno Wars printing and wooden bits down to York.

These shouldn't be in Newcastle!

It's all coming together.

It's a very busy time!

Loss

Our fifth financial year finished on Friday.

Most businesses don’t get to five. Almost 60% fail.

Reiver Games failed.

Eurydice is still going. And going strong.

Each of our five years has been a growth year.

Sales have increased by 49 times in five years.

And by almost four times in the last four.

We’d been profitable every year too.

Just.

Until this year.

We made a small loss.

Less than the write off cost of the laser-cutter.

But still.

I'm proud that after the failure of Reiver Games I've learned how to run a business better. 

Paul and I are doing well.

And next year is looking good too.

Fingers crossed…

Spend

Our bank account lives a boom and bust lifestyle.

After a crowdfunding campaign it's stratospheric.

For us.

Then we spend on materials and components.

Photo by Igal Ness on Unsplash

Then again on shipping.

Then Paul's salary, conventions and advertising chip away at it.

Till it's paltry.

Then we crowdfund again to stay afloat.

We're in the spending phase now.

The last of the wooden bits arrive this week.

I've just spent £8,000 on the acrylic. Most of it.

And £2,500 on playmats.

Next up are the big boxes and the printing.

Then it'll be shipping again.

The balance is heading south...

Arrivals

I’ve picked a box manufacturer.

Almost 5,000 dice have arrived at Paul’s house:

Lots of dice!

Three enormous boxes of wooden bits have arrived at mine (should have been Paul’s!) with two more on the way:

Did someone order some discs and cubes?

The next print run is taking shape.

Our FlickFleet print runs are usually 400 copies.

We’ve done three 400 copy FlickFleet runs and two 400 copy Expansion 1 runs.

The Boxes of Flicks were an aberration, smaller, more expensive runs.

Xeno Wars will be an 800 copy run. We’ve already sold over 400!

Paul’s house is going to be very full for a couple of months.

Relationship

In March I got new quotes for everything we'd need for the Xeno Wars print run. Including boxes.

Once the Gamefound campaign was complete I started getting those quotes refreshed to reflect price increases due to war in Ukraine and other global factors.

The box manufacturer had gone bust.

They'd made 2,150 boxes for us over three years. We had a relationship.

Not any more.

I frantically started hunting for a new manufacturer.

Several companies I contacted couldn't do it.

Some of those put us in contact with others.

Others just refused to answer emails and phone calls. 

I get that they might not want (or be able to) do what we need, but that's not a good way to do business.

It's been slow going.

Last week I reached out to a few more companies.

Much better this time. They all got back to me, all quoted for the work.

One stood out though.

He wanted to speak on the phone.

Discuss the project. He'd looked at our website.

Had some ideas to do things differently. Better. Maybe even cheaper than what I'd asked for. With further savings in future.

We spoke several times. Clearing things up. Asking and answering questions.

Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash

His quote came in cheapest of the five I'd got.

The company is 170 years old.

And, it turns out, I've used them before.

Guess which one I'm going with.

Clock

I’m back now.

Cracking on.

I want to shut the Pledge Manager but we still have 74 outstanding pledges.

I need to shut it so I know what to order from our suppliers.

Prices are likely to rise because of the energy crisis.

I’d like to get my orders in beforehand if I can.

It’s a race against time…

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

Return

I’m driving home from Bristol today.

The Gower was lovely

Back at work tomorrow.

And back to Xeno Wars.

The pledge manager officially closes today but we still have 95 people who haven’t completed it.

Once that’s done we can place the orders.

We also need to finally choose a new box maker and place an order.

Lots to do…

Holiday

I’m away for the week.

In (old!) south Wales.

We’re taking some family time.

When I’m back I’ll be closing the pledge manager and starting to order everything.

Xeno Wars will begin to take shape.

Until then I’m relaxing.

‘Exciting’

… is one word for it.

Frustrating is another.

Worrying also works.

I’ve placed the order for all the wooden bits we need.

There’s a long lead time, so best to get the order in early.

Paid via Wise. It usually takes 3 hours and has low international fees.

It took eight days. For ‘verification’. Then at the end of all that they refunded me.

I need to fix the problem and try again.

I also contacted the box-maker to check the quote I got a couple of months ago is still valid.

They’ve gone out of business!

I need to find a new box-maker.

‘Exciting’.

Or frustrating.

Or worrying.

Production

I've spent the week working on the Pledge Manager.

It goes live at 2pm UK time today.

Paul is making the rewards that we already have the components for.

We're starting to place the orders for the materials that will take longest to arrive.

It's coming together.

Still lots to do.

But moving in the right direction. 

Shut Up

… and Sit Down covered FlickFleet in last week’s podcast.

Tom repeatedly described it as cute. And silly.

We got a bunch of orders as a result.

Many of which arrived while I was camping last weekend. 

It’s amazing the effect of a big name mentioning your game.

Actual influencers.

Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash

I’ve tried to email Shut Up & Sit Down a few times over the last few years.

No luck.

Then Tom wandered past our stand at the Expo.

Was intrigued.

Took a copy.

I wonder how many sales we’ll get as a result?

Currently 16.

Plus a noticeable jump in Gamefound page followers.

Comparisons

We’ve just finished our first Gamefound campaign, after four increasingly successful Kickstarters. I’m going to do a bit of a deep dive on the differences (bear in mind my Kickstarter experience is now over a year old - things might have changed in the meantime).

Why did we change? Kickstarter was working well for us, we had raised over £75,000 through four campaigns. Why would we risk changing? Blockchain is the answer to that. If you live in Europe you’ll have probably experienced a record breaking heatwave in the last week. It was over 2 degrees C hotter than the previous record in the UK and over 4 degrees hotter than the previous record in my city. The world is on fire and it’s our fault. We need to make radical changes to prevent tipping points in the climate.

Blockchain is hugely energy intensive. BitCoin is the worse example, but even the Proof of Stake chains require a lot of energy. Kickstarter announced a move to blockchain last year without providing any real reason at all. When pushed by numerous incensed creators and backers they doubled down ‘Blockchain!’.

Contrast that with Gamefound whose equivalent message was all how how they would be helping creators and backers. Rather that pouring fuel on the planetary fire. We’d used them three times already for pledge managers, so it was a natural choice. But was it a good one?

TL;DR: It was our best campaign ever, but I’m pretty sure we’re would have raised even more on Kickstarter with the same campaign. But I don’t regret it at all.

Gamefound has a lot of advantages. You can have a preview page that’s a landing page with real content that you can make available before the project is reviewed. A dedicated account manager with good response times on queries. Add-ons and stretch goals are first class citizens. They handle EU VAT for you. And the pledge manager is in the same place. We were also offered a free banner ad on the site.

But there are also plenty of downsides (though this is very early days and I expect lots of these will get addressed quite quickly). The worse was the lack of notifications on comments - I find myself having to frequently check the page comments and all the updates to see if I’ve missed responding to any comments. The ads between updates and comments confused a lot of people, so we got responses to update questions on the main page comments. Our backers complained the site was hard to use and the ads were too intrusive. Some backers had pledges blocked by their card issuers (if you’re in the US a Polish company looks more dodgy that an US one). There’s no app and a much smaller user base so we got a lot less pledges on the last day than last time. In fact we probably lost a bunch of backers because they’ve never heard of Gamefound (but know Kickstarter). Kickstarter claim to provide 40-45% of the backers on our previous campaigns. I’d always assumed that was some creative accounting and most of it came from the ads we ran, but maybe not so much. We got almost nothing directly attributed to Gamefound.

There was also a few features of the Kickstarter dashboard I missed (the stream of pledge/adjustments/cancellations including backer name, the graph showing various pledge backer totals in a single place).

Campaign performance by day, darker lines are more recent

We had 40% more people on our mailing list, nearly four times as many followers at launch, three times the marketing budget and a bigger draw project - it added multiplayer rules which people have been clamouring for. And we raised 8% more than last time. It’s not quite a fair comparison as Gamefound doesn’t include shipping in the pledges, but even assuming similar shipping to last time that’s still only 24%. I’m pretty sure we’d have done better than that on Kickstarter.

But I don’t regret it. We need rapid systemic change to minimise the effects of climate change. Blockchain is an ecological disaster and companies should be avoiding it like the plague, not starting to embrace it. Our decision costs us money, but it’s one I’ll happily repeat - we’re going to have to collectively make far bigger sacrifices in the coming years.

Culmination

Our first Gamefound campaign finishes in just under five hours.

Less than 5 hours left!

It’s been ahead of our last one since the beginning.

Our best ever campaign.

Again. The last was was too. And the one before that. They all have.

How much better will it end up? At one point it was looking like we might get £45,000!

Then the prediction dropped to £35,000.

It’s been pretty static since then.

We’ll see where we finish.

It’s been a rollercoaster.

It always is.

I need a rest.

Doldrums

We’re mid-campaign.

It’s slowed down as it always does.

We need to keep the momentum up.

We’re running some ads.

Bizarrely they are generating more website sales than Gamefound backers.

A FlickFleet playmat!

We’ve just unlocked the playmat, which people have been keen for.

That should help.

Next up is the big box.

Hopefully that will help too.

We’re at 63% of our previous best campaign with just over half the campaign left to go.

And shipping will be collected in the Pledge Manager.

It should be our best ever campaign.

We’re still in the doldrums though!

And it’s really slowed down the last few days.

Launch

It’s launch day.

Just over five hours to go.

A time of great excitement. And great nerves.

In eight hours I’ll have a pretty good idea of how it’s going.

We’ve got four Kickstarters’ worth of data to compare this against.

For now though: just possibilities. It could go well.

Or badly. Extremely well, or mediocre.

I’ll just have to wait and see.

In hindsight, choosing to launch the campaign when Paul is on holiday and my parents are visiting may have been … sub-optimal.

Lots to do.

Anxiety

A week today our next campaign goes live.

Our first Gamefound campaign.

Can we replicate the success of previous campaigns?

Will the switch to Gamefound help or hinder us?

Have people had enough of FlickFleet?

How will the cost of living crisis affect things?

In a week’s time I will have a rough idea of the answers to those questions.

For now they are worries I have no way of answering.

What little data I have at this point is promising.

But it’s far from concrete.

Just hints.

So I worry.

For another week.

It’s an anxious time…

Story

We have a weird way of making games.

Our factory

Paul does it himself, in his garage.

Why would we do such a thing?

Are we mad?

Possibly.

Judge for yourself!

We’ve done a couple of interviews in the last week.

Explaining ourselves.

Producing Fun with James Naylor.

And The Thoughtful Gamer with Marc Davis.

I hope you find them interesting.

It was a nice distraction from the Gamefound page - which is finally taking shape.