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Monday “Morning” Minutes: 12/15

ok, well, that’s just stupid.

It’s Monday, I’ve been listening to Nelly & J. Lo “I’m Real (Murder Remix)” on repeat, there are minutes.  (more…)

When you produce a game, after you’ve designed it, playtested it, developed it, found a manufacturer and paid for the printing is the proofing process. You printer/manufacturer will, generally, create a single proof of production copy of the game. The downside to this step is that it lengthens the turnaround time for the whole run and possibly, especially relevant for small press creators, can cost you a nice chunk of change. But the upsides are innumerable. The ability to actually hold and critique your product before it gets to the hot press is essential and any project that you are not assembling in your garage should put up the cash and time to ensure a proper proof is received.

Proofing a production samples isn’t just about catching errors though. It is also a useful pause to examine what you have made and calibrate your expectations for the final product. Below you can see some of the material issues we had with our production proof. Though we are highlighting the concerns we have, the product actually looks amazing and came out head and shoulders above our expectations. But, if you have the opportunity to fix you should take it.

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There were three main concerns with the production proof. Our rules booklet was not bound into a booklet. The play mats were printed as 20 singlesided sheets instead of 10 doublesided. And finally, there were some miscuts on the tiles resulting in improper gem alignment.

The first two issues are easily a case of poor communication. We sent along files that we were completely familiar with, but failed to specify what EXACTLY we were expecting to receive. This is not uncommon, when you create something whole cloth you may not realize it but a huge amount of contextual information exists only in your head. Just as in rules writing you should approach your printing instructions as if you were programming; step by step detail. If you’re worried about appearing pedantic, stop. As someone who spent a decade deciphering the instructions of clients I can assure you the more questions you answer up front the more we (production folks) love you. And the more we love you, the more likely we are to fix itsy-bitsy things before you ever notice them.

oopsie!

It’s Wednesday. Somebody made marimba metal, there are minutes.  (more…)

PAX! That was a Hell of a thing!

herp derp

This past weekend was PAX East 2014. The largest gaming convention takes over downtown Boston every Spring and it is a monster. For Games by Play Date this was an especially important convention. PAX East 2013 was where we conceived of our storytelling party game slash and this year it is where we launched it. The trip from dumb drunken notion to dumb drunken product has been…

How did you come up with the idea to create 52 Shades of Greed?

I wish I could claim the concept, but it was really a group effort. 

The Alternative Banking group needed some illustrations for a deck of cards they wanted to hand out on #S17, their big anniversary day of action. The concept was that of a "stacked deck" where every card had a person, institution, or financial instrument that was doing more harm than good. 

I agreed to do a few of the cards, and I brought on my friend Daniel Nyari who agreed to do the design of the cards. This was manageable in the short time frame they had. Daniel suggested bringing on other artists and illustrating ALL the cards. I was hesitant but went with his suggestion. When we put the call out, the response was overwhelming. Suddenly the project became much bigger, and much more inspiring.

We decided to fundraise to pay for the production of the cards, and when we started talking about it we found a lot of folks who were interested in a story like this. It is a story with lots of angles. It is about Occupy, certainly, but it is also about collaboration between illustrators of all stripes and levels of fame to say something important about the world. It showcases artists as teachers who are engaged in politics and social welfare, much more than servants to other peoples' messages. For us it is also about the incredibly inspiring process of coming together to create a unique and beautiful art object. We found ourselves called to reach out to more media sources and tell them about the project.

The project really evolved over time and that time was in just 1 week! I am incredibly proud of our artists, and the Alternative Banking team, for stepping up so fast when it became clear we could do something great.

Crowdfunding is hard work.  Why is this project important to you, and what about it made you willing to put in the effort?

Beyond just that it's awesome and I want one of these decks myself? 

Something that is very important to me and Daniel, as well as Occupy, is that people get paid a fair living wage for their time. The initial funds we raise will go to pay for the printing of the cards as well as the artists. 

Beyond that, we want to make this a project that works for everyone involved in their own lives, both the artists and the Alternative Banking team. We want this to be something we can show off to past and future clients, and we can be proud to say "We made this together."

In light of that, we plan on rolling out some new big rewards if we can reach well beyond our initial funding goal. We would love to plan physical shows and events which are just as beautiful and educational as the cards themselves. We are currently talking to gallery spaces in New York about a show and series of panel discussions on finance for creatives. We would love to fill up with enough rocket fuel to go to other cities with this project.

How did you create the team behind this project?

Daniel and I have a pretty wide network and were able to reach out to many of the people there for this project. We were very lucky to find this group who were willing to work on this crazy deadline, and the quality of the pieces just blew us away. I would hire any one of them again in a heartbeat because now I know they can come through.

We also found an incredible partner in AdMagic, the people who made the cards. They worked with our tight deadline and printed all the cards in the U.S. We want to do it all over again just to work with them!

The Alternate Banking group was great too. They came up with all the card names and copy. Everything really came together perfectly.

You launched this project with a lot of momentum.  Can you offer some advice to others, who are about to launch their own projects, on how to find similar success?

We got a lot of advice from experts, including the folks at RocketHub. Everything from timing to how to put the word out.

One great tip we got was to create an internet event, and get all our networks to push the project and our hash tags all at once. Getting commitments from various news sources and big tweeters really helped get us moving. The internet rewards large, sudden changes in activity. So if we did a slow build, gathering momentum, we would not have received the attention we got. Occupy never trended on Twitter for exactly this reason, the slow buildup isn't rewarded. By creating a spike, going from zero to lots of action very quickly, we were able to create a buzz and buzzes tend to turn into roars.

After your success with "A Baby's First Book of Zombies" on Kickstarter, why did you choose to work with RocketHub?

I loved our Kickstarter experience, but we did feel like we could have reached more people. I had been to one of RocketHub's events and got the clear impression from their team that they are active in helping push great projects. I was right. We got tons of great, and very specific advice  from the team at RH. Everything from when to launch our campaign, to custom reward levels, and even feature requests when we had them. I felt like Rocket Hub was very much a partner with us, not just a host, which was great.