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.

Delays

We’ve had some (more) problems with the laser-cutter.

It’s cost Paul time while he worked around them.

He phoned the manufacturer. They’ve discontinued this model.

I’m not surprised. 

It was the ‘newer version’ of the one that caught fire.

Newer isn’t always better

The old one was pretty good up until the fire.

This one has been nothing but trouble.

I spent last week helping Paul with the shipping again.

Then met Paul again on Friday night to collect more stuff to ship this week.

Rocky ‘Roid is slipping as a result.

Still, we’re getting there. 

The end of the Xeno Wars campaign is in sight…

Lasers

Our laser cutter caught fire two weeks ago.

Our supplier had two in stock and could install in early December.

It took us a few days to consider some funding options. 

Look at a few alternatives.

By Friday we were ready to place an order.

But in those few days the lead time had gone from early December to mid-January - they’d sold their last stock.

I spent the weekend looking at more alternatives.

They had a bigger, more expensive model in stock - it was too big.

We considered other suppliers.

They didn’t have it in stock either.

We considered other machines.

Then we settled on a like-for-like replacement.

And mid-January.

Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash

At least Paul will be able to get up to speed quickly with it.

Setbacks

The week before last week everything was rosy.

Fulfilment was back on track.

I was enjoying game design and making progress.

This last week has taken a toll.

I found a discrepancy in the books and spent my evenings cross-checking three different spreadsheets to try to track it down.

No games design progress.

And then laser-cutter caught fire and was destroyed. 

An acrylic fire destroyed the internals

Paul, his family and his house are all fine, but fulfilment is stalled while we source a replacement and set it up.

Sometimes you just have to roll with the punches.

Relief

And breathe.

It’s been a stressful couple of weeks.

There’s only two outstanding orders for the Kickstarter fulfilment: boxes and wooden bits.

The boxes are pootling on, we’ve received proofs approved them and the full order arrives on Wednesday.

The wooden bits were all that was left.

They were due this week, so a couple of weeks ago I sent them and email checking it was all ok.

“We’re having difficulty getting time on the machines”, I was told - it would be late.

“How late?”, I enquired.

A different question was answered.

We’ve got 200-odd rewards to ship by the end of September. Paul’s planning a two-week holiday. There’s loads to cut, bag and box.

Are we delayed a week (no problem), a month (tight) or a quarter (deadlines missed) I wondered?

It took two weeks to get an answer to the questions.

I worried.

Our unusual business model means we’re insulated from the shipping chaos that’s stressing out every other publisher. It means we’re often able to hit our deadlines.

Nearly 400 people have entrusted us with tens of thousands of pounds of their hard earned cash.

I didn’t want to break that trust.

Fail them.

I found out on Wednesday they are delayed a couple of weeks.

Not a problem.

And relax.

Breathe.

A weight lifted.

Yay! And Boo :-(

This weekend, in addition to successfully wrangling both kids unaided for 33 hours I finished the FlickFleet pre-orders and finished a couple more copies - FlickFleet is in stock! You can buy it from our website! Yay!

Of course, not everything runs smoothly, so we’ve had to push the Kickstarter back from the end of this month until mid-Oct because of the scheduling woes I mentioned last week. Boo :-(

The downside is it’s going to make things a bit tighter for finances and I’m going to end up sending a couple of quarterly newsletters within a month of each other which might annoy subscribers, but the good news is it gives me more time to get things in place for the Kickstarter which was looking very tight.

In other news, thanks to a couple more stocking orders from our only retail stockist, Zombology is almost sold out! They’ve sold at least 57 copies through their four stores and ordered a total of 73. Not bad sales for a game I’ve literally made by hand! Yay!

About #?@!ing Time

Many years ago, while humanity was busy learning how to craft flint axes and wondering which pelts made the best loincloths, I took part in NaGa DeMon 2013, coming up with a game I called Zomobology, a quick, vicious card game about fighting the zombie apocalypse with science not shotguns. With only a month to come up with a working game, I enlisted the help of the internets, promising free stuff in return for feedback, proof-reading and ideas.

NaGa DeMon went very well, I got loads of feedback, made 6 versions of Zomobology within the month and made them available print and play for feedback purposes. I had nearly four times a normal month's pageviews on the blog and everything was rosy. Huzzah!

Did I mention the free stuff? Yes. Right. Um. So I'd offered the five most helpful feedback providers a signed, numbered limited edition copy of the final version as created at the end of the month. That version was freely available here for download, so to spice it up a bit, I said I'd get some exclusive artwork done for the winners' copies. The only slight problem with this plan was I'd spent all my hard-earned cash on nappies, so budget was limited, and I can't draw for toffee. Another call for help on the internet and I thought I'd found an artist who was prepared to do the artwork for beer money. Millennia passed, man learned to forge metal tools, wear togas and build sewers. Then the artist deal fell through.

Man harnessed the atom and discovered quantum mechanics and the whole thing was getting farcical. Instead I offer the winners (who by this point have largely forgotten who I am) a signed, numbered limited edition copy of the current version, with crappy artwork by yours truly (plus a selection of Creative Commons licensed art from the internet). This version is actually slightly more exclusive since it's changed quite a lot since the final NaGa DeMon version at the end of November and the art, such as it is, is all new. In an effort to draw a line under the whole sordid affair, the winners accept my paltry offer and everything is back on.

Did I mention it had changed quite a lot? So that version has several new mechanisms and is completely untested. So I start testing it and make a few iterations testing it until it gets to the point where it essentially works. It's not perfect (I think it's now too easy to cure zombitis), but it's playable. Let's do this!

Except I've run out of ink for my printer and I've not written the rules for the new version - they're all in my head. So I crack on with this while the winners take advantage of the singularity and download their consciousnesses to a silicate substrate, desperate to not let their failing corporeal forms deny them access to free stuff.

Saturday night the stars were finally in alignment. The Daughter was sleeping well, The Wife was out for dinner and drinks with friends and I was vaguely awake. I'd written the rules up on Wednesday and the printer ink had arrived on Thursday. Time to finally get my house in order. The copies are now seeing the light of day and will be shipping soon. Thank you all for your patience!