We’re about two thirds of the way through the year, and at my day job that’s about the stage where we would take stock and see if we were on track to achieve our goals for the meeting or project or whatever it is. So, what’s the prognosis?
Let’s review the goals I set at the start of the year.
- Scale up production and distribution
- Get one expansion to pre-production status
- Get one expansion to finalised status
Goal 1: Scaling Up
This has only been a partial success so far – in fact, being honest, it hasn’t been very successful (although not a complete failure). Although there are organisations willing to partner with me, the most anyone has been willing to offer so far is assembly, warehousing, and fulfillment of orders. That’s something, and it’s not bad, but it’s not good either. I also need help with production and marketing, and nobody seems willing to touch that side of things. The explanations that have been put forward usually involve being unwilling to accept the commercial risk of committing resources to this project in the current business environment – I’m paraphrasing a bit, of course, but that’s what it boils down to.
It’s frustrating for me, because a publisher could be invaluable in terms of guiding the development work I’m doing – working on backstory, making mechanics reflect flavour and vice versa, and so on. Without that, I’m left flying fairly blind. But they have to see a reasonable return on investment, I suppose, and depending on their investment horizon they may think this doesn’t offer that… Which is doubly frustrating, because I’m comparing what I have to some games which were commercial successes, and doing better in almost every aspect!
Ah well. There are some things I can continue to work on while I continue looking for partners, so perhaps something will come of it. But I’m starting to doubt that it’ll happen this year.
Success probability: 50%
Goal 2: One Expansion to Pre-production
Thankfully, this goal is going much better. All the tile art is done, the rules and concepts are done, and mission design is in progress but there are no significant obstacles so far. I still need to sort out some 3d-art for the figures, and some 2d-art for the rulebooks, but I have placeholder content for all that, and apart from that I just need to flesh out the flavour text.
That last point is more difficult than it sounds, though, because one comment I’ve had from publishers is that the backstory of the game needs improvement. They have been delightfully vague on precisely what improvements, however, and since the I’d like the flavour pieces in the expansion to complement that in the base game I don’t want to push too far ahead until the base game backstory has been sorted out. That, in turn, depends on finding partners willing to work with me on those aspects, so I’m a bit stuck. At this point I’m going to go ahead and do what I think is adequate and fits with the current backstory – at least it’ll serve as placeholder content.
Generally speaking this is going pretty well, and I’m still fairly confident it can be achieved.
Success probability: 85%
Goal 3: One Expansion Finalised
I was feeling a bit less confident about this one, but when I looked over its NCN (Necessary Condition Network, a kind of development map) I was surprised to see that a lot of the development work has actually been done. We’re still bogged down in playtesting at the moment, so although the concepts seem solid they still need to be thrown around a bit to make sure nothing comes loose. Generally speaking, though, it’s going fairly well too.
The biggest challenge here is that I have (as is common for creative types) overcommitted myself – there are too many projects on the go at once, and all of them consume time/energy/resources which are already in surprisingly short supply. That’s a lesson for me: I need to pull my head in a bit and be more cautious about what I commit to. In this particular case, I’d like to see this goal achieved… but if I have to defer it in favour of one of the others, I will. Let’s see how it goes.
Success probability: 70%
So, there’s the current situation. Most of the goals are progressing fairly well, although the most important one is looking a bit uncertain. I’ll admit it’s disappointing, because I had hoped the game was solid enough that it would present a low risk. But there are still things to try, and in the meantime I still get the fun of tinkering with it!
Encounter Table Games 