Thoughts from a first-time self-publisher Part 26: Finishing
Hey everyone! Welcome back. I think I’m going to go to an every-other-week schedule from here on out.
Best Part of my week (so far): Lots of great playtests lately! Probably the best was Sunday though. I brought some games to my local in-person design group. We played Swindling Suitors, my variant for the recently funded Bah Humbug and the 12 Games of Christmas. People were just having a blast! My offer to wrap the playtest because I had what I needed was rejected twice so that they could keep playing. Definitely a positive sign!
Most stressful part: Not for me necessarily, but it seems like there has been an awful lot of bad news in the world of board game publishing lately. FunAgain closing down (and the wide ranging impact that has had on so many publishers), Jason Glover quitting Grey Gnome games and taking all his stuff off the GameCrafter (and reversing course later, thankfully), Gil Hova closing Formal Ferret down, just saw Holy Grail Games closing down. In general, it just seems like the challenge of “making it” in this space has gotten a lot tougher both logistically and emotionally. One of the purposes of this blog is to - hopefully - provide some insight into the realities of pursuing this dream. As I watch people who are so many steps ahead of me bow out, it gives me pause for sure.
Financials: Backerkit up to $4,777.00. Spent some money to attend the Board Game Virtual Summit next week.
Today’s Topic: Finishing
Whoever told us that getting started is the hardest part was lying. Finishing is far harder and way less fun. All those times you’ve heard Gabe Barret or others say that “when you’re 90% done, you’ve still got 90% to go”? Follow this trail long enough and you will fully comprehend what that means.
Finishing a Design:
When is a design finished? As a self-publisher, the practical answer is: when it is in the hands of my backers and no more changes can be made. From a publishing standpoint there is the completion of the game and the completion of the product. Let me talk a little bit about what’s involved in completing Super Snipers as a game even after the design has been “finished”:
My rulebook needs to be as close to perfect as I can get it. I’ve got my ruleset down. After so many playtests, I can teach the game in under 10 minutes and will rarely have questions. The game and ruleset have co-evolved to thematically and intuitively serve one another and lead players to the answers to their own questions in almost all cases. But a clean and finished ruleset does not equal a clean and usable rulebook. I find this to be one of the least fun parts of design, but I know that a well done, well presented rulebook will be the difference between people getting my game right to the table when they get it, and leaving it on the shelf for another day that may not come.
I need to be 100% on my character powers and their wording. There needs to be as little ambiguity as possible in the way the powers are presented, but they also need to be concise, legible, and fit on the cards. I need to be aware of all possible match-ups and how the powers will interact with one another. I need to have tested enough, with enough savvy players and enough newbies to both weed out powers that can be exploited, and powers that are too confusing to grasp how to best leverage them. I also need to future proof them as much as possible for future expansions. And - if that wasn’t challenging enough- I also have AI versions of every character that need different powers (because the Automa works differently than a real player) while still maintatining the “feel” of the character. I’ve used the tried-and-true formula of having each character break a fundamental rule of the game combined with powers that feel “broken” (but if everything is broken , nothing is). Within this approach, it’s important that - as much as possible- the “breaks” are clean and not new rulesets within themselves. For example, in the game there is a concept of “chaining”, where polyominoes either have to chain to the same color polyominoes already on the board or start a fresh chain from a border when there are no pieces of that color out yet. Kuaket’s Adrenaline power allows her to start “Infinite Chains”. If you understand the rule of chaining, it is a simple matter to grok what this “break” means. I’m hoping to avoid endless FAQ’s and characters that get banned from use in households. While the AI characters can vary in difficulty, the player characters need to feel mostly balanced.
I have to finalize my components. Lots of things have changed during the development of the game. Some for gameplay reasons and some for production considerations. One great example is the “Targeting Discs”. These were very small acrylic discs with a picture of your opponent’s character in the crosshairs. The idea is that these could be placed on the Target Grids to show your opponent’s location and show off some art. In reality, these are so small that the art doesn’t really have much of an impact. Moreover, the Innocents are represented by meeples and do a great job of showing that you can’t place polyominoes in their space, while the flat Targeting Discs are much easier to miss in this way. Also, they are fiddly to pick up and very likely to get lost. From a production standpoint, they were adding cost and weight to my game. Even worse, any additional character would need their own one of these discs, meaning extra cost and weight for something as simple as an extra character. I switched these out for a single red meeple for each player. It does a better job at serving its function, it’s two meeples instead of 7 acrylic discs, and I won’t need to include it in expansions.
We have to get all the remaining art in, make sure everything looks great (Hwa makes this easy) and make sure that what we are seeing on the computer translates to the physical product.
If I were pitching this game, it would have been “done” a long, long time ago. Self-publishing - at least the way I’m doing it -means that I’m not just the designer, I’m also the developer and quality control. Not sure it comes across, but I actually really like doing all this stuff! Next time I’ll talk about the less fun part: finishing a product.
