Rules

For a long time the rules of my games live in the Apple Notes app.

I can read them whenever I want.

Tweak them easily.

Edit them easily.

Check them on my phone, when I'm pulling out a prototype I've not played in a while.

At some point they have to become official though.

Graphic design.

Diagrams.

That takes time and effort.

So I tend to leave it until near the end.

When I'm not expecting many more changes.

I'm doing the Gal4Xeon rules now.

In InDesign.

With diagrams.

And graphic design.

It's slow going.

But an important step.

Production

It’s going to be a very busy month. 

I’ve got to do the graphic design for the Xeno Flicks rules and dashboards. 

I've made a start!

Work out all the quantities of things we need. 

Then get the manufacturing orders started. 

Boxes are being made as we speak.

Xeno Wars reprint has gone to the printer. 

Ideally, we’d like to have some Xeno Wars stock at the Expo. 

Need to place several orders for that though. 

Also need to finish Expo preparations. 

Progress is being made at least.

Rules

I’ve almost finished the graphic design for the Away Team Bingo player sheets.

The four low ink ones are done. 

Two out of four high ink ones are done too.

Next up is the rules.

Rules are hard

I’ve a pretty spartan rulebook that went to the playtesters.

But I need a new one.

With diagrams.

And examples.

It takes time.

It’s my current focus.

Next up is review copies and the Gamefound page.

It’s going to be a busy couple of months.

Let The Good Times Roll!

I'm done.

Away Team Bingo is finished.

My third roll and write game.

You are sending teams of crew to explore a planet three times.

To find the most impressive discoveries.

But lots of locations aren't safe.

Will you pick the right mix of crew for the mission?

It's a press your luck game.

You want to stay as long as possible to maximise your rewards.

But staying too long can be costly.

Or catastrophic.

Now the game is finished, it's just graphic design, finishing the rulebook and doing the crowdfunding page.

The top of a low ink page - getting prettier!

There's a start of a Gamefound page taking shape.

The graphic design is coming together.

Then it'll be the rulebook.

It's going to be a busy couple of months!

Seven

I've just published my seventh game.

The Planets My Destination.

It's another print at home roll & write game, like Rocky 'Roid.

This time it's a 3X (there's no eXplore!) game about colonising the solar system.

Like Rocky 'Roid I've aimed for more player interaction than you often see in roll and writes.

You share the dice each round, but can personally modify them.

There are bonuses for arriving first at any of the locations you can colonise.

You can work together to collaborate on projects more quickly that going alone.

And you can wade in with your fleet and conquer an opponent's colony.

I've been worth on it for about eighteen months.

The last couple of months have been finalising the graphic design and the rules.

It's done now.

I've an eighth underway now!

I love the pace you can achieve with roll and writes.

So quick to iterate an test.

Rules

I’m now in fulfilment mode. 

First up is the print and play rewards due at the end of this month. 

They require the finished rulebook and dashboards. 

I’ve finished a first cut of the rules this week. 

Taking shape!

Next up are the dashboards and finalising the rules. 

The 3D printing and laser-cutting files are done. 

Looks on track at the moment. 

Hopefully early. 

Website sales are continuing very strongly. 

Still no idea why. 

But Paul has spent all weekend in hospital with a serious infection. 

He’s coming home this afternoon though.

Pretty

When you’re designing a game you want it to be functional.

And quick to iterate as you make changes.

And pretty to engage the testers.

But the first two are most important.

The game settles down and your changes become less frequent and smaller.

Then you can invest more time in pretty.

As you’re less likely to have to redo it.

Rocky ‘Roid is reaching that point.

This week has mostly been graphic design.

Getting prettier (low ink)

Paul has been shipping.

So I loaded all the invoices in to our accounts package using the app I wrote.

Found some bugs.

Only one lead to a shipping error and we fixed that before it arrived with the customer.

But I spent a lot of time checking for more.

And it cost us some money and Paul some time :(

Genesis

Xeno Wars is a strange game design process.

We’re essentially designing new ships for an existing game, not starting from scratch.

Like the expansion and the two boxes of flicks before.

The expansion we tested in real life with friends.

The boxes of flicks were COVID-creations. And they changed a lot in flight as things were unlocked.

With this we’re trying to be a lot more organised. It has to work with FlickFleet, but also on its own.

And COVID is still a big problem here, I’m mostly testing solo.

This week has been about it taking shape.

I’ve cobbled together multiple copies of the ships, raiding my bits box for parts.

Box of Delights

Starting testing larger battles rather than just individual ships.

Looking into making a bunch of prototypes for testing elsewhere.

Getting orders together for bits and dice. Writing the rulebook.

Current challenge is our dice supplier’s minimum order changing from £50 to £750! 

Trying to workaround that now…

Design

We’re a company of two. We wear a lot of hats.

Paul is manufacturing and fulfilment. And stock management.

I’m sales and marketing. Graphic design and finance.

This week has flexed all of those skills.

A different look!

I’ve been doing a first cut of Xeno Wars dashboards for playtesting copies.

Writing the new rulebook too.

I’ve finally finished the 3D printing packs - so they are now up and we’re going to run some ads too.

And the last piece of the puzzle is end of the month bookkeeping.

I really enjoy the graphic design (though I do not have a flair for it).

It’s been a fun week.

Less fun for Paul though. He’s finally had his surgery, but the recovery is slower than he was expecting :(

Feelings

This week has been one of emotional highs and lows.

I’m in the middle of almost three weeks between day jobs so I’ve had lots of ‘free’ time.

I’ve spent that time with my family, doing household jobs, and a lot of Eurydice stuff.

Monday and Friday last week I met up with Paul (and also Alex on Friday) and we playtested new FlickFleet ideas, Coalescence, The Uprising Saga and Alex’s game: Aliens Ate My Planet.

It felt great to feel like a game designer again.

On Thursday I got to watch Daughter the Second (now four!) during her swimming lesson (I usually work during them) and it was awesome to see her so confident in the water.

I also spent a lot of time very stressed about today’s  Print and Play Kickstarter deadline.

I’ve been working late almost every night plus, where I can, during the days.

It was a way bigger job than expected and today I’m off on holiday for a few days and my parents are visiting next week. I missed the deadline and due to the next couple of weeks’ activities I’ve missed it by a lot.

Stressful.

Highs and lows!

Learning

I've mentioned before that my graphic design skills are weak.

They are.

Our first Kickstarter looked terrible.

The second looked bad.

The third looked poor.

I'm working on number four now. 

Coming next month.

It's an improvement. 

Not earth-shattering, but better.

Baby steps.

Small steps forward compound over time.

Or so I hope...

Letting Go

I'm a tolerable graphic designer. Or passable maybe. Adequate.

I really enjoy doing it, but I don't have a flair for it.

Until now, to keep costs down, I've done it all myself.

The website.

C-

The game boxes. The rules. The cards.

But it's homemade. And it looks it.

Thanks to the success of our last kickstarter we've finally got some cash in the bank.

We're thinking of investing it in some professional graphic design.

Make the website and the games look much better.

They really need it.

I'll miss it though.

The Busy Time

With the Kickstarter all wrapped up we now enter the period when I’m very busy (Paul’s very busy period is pending the acrylic for the add-ons arriving).

I’m currently doing the pledge manager, dashboard graphic design, rules graphic design and the orders of bits and acrylic.

The graphic design is top of the list as we have to provide the Print and Play files (including the dashboards and rules) by the end of July. And I’m away at the very end of July, so I have to provide them by the 29th.

The first new dashboard design in progress...

We can’t place the orders until the pledge manager is finished (3rd of August), but I can be almost ready to go before then since the pledge manager is slowing down now and, unlike Kickstarter, we aren’t expecting a last minute rush of orders.

Then it’ll be catch up on the books. We’ve had a lot of orders through the pledge manager, so there’s a decent backlog of work piling up there :-(

Design and Play

With the pledge manager live, and generating a very surprising (to me and Paul at least!) number of upgrades/add-ons, I’ve been able to focus this week on the graphic design for the expansion. In the run up to the Kickstarter I didn’t want to invest too heavily in it because I didn’t know which stretch goals we’d unlock. With that information sorted I’m now in a position to lay out the rulebook (and the ship dashboards - something else I’d deferred to focus on the Kickstarter). Last week I spent my lunch breaks on the dashboards and this week I've finished them off and started on the rulebook. We've also made a couple of tweaks to the base game rulebook to make things easier to understand and adjusted the points value of the fighters slightly (from 5->6 points).

The other thing we needed for the expansion rulebook was a bunch more scenarios. Again, the exact selection of scenarios relied on which stretch goals we unlocked - we’ve a limited amount of space in the rulebook, so we wanted to get a nice spread of scenarios that covered all the unlocked stretch goals.

On Saturday I went down to York (where Paul lives) and we spent six hours thoroughly testing the scenarios we’d chosen and confirming the points values for the new ships. I also got two hours on trains to work on the dashboards too!

Testing a scenario with the mines

This week will be all about graphic design again so I can get everything we need in place for on-time delivery of the Print and Play files (due by the end of this month).

After that it will be back to crafting physical rewards and ordering the stuff we need from manufacturers to do that. The Kickstarter funds have finally arrived, so it's all systems go!

NaGa DeMon 7: Back to the Drawing Board

But in a good way! This morning I'm in a hotel in Manchester, waiting for my colleagues to wake up so we can go for breakfast. Seeing as I expected to wake up early, I took my laptop with me so I could work on the graphic design for the Print on Demand version of Zombology (a NaGa DeMon stretch goal). Last week while babysitting I resized all the cards (which was a surprising amount of effort), this morning I've laid all the cards out in the order that the POD supplier wants them in.

I'm all done with time to spare, so I can blog about my progress :-)

The POD version is still not quite finished, seeing as the game will come in a clear plastic deckbox, they recommend adding a couple of extra cards, one at the front and one at the back to act as front and back box labels. I've not done those yet, but I don't envisage them taking a particularly long time, so nearly there.

Monday night I made another copy of the real game. Unfortunately, only one. By the time I'd put The Daughter to bed, packed for my trip to Manchester, ironed a shirt and had some tea it was nearly nine and I had to be up at five the next morning. So my best guess is now 14 finished copies by the end of the month, which I hasten to add is not 20. It's a shame that I'll not be able to complete the full twenty copies by the end of the month, but real life is more important!

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.

And We're Off!

I've actually made some decent progress across the board this week for a change.

Monday to Wednesday The Wife was away for work, which unfortunately meant I missed Newcastle Playtest on Tuesday. I'd been hoping to playtest a game for one of our London Playtest UK confederates on Tuesday, but seeing as I was going to miss it, and he wanted some feedback before Essen, I spent Monday night soloing his game and providing some feedback on the rules.

Tuesday was then free for work on Zombology, so I copied all the files from my old laptop onto the new one and then made the changes I'd been planning to the cards and started on the rules. I'm hoping to get Zombology finished fairly quickly now so that I can crack on with something else.

Wednesday was my weekly Games Night, and we had six people, the most for a while. I requested a try out of some new Zombology rules, which were considered an improvement across the board I think, plus a couple of games of Coup and King of Tokyo, a game of Martian Dice (on my phone after being knocked out of KoT) and another play of Kigi. Including three plays of Zombology that was eight games in total!

Friday I got to see The Martian at the cinema (I'd been stoked for this since I heard it was coming out - I loved the book). I thoroughly enjoyed the film too, though I can see that Wilka's comment that he wished it was a 12 episode season on Netflix would have meant less would have been cut.

And then to round it all out I made it to Newcastle Gamers for the first time in months on Saturday and got a couple of plays towards my ten plays goal: Macao and Alea Iacta Est.

It's been a great week, now I just need to build on this momentum and keep cracking on with Zombology - it's within shouting distance of the finish line!

The Only Constant Is Change

Regular readers will know I've been prevaricating for the last two or three months about whether or not to go through with my plan to do a limited edition hand-made run of Zombology this year.

One of the reasons for this has been a secret up until Friday, but now the cat is finally out of the bag I can admit to it! I've been in the running for the last few months for a promotion at work. Seeing as several of my colleagues (and friends) read this blog, I didn't really want to be discussing it here until a decision was made and they found out through official channels. On Friday I received the job offer and accepted it, so it's all go, starting next month.

The new job is a big step up and will require a load of new skills, learning on the job and responsibility, plus more travel, i.e. less time for games design. For the last couple of months I've already been travelling around once a week, which often clashes with Games Night or Newcastle Playtest, further complicating making progress on games design.

The majority of my mates in Newcastle are also colleagues and have helped me with the lion's share of my Zombology, Codename: Dragon and Codename: Vacuum playtesting. These mates will now all be reporting to me. Which is going to be really weird, and also probably not conducive to playtesting.

So everything is changing. What I don't need on top of that is a huge commitment of my spare time and additional stress around marketing and trying to recoup an investment. So I'm ditching the plan to hand make 150 copies of Zombology and instead going with Print on Demand, which requires no effort from me other than the graphic design.

As I mentioned in my review, there's a few downsides to this, not least the cost of shipping to the UK. Most of my 17 pre-orders are from the UK, almost all friends or family. I don't want them to have to pay silly money to a company in the states for a copy of the game so in addition to the print on demand edition, so there will be a Super Limited True Fans Edition™ of the game, featuring a hand-made tray and lid box and laminated cards. I'll make 20 of these: one for me, one each for the 17 family, friends or true fans who've pre-ordered a copy and 2 spares. These will be selling at the original £9 plus shipping price quoted earlier, so I'll not make any money on them - I'm just doing it because I enjoy it and to support those who've supported me.

There's two spares... Just sayin'.

In other news, I made it to Newcastle Playtest this week for the first time in ages and got to play both Codename: Dragon and Border Reivers Second Edition and got some good ideas for both of them.

I've also invested in Adobe Creative Cloud as a little 'promotion present' to myself. It means I'll be able to work on the Zombology graphic design without having to wait a week for my old laptop to boot up and then continually fight with its glacial slowness. W00t! I've already started on the changes I want to make to Zombology before release.

Digital Leaps and Conceptual Bounds

I've been working on a couple of things this week, making good progress on one, and working out in my head what to do with the other.

The first is my learning German app that I'm writing for my phone. This week I've made loads of progress on in. The first half of the week was refactoring the crap out of it, removing a load of duplication, specialist classes and generics and just making the whole thing far, far simpler behind the scenes.

That set me up well for the second half of the week where I added staged repetition and improved the styling quite a lot. There's still very little vocabulary in there, but I figure once I've got it working how I want I can start adding vocabulary wholesale. For the moment just getting it to the point where it's a useful tool for myself will be great. I'm really pleased with the progress I've made this week, it feels like it's developing rapidly despite working on it in my free time around work and a family.

The second thing alluded to in the title is the Zombology graphic design. I've got a moderately attractive (if very simple and hobby-esque) prototype that has been slowly improving over the last year or so. I'm fairly happy with a lot of it now, it's simple, but it's ok for a hand-made print run. The weakest links now are the zombie overrun card, the pay rise card and the round marker cards (which also feature zombies). If I'm honest the weakness is my piss-poor attempt at drawing a zombie. It's bad. It's also not really in keeping with the rest of the graphic design, so it's letting the side down and standing out as well.

I've had an idea this week about how I can come up with something that's more in keeping and within my limited art skills. So the next thing to do is break out my abysmal old, slow laptop and crack on in InDesign/Illustrator. I've got four hours of train journeys in a couple of weeks for my clinical trial hospital visit, but I hope to make a start on this stuff before then. Hopefully, I'll also have some feedback from the other Playtest UK groups soon too, which will give me a more unbiased view of the quality of the game.

In other news, I've crossed Hansa Teutonica off my ten plays list with a game at Games Night last Wednesday and I'm leaning more towards a hand-made, stretch goal/pledge level free run on KickStarter (despite my KickStarter misgivings). Need to do some more market research still, but the idea is taking root in my head.

A Moment of Reflection

Not much progress again this week :-( I was babysitting for a friend on Tuesday and used the evening to finish the graphic design (and add some further improvements) of the next version of Zombology, but then was too busy for the rest of the week to either print them out or playtest them.

I was hoping to get the printing done on Friday night while The Wife was at the cinema, but after a bad night's sleep The Wife cancelled, and my cousin popped in on a visit from Bath while showing her son local universities he's considering attending. I was also hoping to make it to Newcastle Gamers for the first time in months on Saturday, but instead we went on an impromptu camping trip to the wilds of the North Pennines (which were lovely!).

I missed the last Newcastle Playtest too due to a work trip, and I'm going to have to miss the next one for the same reason - I'm travelling a bit more for work now. Newcastle Playtest is only monthly, so I'm going to go three months without attending one, which is pretty pants for a supposed co-organiser.

All this has got me thinking. Am I really set up for another self-publishing company? I did pretty well last time around, but I had no kids at that point and The Wife was really busy with work so I had plenty of time in the evenings for making games and marketing. A weekend away at a convention was an easy sell at home because The Wife was busy and often worked some or all of the weekend anyway. Now I'm travelling more with work and have a family, do I really want to be going away from them on the weekends that I'm not away for work to demo and sell games at conventions?

Last time round I sold a good chunk of games at conventions. I went to The Cast Are Dice, Beer and Pretzels, The UK Games Expo and a few smaller ones. It was a good opportunity to promote my games because when you're running a small company with no marketing budget the vast majority of your intended audience have not heard of you, your company or your products. When I'm going on regular trips away for work, some of which eat up a weekend it's much harder to justify giving up another weekend away from The Wife and The Daughter for selling games. The Daughter's growing up so quickly at the moment that every missed moment counts. The work trips are also getting in the way of playtesting, my Games Nights and attending Newcastle Gamers. In addition to time for developing, manufacturing and selling the games, I also need time to test them, and at the moment it feels like I haven't got that time available.

I've got 13 pre-orders already, which is good, but that's less than 10% of the print run I'm planning. Can I sell the other 90-odd percent through free web marketing and the odd convention attendance? I don't know.

Anyway, I'm going to take a couple of weeks before I commit any money to the effort to check whether I'm sure I'll have the time to commit to making this successful, or whether I think I can make this successful with the time available to me. I'll also consider other paths to publishing one final time: print on demand, or selling to another publisher.

While I think about it, I'll get this next prototype printed out and tested, so at least I'm making some progress...