The end of the year is approaching, so it’s time to assess progress towards the goals I set at the start. I’ll also include a general progress report on the things I’ve been working on. How’s it looking? Well… the short answer is ‘patchy’. For the longer answer, read on.
Goal 1: Scaling Up
Realistically, this one isn’t going to happen this year. With only a few working weeks until Christmas, I don’t see any of the publishers I’ve been talking to in a position to make significant progress before the holiday period begins. The whole experience has been an odd mixture of “hurry up and wait”, with bursts of activity/communication against a background of what boils down to silence. Hopefully once the holiday period is over things will move a bit more quickly.
Goal 2: One Expansion to Pre-Production
This one is in a bit of a holding pattern until Goal 1 gets sorted out. The rules and scenarios and so on are fine, but the flavour text and 2D art needs to be consistent with the finalised base game. Until that progresses, there doesn’t seem much point replacing the placeholder art and text. There’s nothing wrong with it, in my opinion, but I know it’ll need tweaks before I can start putting together pre-production sets. Once again, I don’t think this one will be ticked off before the end of the year.
Goal 3: One Expansion Finalised
Oddly enough, the goal that I was least confident of at the start of the year looks like it’s going to be the only one that actually gets achieved! Progress here is actually quite good. Although there’s always room for more playtesting, I’m at the point where I can declare the rules and concepts complete and switch to writing the manuals and scenarios. The flavour text and 2D art suffers from the same sort of blockage as for Goal 2, but I can progress with placeholder content for that and the 3D models to go with it. Thanks to a burst of activity in the initial stages I also have the tile art sorted out too, so this is getting pretty close to finalised status. I’m confident that this one, at least, will be achieved.
As you can see, progress towards these goals hasn’t gone smoothly. At least there has been some, but it has reminded me that a lot of this project is quite dependent on others. That’s pushing me towards considering other options – Kickstarter, for example – which at first I had been reluctant to pursue.
Other News
Some readers may have already noticed that my storefront has been closed for maintenance. I’m suspending it for the moment – the purpose of the storefront was to provide a distribution channel for pre-production game sets, and I no longer have any pre-production sets available! That’s progress, and although the number of sets distributed is too small to really provide a statistically-significant sample it still has given me some useful data.
In January, I’ll do another ‘State of the Game’ update, as I usually do. In the meantime, I’ll keep working on placeholder content and manuals.
Encounter Table Games 