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carpeomnisgames · 6 years

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In May 2014 I was in the shower in my college apartment a week or two before graduation, thinking about card games and the books I’d been reading lately. While I was cleaning off I had an idea for the basic mechanics of a card game about fantasy heists with similar themes to the book I’d just finished, The Lies of Locke Lamora. I wrote some quick brainstorming notes on my computer when I was out of the shower, not really sure if it would amount to anything or not. The next day I got back to it and wrote more, and then the next, and the next, until I was designing cards and trying to balance systems against each other and I got to thinking hey, I might have something here. It was the first time I’d seriously tried to design a board game, not counting the ones I’d made with friends on long summer days in middle school. Over the next two years I would move back to Vermont, meet up with a great game design group in Burlington (shout out to Let’s Make Games Vermont), and work steadily to refine and develop that idea I’d had in the shower that day before graduating. At some point the game, which I’d been calling “the heist game” in my notes, gained the name No Honor Among Thieves.

In May 2016 I registered an LLC for Carpe Omnis Games, naming my publishing company after the website and blog that I’d had for years, so that I wouldn’t have to buy a new domain name and set up a new website. I had a game now, and it was good; all I needed was money to publish it. I worked for months to prepare for a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter, sending review copies of No Honor Among Thieves to critics, assembling lists of news sites to send press releases, setting up interviews and podcasts, and asking for feedback on the campaign from everyone I could think of.

In August I launched the Kickstarter campaign, fingers crossed. In September the campaign ended, having earned $48,325, which was approximately 165% more than I’d asked for. This game was actually going to get published! And so it did, though it took a lot longer and cost a bit more than I thought it would.

No Honor Among Thieves is currently in the process of shipping out to backers worldwide. Some people in Australia already have it, UK backers have it en route, and everyone else is eagerly awaiting the email with tracking numbers from the fulfillment centers. The game is done, it’s being delivered, I actually made this work! And now, finally, four years after I had an idea in the shower and for some reason decided to actually stick with it instead of writing down some concepts and forgetting about it, here it is. No Honor Among Thieves, a game of daring heists and sudden betrayal.

This is all a bit of a long-winded and self-congratulatory way of saying that there’s now a store available on the website, where you can buy the results of my work for the past four years. You can find it here, or in the main navigation bar at the top of the page. Go there to preorder No Honor Among Thieves or the Kickstarter promo pack that contains all the little goodies unlocked by stretch goals during the campaign, buy NoHAT hats, or check out a bunch of Carpe Omnis Games branded apparel that I designed mostly because I wanted something cool to wear to conventions. I’ve also given the homepage of the website a bit of a face lift, to de-emphasize the blog that I don’t post in on anything remotely resembling a reasonable schedule and emphasize the products that Carpe Omnis Games is selling. It’s been a pretty major overhaul of the website, and I’m quite proud of how it looks, and the products that are now on sale here.

This is the culmination of four years of work. And I’m nowhere near done yet.

Welcome to the new Carpe Omnis.

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#Carpe Omnis Games #No Honor Among Thieves

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carpeomnisgames · 6 years

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I haven’t been posting much on this blog of late–most of my writing time has been going towards new games and books that I’m working on and hoping to publish, or towards writing updates to the Kickstarter backers of my first published board game, No Honor Among Thieves. Between those projects, and my new full-time job that I started in August, I haven’t had nearly as much time to keep up with stuff like this as in the past. But NoHAT is finally shipping, so I’ve been looking into ways of selling the game from my website once all the Kickstarter backers have their copies, and I figured that others might benefit from the results of my research if I were to post what I’ve been doing. So here we go.

First off, one important thing to remember: you’re probably not going to make a profit from your Kickstarter by itself. Get that idea out of your head. All the money you raise on Kickstarter is going to go towards fulfilling the backer rewards for that Kickstarter campaign, especially if this is your first time doing this. You make your profit by selling your game at retail afterwards.

Some example numbers for you: No Honor Among Thieves needed about 900 copies of the game to fulfill backer rewards. The minimum print run from my manufacturer, Panda Games Manufacturing, is 1,500 copies, leaving me with 600 that I can sell afterwards. Depending on whether I sell those copies mostly to distributors and retailers or directly to customers, if I sell all of them I could make anything from $10k (which would mean I don’t quite break even on this game, considering how much of my own money I’ve put into it over the past four years) to $20k. This is what I’d consider to be the usual method that a crowdfunded publisher uses to make some money from their hobby business.

There are three main ways to sell these extra copies of your game: distribution, conventions, and online.

Distribution

This is what gets your game on shelves at stores. There are three ways of going about doing this: selling to retail stores, selling to distributors, and working with consolidators.

Retailers generally want about 50% off of MSRP and free shipping to their store. If this is your first time going through the publishing process, working with local game stores in your area is probably your best bet for getting your game on some shelves. If they don’t want to take the risk on an unproven publisher you can make deals with them to sell games on consignment, where you provide a couple of copies and they pay you when they sell them instead of when you send the games to them.

Distributors are companies that sell games to local game stores. They have broad reach, and buy in bulk (I’ve never seen a distributor ask for less than 100 copies of a game). They’ll usually want about 60% off of MSRP per copy, and you can negotiate with them for whether or not they pay for shipping (free shipping on orders above a certain number is a good incentive that you can offer). If you want to find distributors, check out this list by James Mathe, or contact your favorite local game store and ask who they buy their games from. There’s no harm in contacting as many distributors worldwide as you want, but remember that you might not have much luck if this is your first game. Also, you’ll want to start talking to them about three months before your game is available, so they can ask the retailers that they work with if your game is something they’d be interested in buying. Find more expert advice (again from James Mathe) here.

Consolidators are companies with ties to many distributors, and who sell games to those distributors, taking a small cut each time they do so. Distributors like consolidators because the consolidator can ship them many different games from different companies in the same package, saving them shipping costs and giving them more variety (this is also a reason that retailers like distributors). Right now, unless you’re already a client of a consolidator, you probably aren’t going to be able to take advantage of their services. There’s only a handful of them in business, and they’re absolutely swamped with business.

If this is your first time publishing a game, consolidators and distributors are going to be harder to work with. These businesses want to minimize their risk, which means that they only buy products that they know they can sell to retailers. Publishers with multiple products available provide less risk, because 1) they’ve got some sort of a track record at that point, and 2) if a distributor buys 100 copies of one game and 100 copies of another game from a publisher, and one of them doesn’t sell very well, then they’ve still got the other one that they can push, whereas if they buy 200 copies of just one game then they’re banking on that one working out for them. It’s the same principle as smart stock investment; minimize risk through diversity.

That said, you should absolutely get in touch with distributors anyway. Have a sell sheet ready that you can send them, know your prices, offer free shipping, and be ready for them to ask for demo copies. Just because it’s harder for a first time publisher to convince a distributor to work with them doesn’t at all mean that it’s impossible.

Conventions

Confession time: I’ve never actually sold anything at a convention. I’ve been to conventions to demo my games, but I only have a few pieces of advice from that experience, and none of them are really related to selling stuff.

Plan out your booth setup and order your signage and handouts way earlier than you think you need to. It takes a while to design and print stuff like that.

Bring a lot of business cards to hand out. You can go two ways with these: either make them general advertisements for the game, so that you can order them in bulk and hand them out at later conventions as well, or make them specific to the current state of development that the game is at, which will give people a better idea of what to expect from you but will also eventually leave you with a collection of business cards that you can no longer use (for example, you can’t use a card that says “Follow development on my website!” or “Launching on Kickstarter on April 4th!” after the game is published). I myself have stacks of business cards from each stage of development for No Honor Among Thieves that I can never really use again because they have outdated information on them.

I usually like to have some free swag to hand out to people that isn’t just a business card (for No Honor Among Thieves I used custom poker chips, but there’s all kinds of branded merchandise you can get your hands on to promote your game). This option can be a little expensive, so skip it if you want to keep a tight budget.

If it’s within your budget and makes sense with how your game plays, having a space at your booth to demo the game you’re trying to sell is a fantastic idea. This gives people a chance to play before they buy, and also works as fantastic advertising, giving passers-by a chance to watch the game for a minute and see people having fun with it. This is a bit difficult to pull off with the amount of space usually allotted to an indie publisher booth, unfortunately, but even if you can’t have a game demo right there you can usually sign up for an event at the convention to demo your game.

Bring at least one other person to help you run your booth, no matter how small it is. You will thank me when you need to go to the bathroom, grab lunch, or talk to more than one group of people passing by your booth.

That’s more than I thought I had to say about conventions, but I still don’t really know how to sell stuff at one. I imagine there’s all kinds of marketing and vendor license stuff that you have to keep in mind. Hopefully I’ll get some experience in this particular field at some point soon, and come back with another helpful post.

Selling Online

I’ve been doing a lot of research into this lately, in preparation for No Honor Among Thieves finally shipping to backers and me switching over to retail sales and plans for my next publication. The tools that I’m using might not be for everyone, since I used to work as a web developer and am generally what you might call “good with computers,” so in addition to an overview of the tools I’ve been using I’ve tried to find some options that would let you easily set up an online store even if you don’t know how to build a website yourself.

To build a webstore, you need four things: web hosting, an ecommerce program of some kind, a way of collecting payments (this is included in some ecommerce platforms but not all), and a way of getting your orders to your fulfillment people so they can ship the game out to where it’s supposed to go.

I’m going to cover my method first, and then offer alternatives for people who aren’t as tech savvy or who don’t want to put as much time into the project.

If you know a little bit about building websites, I recommend building a webstore using WordPress and WooCommerce. Both of these programs are free, with a lot of optional paid upgrades available, and come with a variety of free themes that you can use to quickly make your website look professional. Hosting at any major web host is about $8/month, and a domain name is $9/year if you use my favorite registrar. Beyond that, you don’t have any other expenses for setting up your store using this method. I use a free Stripe account to accept credit cards and a PayPal account for everything else.

Pros: Super cheap, you can customize it however you want, and a lot of companies and services have WooCommerce integrations that let you automate a lot of your business.

Cons: Takes longer to get set up, you have to maintain the website yourself, there’s no tech support to call if you have problems, and requires some technical skill to build.

If you want something that works out of the box and integrates with basically everything, and are willing to pay a little extra money, Shopify might be a good solution for you. Their basic plan gets you a website, tech support, easy-to-set-up product listings, transaction handling, an SSL certificate, and everything else you might need to run a decent online store. They don’t provide you with a custom domain name by default, but again, you can get those for cheap.

Pros: Shopify basically handles everything for you, leaving you free to focus on making and selling games. They also have integrations with a ton of different services, meaning that if you choose your fulfillment partners correctly you can entirely automate the delivery process on your end after you make a sale (something that I encourage you to do as much as possible).

Cons: Their basic package is $29/month, which is a fair bit more than setting everything up yourself with WooCommerce. Also, you have to build your website using their platform, which means you can’t customize it as much as you would if you built it yourself.

If you want to spend even less time on setup, you can sell your games on a marketplace, such as Amazon. Selling on Amazon through an Amazon Seller’s Account lets you reach a huge audience of potential customers without having to set up a website yourself. It also lets you use Fullfillment by Amazon, which can cut a lot of the headache out of inventory management and associated logistics.

I honestly don’t have much to say about this option–whether it’s an effective strategy or not, what hiccups you might run into along the way, etc–because I stopped looking into it when I found out how much a seller’s account costs.

Pros: Amazon has a huge audience, many of whom are used to buying games on the platform. You don’t have to set up and maintain a website, just a seller’s page. Fulfillment by Amazon can handle all of the logistics for you.

Cons: $39.99/month, plus storage costs if you use Fulfillment by Amazon. Also, you probably want to set up your own website for marketing purposes anyway, so why not sell games through that?

My Next Steps

This is all a kind of long-winded way of explaining that No Honor Among Thieves will be available for retail purchase within the next couple months, after all of my Kickstarter backers have their games. I’ve got six-hundred extra copies that I’m going to be able to sell, and if they go fast enough that I think a second printing is warranted then that’s going to be good evidence that there’s demand for an expansion, which I’ll then be able to start working on. So my game design and publishing plans really depend on how well I manage these sales.

It’s been a long road to get to this point–four years, from coming up with the idea in 2014 to finally shipping in 2018–and frankly I’m amazed I’ve gotten this far with it. Hopefully my experience can help someone else publish their own game a bit more quickly than mine.

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#Carpe Omnis Games #No Honor Among Thieves

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carpeomnisgames · 7 years

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I am, it turns out, super bad at naming things. Or super good, maybe, seeing as the issue is that other people keep having the same ideas. Great minds supposedly think alike, after all.

Back when I was developing No Honor Among Thieves, I ran into a bit of a problem where someone else started making a game with the same name. This happened twice. Obviously this was because No Honor Among Thieves is a great name for a game, and I’m not the only person to realize it, which in retrospect I probably should have seen coming. It didn’t take me long to resolve the situation either time it happened, but it was still stressful for me, and I swore to avoid the problem in the future by making up words for my next project’s title.

Which brings me to now. As mentioned back in this survey I ran, I’ve been writing a tabletop roleplaying sourcebook to help people in running grungy criminal caper shenanigans in fantasy cities, with themes similar to those present in No Honor Among Thieves. This is a genre that has been seeing more and more popularity in roleplaying games with systems like Blades in the Dark and Dusk City Outlaws coming out, and also rising popularity in the literature I like to read (see The Lies of Locke Lamora, Low Town, Six of Crows, and others). The genre doesn’t really have a name, and “low-fantasy urban crime stories” doesn’t flow off the tongue particularly well, so I thought I’d be clever and invent a term to use. I like steampunk and cyberpunk stuff, and I also enjoy the “punk” genre suffix, so I decided that the term I’d use for these adventures in the gutters would be “gutterpunk.”

I was so damn proud of how clever that word was. What a cool name for a genre, right?

I’ve been calling this book Gutterpunk Fantasy since I started writing it in February. Recently it got to the point where I’m almost done, and have been going back and doing major revision work. At about the same time I figured I ought to start looking into my publishing options, as well as places that I might promote it during the inevitable Kickstarter to fund publication (since No Honor Among Thieves is going to leave me flat broke by the time shipping is done). As part of all that, I Googled the term “gutterpunk.”

Turns out gutterpunk is already a thing. Specifically, it’s a subculture. Of transient punk-rock train-hopping hobos.

I could still use the word, of course, but I’m not sure if I really want that connotation, and that overwhelming population of other Google results whenever anyone searches for the book in the future. My solution to this problem with No Honor Among Thieves was to talk to the other people involved and work out an arrangement where I got to use the name, but you can’t do that with an entire subculture, so this time it looks like I’ll be the one making some changes.

I’ve been putting together a list of alternate titles, with assistance from some friends. My personal favorite is Crooked Alleys: Criminal Roleplaying in Fantasy Cities, but I’m open to other ideas if you’ve got any. Leave a comment below or send me a message if you’ve got something good.

Other ideas:

Gutter Rat Fantasy

Gutters and Gold

Street Rats

Street Games

Grime and the Gutter

Major themes of the book: fantasy street gangs, heists, mysteries, conspiracies, and lots of random tables for generating cities or adventures. There’s some D&D and Pathfinder content in there as well, included under the open gaming license, but it’s mostly systemless.

(In a city of crooked alleys / Crookeder women and wicked men…)

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#Carpe Omnis Games #No Honor Among Thieves

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carpeomnisgames · 7 years

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When I launched my Kickstarter campaign for No Honor Among Thieves, I promised a delivery date of May. At the time I though that was being overly pessimistic, and that I would probably deliver one or two months before that, and everyone would be all impressed. Guess what? It’s almost July now, and the game isn’t out yet. I’m getting a pre-production copy in two weeks, so I can’t even say that pre-production is done.

Though I do have some very nice coin sculpts from the manufacturer now.

Over the course of this process, I’ve come up with a list of things that I need to do better next time to make sure that whatever the next project is, it’s delivered when I say it will be. I’m just going to throw them up here in bullet points, so that I remember them later. Maybe they’ll help someone else too, who knows.

Get time quotes as well as price quotes from the artists. I lost a lot of time during illustration because I didn’t realize how long it would take the artists I was working with to complete the illustrations I’d commissioned from them. Eventually I ended up hiring on more artists to try and speed things up a bit.

Ask the manufacturer for templates instead of trying to build my own templates based on the requirements in their design guidebook. Alternatively, I could have hired a professional graphic designer instead of doing it all myself, but I wanted to save money, so here we are. I’ll probably do all the component files myself again in the future, too, because I know what I’m doing now.

On a related note, now I know all of the color settings that card files need to have in order to be usable by the manufacturer, so for my next project I can start working with those from the get-go instead of having to convert everything later.

Get templates for any components that I’ve got freelance layout or graphic designers working on, instead of just sending them a link to the manufacturer’s design guidebook. Also, immediately put those people in direct contact with the manufacturer’s pre-press team if there are any issues. A large portion of the past couple months has been spent going back and forth between the layout designer and the pre-press guy making small changes to the rulebook for the game, and I really need to have some procedure in place to speed things up if that happens in the future.

Get final versions of components to show to backers as soon as you can. I got some really great feedback from showing people the box and the rulebook PDF that I think improved the final product significantly. This bullet point doesn’t necessarily save you time, but it’s still a good thing to do.

Budget an extra three months on top of however much you think you need. I don’t think I’m ever going to promise to deliver a game in less than a year again, unless I already have the art completely done and files checked over by the manufacturer when I go to Kickstarter.

The way things are going, it might be September before people get their copies of the game. At least we’re still on track to complete the project–people will be getting their games. And once they do, I’ll have the hard choice of deciding what project I want to publish next–I’ve got another card game moving into blind playtesting, and 61k words of a tabletop RPG sourcebook that I’m just starting to edit, either one of which could conceivably be ready for a crowdfunding campaign by the time NoHAT actually delivers. Hopefully I’ll be able to apply these lessons to whichever project I decide to go forward with.

The post Avoiding Delays: A List of Things to Do Better Next Time appeared first on Carpe Omnis.

#Carpe Omnis Games #No Honor Among Thieves

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carpeomnisgames · 7 years

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Last week, I ran a poll asking people which of the projects I’ve been working on they’d be interested in, because I’m basically just waiting on the manufacturer to move forward with No Honor Among Thieves right now and figured I could put a little time into something else. I put five of my project ideas into the poll, and a box where people could enter their own ideas and comments. I was expecting thirty responses or so, which would give me a good idea of what I should focus on for what I try to publish next.

At the time of this writing, I have 223 responses to the survey, which is providing me with some really good data. I asked people to rate each option from 0 to 5, where 0 is not interested at all and 5 is very interested, so looking at the graph for each project can give us a good idea of how much people are interested in it.

The first option was an expansion for No Honor Among Thieves. As the graph shows, there’s a lot of interest in this. However, a not-insignificant number of respondents used the comments form to tell me that they wouldn’t know how interested they’d be in an expansion until they’d played the original game, which is a fair point. Despite the amount of interest, an expansion likely won’t be my most immediate next project, since people do deserve a chance to play the base game first. That said, I’m definitely going to put making one on the schedule somewhere in the next few years.

The next option I put into the survey was a tabletop roleplaying sourcebook that I’ve been writing for running games in the sort of criminal low-fantasy genre that No Honor Among Thieves is set in. This wouldn’t be a full roleplaying game system for the genre–that already exists, in the form of Blades in the Dark and Dusk City Outlaws–but it will contain a lot of random tables, tools and mechanics that can be slotted into any system, and some general advice for playing the genre, as well as some Open Game License content for D&D 5e and Pathfinder. I’ve got 68 pages written thus far, in the two months I’ve been working on it.

As you can see from the graph, interest is split pretty evenly on this one. I assume the people on the left are the people who don’t play tabletop RPGs, and the people on the right are the ones who do. There are significantly less people interested in this than are interested in an expansion, or in the project I posted next (see the entry on Station Nine below). However, the budget for this project is also about ten times less than either the NoHAT expansion or S9. From the quotes I’ve gotten and the calculations I’ve made, I could publish this book with a budget of $2000. If I charge $10 for a PDF copy, and everyone who set this at 3 or above in the poll backs it at that minimum level to get the book, then that’s 48.5% funded from an audience that consists only of the 223 people who responded to the poll. For reference, similar calculations for the expansion and S9 put the expansion at 34.2% and S9 at 20%. Which are both great numbers, and mean that the projects are very likely to succeed if I go to publish them; it’s just that the sourcebook is most likely to succeed.

I think this could be a great interstitial book to publish in between larger board game projects, and I’m definitely going to move forward with it. It’s not taking up too many resources and I’ve been really enjoying the process of writing it, so why not? I’ve been using it as an excuse for some interesting research and watching Leverage, which is always a good time.

This was the next option in the poll. “Station Nine” is the working title for a game I’ve been developing since just before launching the Kickstarter for No Honor Among Thieves, and which has come together very quickly when compared to my previous game. It’s about fiddling with the life support systems on a space station to favor your alien species over the ones represented by the other players. Essentially, it’s passive-aggressive thermostat changing on a much larger scale. I posted up a few cards that I did the graphic design on (which someone used the comments form to tell me looked “like a chemistry text book”), and people seemed to really respond well to the scientific art-deco design and the brief description I included. Interest in this project isn’t as fervent as interest in the expansion one, obviously, but it’s definitely there. With this level of interest, Station Nine will probably be my next big board game publication.

When I was reading the manufacturing quote for NoHAT, I misread the section on the metal coins, and it looks like they’re going to cost me a lot more than expected. So I’m not going to be able to afford to produce many extra packs of them for sale at retail after the Kickstarter, which was something I promised during the campaign that I’d have available. This poll option was to see how interested people would be in a campaign to fund the manufacture of more of those metal coins. As you can see, the response was kind of mediocre. The result of this poll means that I’m going to at the very least put other projects ahead of this one, and possibly delay it indefinitely if no one expresses more interest in it later on.

For our final poll option, we get to see that not many people give a damn about merchandise. Which is about what I expected, really. I’ll still probably put together some shirts or something at some point (someone used the comments section to request patches as well, which is a cool idea), but I’m not exactly going to prioritize it, and I’m going to look into using a print-on-demand company instead of stocking inventory.

Trends in the Comments Section

There were a couple of noteworthy trends in the comments box on the poll that I found interesting.

First was the one that I mentioned earlier, the people telling me that they didn’t know yet if they were interested in an expansion or not. Honestly, I feel like this is something that I should have figured out before anyone told me. It’s a very good point.

Second were people not quite understanding what the Gutterpunk Fantasy option was. Some people asked for clarification, while others seemed to be assuming it was a full game system. I edited the poll option halfway through to be more clear, but just in case anyone is still confused, this is meant to be a book of tools and advice that can be used with any game system, not a system in itself. It’s a sourcebook, not a core book. I am working on a tabletop roleplaying system, but it’s something I’ve been touching on and off for two years and will likely continue working on for the next five, and this isn’t it.

Third were the commentators that I found the most interesting. A lot of people (as in, multiple people telling me almost the exact same thing) gave me suggestions for a game about different underworld factions competing over control of a city that sounded to me an awful lot like an idea I’d already been toying with. I have a collection of game concepts that I want to make at some point, ideas that only have a few pieces of theme or mechanics attached to them and which I want to flesh out at some point–for example, a noir mystery game where one player is the detective and one of the other players has secretly committed the crime, but everyone else playing also has unrelated secrets they’re trying to hide from being discovered, and it’s all The Resistance and Werewolf and whatnot. One of the ideas in that collection is a fantasy city intrigue game based on a well-received forum game I ran back in 2012 on the GiantITP forums. I honestly wasn’t sure what game idea I was going to pull out of that collection of half-formed concepts to work on after I finish with the projects I’ve currently got running, but since there seems to be interest in that one…

I also had one or two requests for a smaller-scale more swashbuckling kind of game, which I quite like the idea of. I’ll see what I can do with that.

Thanks to everyone who submitted a response to the survey. Collecting this data has been very helpful to me in analyzing what I want to do next.

The post Next Project Poll Results appeared first on Carpe Omnis.

#Carpe Omnis Games #No Honor Among Thieves

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carpeomnisgames · 7 years

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This month is mostly going to be waiting on the manufacturer for No Honor Among Thieves, so I figured I could spend that time working on something else. I’ve got a number of things I’ve been stirring up, but to make sure I’m on the right track I wanted to put up a survey to ask people what they’d be interested in from Carpe Omnis Games.

If you’ve got a moment, check out the embedded Google Form below.

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The post Carpe Omnis Games: Next Project Poll appeared first on Carpe Omnis.

#Carpe Omnis Games #No Honor Among Thieves

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carpeomnisgames · 7 years

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In my previous post, I promised that I would write up something about art directing and dealing with freelancers. I’ve got all my illustrations for No Honor Among Thieves at this point, and am in the process of getting things sent to the manufacturer for them to do their part, so I figured now would be a good time to sit back and talk about that, since I have such recent experience with it.

Where Do I Find Freelance Artists?

I am a member of a bunch of different Facebook groups, subreddits, and other forums where new and experienced tabletop designers and publishers can ask questions of each other. One that I see come up very often is some variation of the following: “Where can I find artists to work on my project?”

This is something that I struggled with for a while. At first I tried contacting artists directly based on their DeviantArt profiles, which didn’t really work out. The few artists who bothered to reply to my query emails responded that they were too busy to take on additional work, or asked for more details and then never replied further when I got back to them. I’ve heard that some people have had good results from commissioning artists that they found on DevientArt, but I personally have never had any luck with it.

If you want to do the same thing on a website that is actually composed of concept and game artists looking for work, I would suggest browsing ArtStation rather than DeviantArt. You’re more likely to run into people who are actual professional artists instead of hobbyists.

You don’t really need to search for artists, though. You can get them to come to you very easily by posting a job on freelancer sites like Guru.com or Fiverr — I got great art from artists on both of those sites. Leave the job posting up for a week, and if your post is well written you should get twenty to forty replies from different artists. The aforementioned ArtStation also lets you post jobs, but charges you $150 for each one that you post, which is a bit much for your average indie Kickstarter.

In general, posting jobs and letting people apply will let you find artists much faster than seeking them out yourself.

The Inquisitor, by Florencio Duyar III

How Do I Write the Job Posting?

There are certain elements that you need in the job posting to ensure that you get the sort of artist you’re looking for. The first time I made one of these postings, I got a lot of artists that just weren’t suitable at all for what I needed, and had to spend a lot of time sorting through them. The second time I was much more specific with what I wanted, which saved me a lot of effort.

Describe the style of art that you want, and provide links to examples. Find something on Google Image Search that looks like what you’re going for.

Outline your budget. How much are you willing to pay for illustrations? Mention your maximum cutoff in the initial posting and you won’t spend as much time staring at amazing portfolios wishing you could afford to hire them.

Mention in the post that applicants should provide a link to a portfolio. I know this seems obvious, but if you don’t mention it then sometimes people don’t bother. If they send you an application without a portfolio after you’ve put it in the job posting, then you know that they can’t follow basic written instructions and you probably don’t want to work with them.

Describe the scope of the work. Are you going to be assigning an artist a dozen illustrations? Two? A hundred?

Definitely link to your Kickstarter page or other web presence so that prospective artists can get a better idea of the themes you’re trying to get across with the art.

Include these elements, and you should get a much more focused and specific group of freelancers looking for work.

Bored Guards, by Sheryl Chieng

Which Artist(s) Should I Work With?

The people who respond to your job posting on freelancer websites can usually be broken down into a couple of broad categories.

Design companies with staff, a logo, and a professional proposal. These can range from companies with wildly different skills than what you were looking for that were obviously just going through every new post in the Illustrations category and replying to it with a form letter, to companies that actually look competent and could probably do everything you need them to. I’ve never worked with any of these companies, personally. I like to have a personal relationship with my freelancers, and I like to review a specific person’s portfolio rather than not be sure which artist out of half a dozen at the company I’ll be getting.

Companies and individuals who grossly misunderstood what you are looking for and obviously either misread or ignored the text of the job posting. For example, every time I have posted a new job on one of these sites I have received responses from programmers offering to build websites or apps for me. Sorry, buddy, but that’s not at all what the posting was about.

Individual artists who understood the posting and are ready to work. Those are the people you have to sort through to narrow down who you want to work with.

When you’re sorting your artist applications, you need to answer a couple of questions for each one of them.

Does this artist do good work in the style I’m looking for? Go over their portfolio of previous work and make sure it looks good. Keep an eye out for issues like wonky perspective, mushy shading, and unsettling proportions. Also note any peculiarities of their style. For example, if the pieces in their portfolio are all character art with no backgrounds, don’t expect them to be able to draw landscapes or complicated machinery or anything that isn’t character art with no backgrounds. Also pay attention to their style in general — if you’re looking for realistic drawings and their portfolio is entirely cartoons, that’s probably not someone you want to hire for this job.

Does this artist have any issues communicating in English? Thanks to the Internet, you can work with artists from all over the world, which means you’re going to be talking to a lot of people for whom English is a second language. Usually that’s not a problem, but very occasionally you’ll come across a message from an artist with great work but who you can’t really communicate with. You can still work with those people, but realize that it’s going to be more difficult, and take more time.

How much does this artist charge per illustration? From my experience commissioning card art, prices can range anywhere from $30 per illustration to $200+. In general, my rule is that if an artist charges $60-$100 for a small colored illustration for a card, then that’s an artist to keep on file. If they charge over $100, then you might want to consider only using them for the larger or more important pieces of art. If they charge over $200, you could probably use them if your game doesn’t have that many cards and you’re flush with cash, but otherwise you can find people who will work for cheaper. If your game requires larger pieces of art than cards, be prepared to pay $150 and up, all the way to $400-$600 for covers or boards.

Is this artist reliable? There’s not really any good way of telling this. The freelancer sites tend to let employers review freelancers and vice-versa, so you can sometimes go off of those, but the best way to tell if someone is reliable or not is to work with them. I like to assign one or two small pieces to an artist before working with them more extensively, to see how fast they work and how reliably they deliver, but even with the best people sometimes things come up unexpectedly. Over the course of getting illustrations for No Honor Among Thieves I had multiple artists get sick, one hard drive crash, and one poor guy who had his apartment flood while he was trying to work on my art. The best way I can say to build up reliability is to have a stable of artists that you know and can work with, and know who is fast enough that you could potentially sub them in if another artist becomes unable to complete their work.

If you want to have only one artist illustrating your game, obviously that approach won’t work. In that case, you’ll have to be extra careful when coming up with that initial relationship. I cannot stress enough the importance of working with your artists ahead of time if you’re able. You need to know how long they will take to complete illustrations, how much instruction they need and if they can follow instructions given. You need to know if they will communicate when things go wrong, and you need to know that they’re good for the work. Even then, be sure to build in an extra month (at least!) to your illustration schedule, just in case something goes wrong. Because something will go wrong. That’s life.

Paranoia, by Chyi Ming Lee

How Do I Pay My Artists?

Never, ever, pay in advance. Unless you know the artist personally, have worked with them many times before, and are willing to never see that money again if worse comes to worst. I made this mistake once, and then never again.

Escrow is your friend. If you don’t want to figure out an escrow service (some of the freelancer sites, such as Guru.com, offer them for free — read through the documentation of the sites you decide to use) then I suggest a simple half now, half later approach.

You may want to come up with a freelancer contract for your artists to sign, especially if you’re heavily working with one in particular or aren’t working through a freelancer site with its own contract built-in. You can find basic templates for this sort of thing all over the internet. Pick and choose the language you want to use. What you want is a work-for-hire agreement, unless you’ve decided to split profits with your artist, in which case you should probably consult a lawyer instead of asking the opinion of a part-time game designer offering anecdotal advice.

The Sponsor, by Ahmad Said

Conclusion

I think that covers most everything. Remember to check in with your artists if you haven’t heard from them in a while just in case something’s gone wrong, get them to keep you updated with sketches and the like so you know how things are progressing and can make changes when it would be easy to make them, and always be polite and understanding. Treating people with respect and courtesy goes a long way towards getting good work done.

If you have any questions about any aspect of hiring and working with artists, please feel free to ask in the comments. I don’t have experience with profit sharing agreements and the like, so I can’t offer advice on that, but I have worked with a dozen or so different artists over the course of this project, and I think I’ve gotten the hang of it at this point. Hopefully this is helpful to someone.

The post Post-Kickstarter Work: Art Directing appeared first on Carpe Omnis.

#Carpe Omnis Games #No Honor Among Thieves

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carpeomnisgames · 7 years

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Back before launching the Kickstarter for No Honor Among Thieves, I posted a list of Kickstarter lessons that I had distilled from all the advice given to me before I ran my crowdfunding campaign. Now it’s been a few months since the campaign successfully funded, and I’m almost through the preproduction stage of actually manufacturing and publishing this game. It’s past time I sat down and wrote the companion article I promised back then, talking about what I learned while doing the campaign that I wasn’t expecting or didn’t know about going in, hopefully to help other people avoid my mistakes in the future.

Let’s break this down by sections, shall we?

A Brief Overview of the Campaign

I launched the crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter on Tuesday, August 30, 2016, with a funding goal of $28,000. I picked Tuesday because according to what I’d read that’s a good day for launching a campaign. I ended on a Tuesday for the same reason, on September 27th. The goal was set at $28,000 because that was the absolute minimum I felt I needed to make the game to the quality that I wanted, according to all the quotes I’d gotten for manufacturing, shipping, and illustration. The first few days, as expected, went really well, and then things tapered off for a while, also as expected–most crowdfunding campaigns follow a sort of reverse bell curve, doing well at the start and end, with a slump in the middle. I had a significant boost midway through the campaign, when I attended the Boston Festival of Indie Games as part of the Indie Tabletop Showcase. After the Showcase I also added a couple new higher-value pledge levels and opened up more of the pledges that got backers’ faces on cards, because I felt that it needed a boost at that point. Throughout the campaign I also had reviews, interviews, blog posts, designer diaries, and Reddit AmA threads going, as well as advertising on a number of different sites. I didn’t quite manage to achieve the ideal of having something going on every single day of the campaign, but I came damn close.

There was a while after the boost from Boston FIG had ended where I was afraid that the campaign might not actually fund, which wasn’t a good feeling to have. It turned out to be an unfounded fear, however, as the campaign went absolutely crazy on the final few days, ending at $46,325, approximately 165% of the funding goal.

You can see the campaign’s day-by-day statistics on the Kicktraq page, which if you don’t know is a fantastic site that automatically consolidates a lot of data about campaigns on Kickstarter. It’s a great source for research and analytics.

The pledges-per-day chart is the most useful, I feel. Though I’m not sure why it spilled over onto the 28th, when the campaign only ran until midnight on the 27th.

Cross-Promotion

One thing that really helped out later in the campaign was some cross-promotion from another Kickstarter campaign that was ongoing at the same time, for a game called Endangered Orphans of Condyle Cove by Certifiable Studios. One of my backers, who was also one of their backers, posted a link to my campaign in their very active comments section, and the guys at Certifiable Studios decided that they really wanted to get their hands on No Honor Among Thieves. So they made my campaign reaching its funding goal a requirement for one of their stretch goals. Now, I had gone into the campaign not planning on doing any cross-promotion with other Kickstarters, because I’d seen a lot of that done in campaigns I’d followed previously–a slew of “here’s another campaign that we think you might be interested in!” notes at the end of a campaign update, that sort of thing–and it had always kind of annoyed me. But what the Condyle guys did for me was amazing, and really contributed to me getting as much as I did from the campaign during those final days. Due to them promoting my game to their audience, without asking and just because they liked the game I was working on, I was able to hit my funding goal a day before Kickstarter sent out the 48-hour reminder to all the people who’d clicked the “Remind Me” button, which meant that everyone who came back to look at the campaign at that time saw a successful, fully-funded campaign starting to blow through stretch goals. Success breeds success on Kickstarter, and people are more likely to pledge to a campaign that is already funded than one which has yet to reach its goal, no matter how close it might be to said goal. The whole experience has changed my view on cross-promotion on Kickstarter, to be honest. I’m still against badgering people for link exchanges and whatnot, though I’ve been told that doing that sort of thing actually works and it can be done relatively tastefully, but highlighting someone else’s campaign because you think your audience might be interested in it is another thing entirely. For example, I was on Kickstarter the other day and saw a campaign for a tabletop roleplaying game called Dusk City Outlaws that I think the audience of No Honor Among Thieves would enjoy, since it’s concerned with a lot of the same themes and inspirations. I’m planning on mentioning that campaign in my monthly production update later in February. Pass along the good vibes that the Condyle people sent my way.

You can easily see on the comments-per-day chart where the backers from Condyle Cove started joining the campaign for NoHAT.

Advertising and Paid Marketing

At the time that I was planning and running the crowdfunding campaign for No Honor Among Thieves, I worked at a branding agency as a web development and digital marketing specialist. Using what I’d learned at work on a project of my own was great fun, though I may have gotten a little carried away with it. Over the course of the campaign I took out banner ads on multiple sites, ran a Google AdWords campaign, and ran ads on Facebook.

Banner Ads

The banner ads were, with few exceptions, not really worth the money. I tried running ads on a number of different gaming review and news sites, most of which brought the campaign less than fifty views each. Considering the total views that the Kickstarter page had over the course of the entire campaign was 29,564, fifty views is…not a lot. Especially when it looks like most of those views didn’t actually lead to anyone backing the project, though admittedly that sort of thing is a bit difficult to track (if someone finds your campaign through an ad and then comes back later to back it, the analytics will generally give credit for that pledge to however they found it the second time, which is probably going to mean crediting Kickstarter or Google rather than the actual source). Like I said, however, there were some exceptions. Here’s the breakdown:

Source Number of Backers Number of Dollars BoardGameGeek.com 21 $983 Project Wonderful 12 $614 Kicktraq 8 $375 All Others 2 $104

Note that the BoardGameGeek numbers might also include some that were from forum threads on BoardGameGeek. I had a mix up in my Google Analytics that I only corrected halfway through the campaign, so some wires may have gotten crossed there. Same with Kicktraq: I unfortunately didn’t get my analytics issue corrected in time to be able to know if those 8 backers came from the ads I ran on Kicktraq, or from seeing the campaign in their Top Ten list, or what.

From the numbers that I have on hand, though, it looks like BoardGameGeek was the best investment, hands down. Looking at the number of sessions that came from each source, my banner ads on BGG brought 3,861 views to the Kickstarter page, which was about 13% of all views over the course of the campaign. There’s no way to tell how many of those pledged immediately and how many hit the “Remind Me” button and came back to pledge later, so I’m still going to count that advertising buy as a clear success even though according to the numbers I have it brought to the campaign only about as much money as I spent on it (I bought a bunch of ads during the month and a home-page takeover on the final day of the campaign, for reference). I’m definitely going to work with them again.

The listing for Project Wonderful in the table is a little misleading, since it implies that PW is all one source. Project Wonderful is an advertising network shared by a number of different sites, with a bidding system that works well to get you really cheap ad space on a lot of the sites they work with. Running a marketing campaign on Project Wonderful can be a little hit or miss, and honestly I don’t think I’d recommend it if you aren’t willing to put the time in and really do the research with each of their sites that you’re thinking of putting ads on. I personally put ads on Giant in the Playground‘s forums, 1d4chan.org, and a bunch of webcomics that I like to read. My ads on Giant in the Playground alerted some old friends of mine on the forums that I hadn’t talked to in a year or so that the Kickstarter was going on, which led to a bunch of guys I used to play play-by-post wargames with backing the project. Of the others, I got two backers from 1d4chan, which cost me practically nothing to put ads on, and got no backers from anywhere else I placed ads with Project Wonderful. Like I said, hit or miss. The real takeaway from this is to remember to let your old friends know about what you’re up to, especially if they’ve played forum games that you made and therefore already know that they like your work.

Kicktraq was also up there, but I think that most of those came from No Honor Among Thieves being in their Top Ten for a lot of the campaign. Their advertising program is new, and experimental, and I was happy to be a part of it, but I’m not certain if I’d do it again. For a big project, maybe, but not if you’re on a limited budget.

Nowhere else that I placed banner ads brought in significant views or backers. Out of the lot of them, I think I’d be most willing to work with The Dice Tower again, because I only put ads on there when I was most of the way through the campaign, and they still brought in over 200 views. I think a full month of that would have done some good.

Overall, I have to say that as much fun as they are to design, relying on banner ads is not a winning strategy. If you’re running a big campaign with a bit of a marketing budget, ads on BoardGameGeek are your best option.

Google AdWords

I don’t know if I set it up wrong or if Google AdWords is just not a good choice for Kickstarter marketing, but whatever the reason, I really did not do well with this platform, to the point where I stopped using it entirely partway through the campaign because it was just draining money without providing any return. I am planning on trying again next time, because from how much I’ve read about their system it really seems like it should work for me. I would advise against trying to use AdWords yourself unless you’re willing to put the time in to learn how to really use it.

Facebook Ads

Buying ads on Facebook worked out really, really well, once I figured out how to do them right. At first I just sponsored posts from my company Facebook page, which brought in about 70 views total. About halfway through the month I wised up and used Facebook Ad Manager to make a much better ad, which brought in 1,269 views over the remainder of the campaign. You have to make sure you target them right, and build ads that people will actually want to click on, but I think I can safely say that placing ads on Facebook was a good choice.

Reviews, Interviews, and Other Marketing

My paid marketing efforts were effective overall, if more expensive than they really needed to be. It was the unpaid stuff that really worked out for me, though. The reviews, interviews, blog posts and social media stuff that I had going on during the campaign were really the driving force behind how well I did day-to-day, and according to my analytics and anecdotal evidence from backers this category of marketing brought in the most funding, by reaching out to people who might be interested in the project and confirming in their eyes that it was in good hands.

In total, the campaign got fifteen backers and $887 dollars directly from the sites of reviewers, interviewers, and bloggers that I had reached out to before the campaign launched. Once again, however, there is no way of telling how many people read a review or interview and then visited the Kickstarter page to back it later on. These sources also served to bolster the interest of anyone visiting the page from any other source, since I linked to a lot of them in the Reviews section of the page.

I also got 25 backers and $1,120 directly from Reddit, where I posted about the game multiple times on a handful of different subreddits and ran an AmA thread on the last day of the campaign. I really like Reddit–it’s a great place to both talk about games and get the word out about what you’re working on. You can’t come at the site too much from an advertising perspective, because the users on there can smell a marketing shill miles away, but if you treat them like you’re just sharing something you think they might be interested in, and are able to hold an actual conversation with people there, then the place can really work out for you. Don’t get dragged into silly arguments or flamewars and you’ll be fine.

I’d say that the biggest impact on my campaign as a whole were the reviews that I got. Especially helpful was the Father Geek review, which multiple backers told me was what convinced them to back the campaign. I personally really enjoyed the feature in the Polyhedron Collider podcast dedicated to No Honor Among Thieves–the guys at PC had a lot of fun with the game, and listening to them tell stories of heists past was really great. Other reviewers, like Jonathan H. Liu of GeekDad, noticed issues with the game that I was able to patch and playtest during the campaign, thus improving the final product.

The slate of reviews I got were, on the whole, incredibly positive, which was a great thing to see. When you’re making something, it can be hard to tell whether it’s actually any good or not, because you’re in the thick of it and you’re spending so much time hunting for problems rather than looking at what’s going well. Having that third-party validation was an amazing experience.

My only problem with reviews was that I think I had too few of them. I had planned for seven, but one of the reviewers I’d contacted and sent a game and who had said he’d do a review never posted one and never got back to me when I asked him about it, so I ended up with six. Which is a decent number! But I think I could have had more, from a greater variety of reviewers. For my next major project I’m planning on aiming for ten or more.

Doing Better Next Campaign

The campaign did well. Really, really well. But there’s always room for improvement.

Here’s a quick summary of what I think I could do better next time:

First up: as I mentioned before, more reviews. In the run-up to launch I kept finding more people that I could have sent boxes to, and hopefully I’ll be able to work with them for my next game.

Related to the first: have more demo boxes on hand during the campaign. Early on there were a couple people who contacted me asking if they could get a copy of the game during the campaign to review, and it would have been great to have been able to send them one.

Spend advertising dollars on the places that worked. I’ve done the experimenting, and next time around I can use that data to not waste so much money.

Australian-friendly shipping. There were a lot of people from down under paying the extra $10 for shipping, and I’m pretty sure that next time I can make it so they don’t have to.

Get more podcasts and bloggers and interviews! I didn’t do many this time around. I was on one podcast, got mentioned in a couple newsposts, wrote a single guest blog post, did two interviews, and was discussed on another podcast. I feel like that’s not really all that much, for a campaign of 29 days. I did contact a lot of people, but most of them couldn’t fit me into their schedules at the time. Hopefully for my next project people will be more willing to talk with someone who’s already proven he can do this Kickstarter publishing thing.

Related to the above, next time I’ll try not to send emails to media people just before Gen Con. Because of course everyone was too busy for my first-time indie Kickstarter, they had to report on all the stuff coming out of Gen Con.

Also, I’d like to try to go to Gen Con with a demo of the game instead of complaining about how no one will talk to me because they’re all busy getting ready for Gen Con.

Small one here that came up a surprising number of times: for a lot of people, the end of the month is payday, and I ended my campaign right before it. Next time, I want to end right after payday, so people actually have money on hand.

And finally, next time I’d like to recruit at least one other person to help me run the campaign and get everything set up ahead of time, because my God was this a lot of work. Fun work, but also really, really exhausting.

Next time I’ll talk about the process of preproduction, and how much fun it is to be an art director.

The post Post-Kickstarter Retrospective: What to Do Better Next Time appeared first on Carpe Omnis.

#Carpe Omnis Games #No Honor Among Thieves

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carpeomnisgames · 8 years

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A month before launching my Kickstarter campaign, I had the opportunity to pitch my game company to investors and entrepreneurs at a shark tank-like event in my town called Road Pitch. I didn’t get any investment, but I did learn some lessons that I thought might help anyone else looking to try and walk that path after me, so I wrote up my experiences into a guest post for Stonemaier Games. Jamey at Stonemaier has a long and exhaustive series of Kickstarter Lessons that I studied extensively before launching the campaign for No Honor Among Thieves, and I couldn’t be happier to contribute to that collection.

From the post:

“I honestly wasn’t interested at first. I was getting money from Kickstarter, so why would I need or even want to pitch my company to investors? It seemed like it was the sort of event not meant for indie companies the size of mine, so I was planning on passing on the opportunity until two little things came up that convinced me otherwise.

The first was that Greg (the guy in charge of the event in my town) assured me that part of the pitch session was about getting advice and feedback from the Riders, not just investment opportunities. I’d be able to run my plans past actual business people and see if they thought there was a chance I could turn this hobby of mine into something more. In retrospect, this was the most valuable thing I got out of the whole process.

The second was that I realized I’d make a pretty major mistake in my budget estimates, and I actually needed about seven thousand more dollars than I’d been expecting to publish the game. This was really not good news for a first-time crowdfunder already worried that I was asking backers for too much. Suddenly, the thought of looking for traditional investment before the Kickstarter didn’t seem like such a bad idea.”

Read the full post here.

In other news, No Honor Among Thieves is currently 10 days in, and is 45% funded. If you haven’t taken a look at the campaign before, now’s a good time. I’m going to be at the Boston Festival of Indie Games on Saturday, and I’m hoping that interest there might push us over the halfway mark a week before the halfway point of the campaign.

The post Guest Post on Stonemaier Games: Seeking Investment Before Kickstarter appeared first on Carpe Omnis.

#Carpe Omnis Games #No Honor Among Thieves

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carpeomnisgames · 8 years

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It’s taken two years to get to this point, and a number of delays, but I’ve finally got everything nailed down. No Honor Among Thieves is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter.

Check out the campaign here.

Before I head back to feverishly attending to my new campaign, I’d like to take a moment to thank everyone who helped me get this far. Thanks to the playtesters, to my friends who called me on my bullshit and the people at conventions who took a chance and sat down with an unfinished game. To the artists who did all the hard work on making the cards look good. To the professionals who bore with me while I got everything lined up for my first ever crowdfunding campaign.

Now it’s time to make this thing shine.

Assemble your crew. Make your plans. Take it all.

The post No Honor Among Thieves: Live on Kickstarter! appeared first on Carpe Omnis.

#Carpe Omnis Games #No Honor Among Thieves

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carpeomnisgames · 8 years

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In preparation for the launch of the No Honor Among Thieves Kickstarter campaign, I’ve decided to hold a little raffle for subscribers to the newsletter. Everyone who is subscribed to the No Honor Among Thieves newsletter by the time the campaign launches will have a chance to win fabulous prizes, including:

A free copy of the game after publication

A NoHAT hat

Ceramic poker tokens with Honor Among Thieves on one side and No Honor on the other

Possibly other prizes if people give me cool ideas for them

You can find more details here. If you’re interested in maybe winning some stuff, and also being alerted by email when the campaign launches, sign up for the newsletter either on that page or by using the form below.

First Name

Last Name

Email Address

Submit

The post Newsletter Raffle appeared first on Carpe Omnis.

#Carpe Omnis Games #No Honor Among Thieves

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carpeomnisgames · 8 years

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I’ve been fascinated by crowdfunding, and Kickstarter in particular, for a while now. I’ve been attending panels at various conventions, studying successful and not-so-successful campaigns, and reading articles or blog posts about the subject for four or five years. Also, as you may have gathered from all the posts about it on my blog, for the past two years I’ve been working on my own game that I’m planning on funding through Kickstarter. And finally I’ve recently begun being a bit more proactive and started asking questions and getting feedback from some of the crowdfunding veterans I’ve been following. I’ve made a bit of a study of it, is what I’m saying. Getting something published has been the dream for quite a while now, and I don’t want to spend all that time, work and passion on a project only to trip up at the goalpost.

When you read, listen to, watch or talk with enough of the people offering crowdfunding advice, you start to notice certain patterns. Everyone words it differently, and sometimes people offer contradictory advice, but there’s definitely a set of lessons that everyone seems to learn while going through this. I’ve seen a lot of that over the past few years of research, and I’ve tried to distill these lessons down into six main points, plus one that I learned myself and want to write down to remind myself about later.

This is going to be focused on games publishing through Kickstarter, because that’s what I’m interested in. The advice may also apply to other types of project and other crowdfunding platforms, but it’s the details will be about tabletop games.

1. Have a crowd before you begin

This is the big one, the advice that you’ll see over and over again if you do any amount of research into running a crowdfunding campaign. You can’t just go to Kickstarter without any preparation, hat in hand, and expect to be showered with cash to fund your wildest dreams. That doesn’t work. When you’re crowdfunding, you need to actually have a crowd to fund you, and they need to be a crowd that’s actually interested in what you’re doing.

This is the hardest one for a one-man first-time publisher trying to crowdfund a game, and one that I struggled with a lot until I realized I was already doing most of the things that I needed to do for it. I’ve had this blog since 2011, I regularly attend conventions with the game I’ve been working on, and I already comment on game forums to offer and ask advice. That’s the important thing, right there. You can’t build a crowd by offering no content. When you don’t have a game that people can buy quite yet, that means talking about things that people who might also be interested in your game are already interested in. Make stuff that you love, and make it good. That’s all it ever really takes.

On top of that, it helps to run a good social media presence. It’s better if you actually talk to people in the various mediums you use (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, whatever), but even just having an automated script that notifies your Twitter followers when you make a blog post helps. I use a service called If This, Then That to post to my Carpe Omnis Games Facebook and Twitter whenever I write a post on the blog related to the game. I also post other news that I don’t think merits a full blog post directly to both FB and Twitter. I’m not super good at interacting with people on these platforms, especially Twitter, but even I admit that they’re valuable tools for letting people know you’re out there. They’re certainly excellent for having a conversation, since that’s what they were designed for.

Post stuff that you’re interested in, and have conversations that are helpful to yourself and to others. Offer advice and ask for advice. You can’t just walk out and buy a community, you have to put the work in to build one.

No Honor Among Thieves has good graphic design for the Kickstarter, but is missing some art.

2. Be as finished as possible (but not completely finished)

You’re going to Kickstarter to pay for all the stuff you need to make your game, right?

No.

Your game should be made at this point. As much of it as possible. You should have the rules finalized already. The graphic design as done as you can get it. You should have art for as many cards or other components as you can afford (and if you can’t afford any, find some other way to make it look good–see point 3, below). People are going to want to read the rules, so you need them to be as close to done as you can get them, blind playtested front to back and mechanically rock solid. Your backers should be able to look at your game and get a good sense of what it is they’ll be buying, and whether or not it’s going to be worth pledging. You need to prove to people that you aren’t going to burn through their money without providing anything in return, and the best way to do that is to already have the final product most of the way done. Not 100% done–you’re on Kickstarter looking for funding after all, and if you look like you don’t need money then people aren’t going to trust that either–but to the point where you wouldn’t feel bad about putting the game on a table at a convention. Don’t make something that you’re ashamed to have your name attached to when you look back on it years later.

This leads directly into the next point…

3. Look good

You need to look professional. This ties back into proving to people that you aren’t going to waste their money. If you haven’t put the work in when setting up your Kickstarter page, or when making your videos and your imagery and your graphic design, people have no reason to believe that you’d put the work in when designing the game they’re supposedly funding. This means you need to have a good video, a good banner image for the page, and pictures of your best-looking prototype. It means charts showing the breakdown of where the money is going to go, and how to play videos. It means no typos, good copy on the page, and high quality images breaking up the text. If you can’t make good graphics or good copy yourself, you’ll either need to hire someone to do it for you or buckle down and practice until you get it right.

This point might seem superficial, but look at it from a backer’s perspective. They’re busy, they’ve got work of their own to do, and they’re taking time out of their day to read through your Kickstarter page. You only get one first impression. Even if your rules are genius, if the first impression of your game is a phone camera picture of cards that you cut out of letter paper, no one is going to take the time to look further, because 99 times out of 100 when you see something like that the end result isn’t genius. Having a good looking page lets people know that you’re taking the project seriously.

4. Get reviewed

This one is pretty simple. Find tabletop game reviewers, contact them and offer to send a prototype copy of your game for them to review. Most of the time people will agree to post the reviews during your Kickstarter. The idea here is to give people some objective, third-party verification that your game is good. This list collected and maintained by James Mathe is a good place to start, as is this list by Jamey Stegmaier. This goes hand in hand with the work you should be doing to get a crowd before you launch.

Be warned–some reviewers, especially the bigger ones who get a lot of requests to review games, charge money for Kickstarter previews. This makes sense from their perspective, since a crowdfunded game is a bit riskier for them than an already published game. There’s the chance that the game might not come out at all, the chance that the rules they play and review won’t be the same ones that eventually get published, and the chance that the game is just godawful and in no fit state to be published or played. In my experience, prices range anywhere from $75 to $200. There are plenty who do it for free, so if you’re not willing to shell out some cash for this you can still get reviews, but don’t be surprised if you come across the ones who charge.

5. Know the numbers

This one is pretty obvious to me, but from what I’ve been reading some people have had trouble with it in the past, so it’s a good thing to double check before you try to crowdfund your game. The rule is simple: know how much money you need, and for what. Before you launch, you should have quotes and estimates for every last thing you can think of. Manufacturing at multiple levels and with multiple sets of stretch goals, freight from the factory to the warehouse, distribution to backers, art and graphic design, the lot. You should know as best as you possibly can how much it will actually take to get this game made, and ask for a little more than that much money. Add a couple thousand dollars on top of it. Do not assume you will overfund, and set the funding goal lower than you actually need so that people get excited when they see how much it’s overfunded by. That’s a disaster begging to happen, and I keep being surprised that it would need to be mentioned, but apparently it’s an issue for some people.

You do want to ask for the least amount of money possible, but it should be the least amount of money possible while still getting the project done. Cut costs by working to get the best manufacturing and shipping quotes. It’s hard work, and you have to be careful to make sure that your super cheap option isn’t cheap due to terrible quality, but it can be done. Learn how to use some spreadsheet software (I use Google Sheets, personally) and get to work comparing numbers.

6. You will forget something, and it’s okay to delay things

Jamey Stegmaier says it best–you don’t have to launch today. What this boils down to is that if you don’t think you’re ready, for any reason at all, don’t launch. You’ve got to be a little careful with this one, because it can be easy to fall into a cycle of perfecting and delaying and never actually being finished, but most of the time when you have any concerns you can delay for a month and address them. I’ve done this a couple of times with No Honor Among Thieves, before coming to the point where I think I’m 100% ready. There’s still a lot to get done–I need to finish the Kickstarter video, for one thing–but it’s stuff that I can get done in a few weeks. The current plan is to launch the Kickstarter on August 25, and I’ll keep you posted if that changes at all.

Bonus: Do your due diligence on the name

This isn’t something that was mentioned more than offhand by anyone that I’ve been following, so I had to learn it the hard way. Say you have a name for the game you’re working on that you really, really like–it fits both the theme and mechanics perfectly, it flows off the tongue, no one else has used it yet, you’ve done thorough Google searching to make sure of that. Maybe your family gets you a gift or two with the name, and maybe you start using it in advertising. Before you get to that point, the point where you can’t change the name without losing a whole lot of work and monetary/emotional investment, make sure that no one else has started working on a game and decided to use the same name in the interim.

This actually happened to me twice during the two year development of No Honor Among Thieves. First, back in October of 2015, I was contacted by a very nice Bulgarian gentleman who said that he’d been working on a game called No Honor Among Thieves for a couple months, and maybe we should talk about the name. Since I’d been working on mine since 2014, he agreed to change the name of his to Among Thieves. We’ve talked a lot since then, comparing strategies and contacts and plans for our Kickstarters, so things worked out really well for both of us.

Among Thieves just launched on Kickstarter, and it looks great–I’m planning on backing.

The second time was a bit more complicated. In May, I was sending emails to reviewers asking if they would like review copies of the game, and one critic told me that he’d gotten an email from “Trevor” within the hour of me contacting him, and maybe we should talk to each other more about splitting up the list of people to contact. He’d assumed that me and Trevor Harron of Blue Heron Games, who had also been working on a game called No Honor Among Thieves, were working on the same project. We weren’t. This one was trickier to sort out, because while I’d been working on my game for a fair bit longer, Blue Heron Games had filed for a trademark on No Honor Among Thieves just a couple months previously. Because I’d spent so much time and effort on the project with the name I offered to buy the trademark off of him and reimburse him for his branding expenses thus far, which he agreed to. Kind of an expensive lesson, but I really didn’t want to change the name of my game at that point, and I saw it as largely my fault for deciding I didn’t need to bother with registering a trademark when it was suggested to me the first time this happened. Blue Heron’s game is now called Collectors and Capers, and I get to keep mine as No Honor Among Thieves, and everyone walks away happy once again.

Collectors & Capers is currently seeking funding on Kickstarter. I’ve already backed it, and I’m looking forward to seeing what this other game with a similar name is like.

Here’s the lesson: don’t get too attached to the name of your game unless you’re willing to take the time and spend the money securing it. This isn’t something that had come up anywhere in all my research before I started working on this project, and hopefully me bringing it up here can prevent other people from having it happen to them, too. As for myself, I think I’m going to make up some words to use in the title of my next game.

There’s a ton more advice I’ve found, heard and tried to implement over the years that I’ve been accumulating it, but these are the ones that stick out as being most-often repeated. My plan is to write another one of these posts after I’ve run my Kickstarter and see if my opinions have changed over the course of it, or if I feel like anything needs to be added.

If you think I’ve missed anything, let me know in the comments.

Sources:

Stonemaier Games Kickstarter Lessons: Jamey Stegmaier has written 195 Kickstarter Lessons posts at the time of this writing. And that’s just the ones he’s put numbers on–there’s any number of interviews, guest posts, top ten lists, comparisons, and retrospectives on his blog that aren’t included in the main Kickstarter Lessons series, but are nonetheless immeasurably useful. Of all the sources I’ve consulted over the years, Jamey is the one most likely to repeat himself, usually by coming at the same topic from a different direction or expanding upon one subsection of an earlier post in a later one, but it’s all really good, really nuanced advice, and I urge you to read it yourself if my six-point summary in this post isn’t detailed enough for you. Stonemaier Games’ blog is the grit from which I refined my takeaway lessons.

James Mathe’s blog: James Mathe is the founder of five different companies, runs three gaming stores, and has been running tabletop game Kickstarters for as long as it was practical to do so. The most practically useful posts on his blog for any new game publisher or developer are the detailed breakdowns of his previous campaigns and his collections of links, such as his lists of reviewers, manufacturers and video producers. His advice on how to build a crowd without being skeevy about it is also fantastic. As a note, this blog is definitely quality over quantity, and he doesn’t post super often, but what he does post is always gold.

Genius Games Kickstarter Advice: Genius Games ran a series of blog posts in 2014 breaking down every step of the process they went through to crowdfund and publish their game Linkage. The series is unfortunately incomplete, ending with part one of what was presumably intended to be a two-part post, but the seven posts in the series all have a wonderfully statistics-driven way of looking at the platform that I think anyone can benefit from looking into. And speaking of statistics…

Genius Games Kickstarter Statistics: Here we have more statistical analysis from Genius Games, covering everything from how likely a project run by someone who’s backed a lot of other projects is to be successful to what days successful projects tend to launch on.

Tabletop Kickstarter Advice Facebook Group: This is a great place to ask questions, or to give advice if you’ve got a little more experience.

Tabletop Game Design Subreddit: Also a good place to ask for advice, or to give advice. There’s a bunch of passionate people here, and the pseudo-anonymity when compared to Facebook makes them more likely to give you the harsh advice that you might need to hear.

Board Game Geek’s Kickstarter Forum: BGG had 1.2 million members in 2015, and that number is only growing. This is the place to talk about games online, and if you’re planning on making games you probably ought to join the conversation.

I would also like to give a shoutout to every Kickstarter panel at PAX East for the last five years, as I’ve attended most of them. Thanks for sitting up there and letting people like me ask uninformed questions from the audience. Your patience with my inanity has been legendary in nature.

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carpeomnisgames · 8 years

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Results from the survey have stopped coming in, so I’ve gone and turned it off on my previous post. Time to go through the results.

Here’s the numbers.

24 total responses.

50% were interested in better card materials.

33.33% were interested in plastic coins.

0% were interested in glass coins.

75% were interested in metal coins.

20.83% were interested in a fancy box.

12.50% were interested in an art book.

41.67% were interested in exclusive content.

75% were interested in exclusive components.

33.33% had other comments that they put in the suggestion box.

One thing that surprised me a little bit were the number of people using the comments box or the Reddit thread where I also posted the survey to advise me not to make a deluxe version of the game. I’m honestly not sure what to make of that, since I’ve seen deluxe versions of games do really, really well in a lot of Kickstarters. Is this something that people actually feel strongly about, or is it something that people say annoys them but when it comes down to it the numbers show them reacting in a different way? Or am I reading too much into the anecdotal evidence of my own experiences? I don’t know, but frankly the arguments people were making made a lot of sense to me, so I think at this point I’m going to focus more on upgrading the base game as much as possible instead of trying to push too hard for two versions of the game. Some things, like metal coins, are probably too expensive and heavy to make it into that version, but a couple people suggested having stuff like that as an add-on, which I thought was a pretty good idea. If I can figure out how to get good metal coins made on the side, I’m definitely doing that.

A few people were also vocal about disliking the idea of different card quality or different content between two versions of the game, though a solid 40% who filled out the survey were still interested in exclusive content. I think I’m going to steer away from that, though, unless the cards included are promo things you can also get elsewhere. The idea of having one version be mechanically better than the other leaves a bit of a bad taste in my mouth.

This has all been very helpful as I work to put together the Kickstarter page and finalize things before launching the campaign. To everyone who submitted a respones to the survey, thanks for the feedback. Hopefully the game will be better for it.

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carpeomnisgames · 8 years

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For the Kickstarter, I’ve been planning to have one basic version of No Honor Among Thieves, and one “deluxe” version that costs more but has better components. I think this is the best way to satisfy my desire to keep the game reasonably priced but also have the sort of really good pieces that make reasonable prices difficult.

I’m trying to figure out what people would be interested in when it comes to a deluxe edition of the game–I can’t do every idea I had, both because some of them are contradictory and because some of them would push the price way up. So I put a survey together.

[contact-form-7]

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carpeomnisgames · 8 years

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I’ve been working on card designs again. I like the basic designs I’ve come up with, but one very noticeable problem is that it’s difficult to distinguish different card types from each other when they’re all sitting face-up on the table. The only differences at a glance are the text and a small stripe of background color behind the bottom parchment section.

You can see what I mean here:

The red line, and the grey beyond it, is the approximate place the template assumes the card will be cut while printing–in my files the black border extends beyond it, to the edge of the image, but showing it like this gives a better idea of what the final card will look like.

So I’m working on some changes. The most obvious change that I could make would be changing the color of the different components on the card, the gold border pieces and the parchment especially. It was also suggested to me that I could get rid of the black border, which isn’t a bad thought. That black border is something that is traditional in card games, and is seen in a lot of them, as a way of hiding what color the front of the card is from the side while they’re stacked in a deck. Since all the cards in one deck in No Honor Among Thieves have the same background color, that’s not really a practical concern here, so I could potentially get rid of it.

Here you can also see that I’m experimenting with alternate ways of displaying the Character’s recruitment cost. The coin that I currently have looks nice, but it also just kind of floats above the parchment background that it’s on, which feels weird. A simple coin icon and a number gets the job done in less space and with less fuss.

This solution to the problem doesn’t look bad, I guess, but I do like the vibrant parchment color I have on the old design.

This variant has got some good contrast between the important part of the card (warm colors) and the background (cooler and darker colors), while still having a sizable colored border to keep it distinct from other card types.

When I started writing this post I was going to ask for suggestions and reactions to these three variants, but now that I’m looking them over again…I kind of like this third one. The contrast between the blue background and the orange paper is just lovely, the black border really isn’t needed, and overall it looks better than I thought it would when I threw it together to be a basic example of how the old design would look without the black edge. So I’ll probably end up going with that design, unless I come up with something dramatically better.

If anyone does have any thoughts or opinions, please do let me know. I also need to fix the issue with the current build where the No Honor icon is exactly the same as the dagger icon on the dice, which leads to a lot of understandable confusion when initially explaining the rules. I like the dagger icon, but I also think it looks better on the dice, so I’m open to suggestions as to what to change it to. Thus far my ideas are a broken dagger icon or a red-ink highlight behind the words of the No Honor ability.

Also, I think I need to change the name for “No Honor” abilities. That name has stuck for this long because I needed a name for it, not because it worked especially well for intuitive comprehension of the rules. I’m thinking something like Broken Code or Broken Honor abilities, so that the name tells you exactly when you can use the ability, but again I’m open to suggestions.

If you want to make suggestions but don’t know what those terms mean for the game, you can find a print-and-play with rules available to download in the sidebar.

Thoughts?

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#Carpe Omnis Games #No Honor Among Thieves

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