Boardgame Developers

dammit

Hey!

So, I'm starting this thread to put all boardgame developers on this forum on the same page, with the same information. Currently, we have quite a few good looking games that might be ready to go to the next level: publishing!

Unfortunately, none of us know how to do this yet, so let's share everything we do know - share resources etc - so that we all have a chance of getting our games out there. I don't believe that there is a limit to how many games could be taken from SA to be produced, so there's no reason for us to feel as if we are competing with one another.

So, to start the thread off, I've been chatting to Eugene from SkyCastle games and he has said that he wants to do what he can to get the SA boardgames published so - if you'd like to get in contact with him - you can email him on eugene at skycastlegames.co.za. He'll give a lot of good advice with regards to considerations around publishing (weight, boxes, dice etc).

For the CPT devs - get in touch with him regarding having some space to set up and show your games at HobbyX (First weekend of Oct). He's also the person Nick chatted to to organise space at their stand for rAge this year :)

For the CPT devs too - if you want your games tested by hardcore boardgamers, it might be a good idea to find out when the next CLAWS event is at UCT. You'll need to be able to persuade the gamers to play yours instead of any other cool games, but if you can do that and get them to have fun, you might have found the people who'd be buying your game off the shelf :)

dislekcia

So keen on this.

If there are any meetings planned with Eugene, please count me in! I'll give him a shout about HobbyX as well, although my game's not very good looking at the moment.

I think we should look into print-on-demand services too, I know Tuism linked something a while back that did cards which might be pretty good for what I'm trying to make.

And finally: There's another testing ground in CT that's pretty keen on helping out local boardgame devs. The thursday night gaming group at Wizards in Claremont has said they'd be happy to help test anything we can throw at them.

Tuism

I had looked at a whole bunch of research in publishing, and basically getting with publishers is a long hard road I'm sure all you all also recognise.

For self-publishing, well, it's a road of logistics and materials and pricing and all that kind of stuff. Then it's marketing and logistics of shipping and whatnot, retail relationships, etc. Wait, no, it's the marketing stuff first. No, heck, it's everything all at the same time, really.

OR

Print on demand - which really only suit small and limited format things like card games (yes Cricket fits!) due to the rather higher cost of print on demand - it's higher per unit but without a minimum order and the craziness of warehousing and stocks. And it works with smaller things because paying 100% more than usual for something $10 -> $20 is more acceptable than paying 100% more for something would cost $25 through usual production -> $50 on print on demand.

Daniel Solis is a great example of getting this to work. I love this guy, he's got some great numbers that he's made public on his blog, and he pretty much devs all his games in the open, and they're all card games with no themes of violence. Really good ideas.
http://danielsolisblog.blogspot.com/


BGG's resources are of course very good, but I'm sure you know that already:
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/322382/game-design-self-publishing-resource-game-designer
http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/933849/designers-resources-list


There's a recently pulled-together group called Indie Game Alliance, I joined pretty early, and they promise a bunch of "minions" who will help you show your game around different game conventions with prototypes, as well as other services. Promising, though I don't know if much of it has materialised yet. They do have a pretty active community of indie developers (boardgames not video games) and are pretty good with the chatter.

Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/IndieGameAlliance
Their BGG Geeklist: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/guild/members/2000
There's also a closed group "developers lounge": https://www.facebook.com/groups/igadevlounge/

The Skycastle chatter is very interesting, I'd love to see what kind of interest and level of publication they are interested in - and even more - HAVE DONE. From my knowledge their scorecard on publication is a big zero, especially after the MMMA stuff seems to have just died.

dislekcia

Tuism said:

The Skycastle chatter is very interesting, I'd love to see what kind of interest and level of publication they are interested in - and even more - HAVE DONE. From my knowledge their scorecard on publication is a big zero, especially after the MMMA stuff seems to have just died.

Uh, you do realise that what @Dammit's been doing is the direct continuation of the MMMA stuff "that just died", right?

I get what you're trying to say, but it's not like Skycastle was interested and then stopped returning calls. They're still actively interested and supportive, despite not having published a game from scratch before.

Tuism

I know what she's been doing is building off of MMMA, but that doesn't change anything... It's @dammit that's pushing and making stuff, and I said I wanted to know what Skycastle was doing. That is all. What Worst Warriors is doing has nothing to do with Skycastles' credentials.

My own dealings with Skycastle (various Netrunner stock and player support situations) has been less than stellar so I'm just skeptical. I haven't made any judgement, I'm just looking for anything concrete I can base an opinion on.

dammit

@Tuism - I'm not sure what you think "died"? Skycastle said they would be interested in looking at MMMA again when it was finished. Something that it never got to - until the latest version of WW.

Eugene has offered to take the game to various groups for playtesting, offered his nieces as age range tests and has happily said we can use both rAge and HobbyX stands. That's pretty big, if you ask me.

The other point that @dislekcia has mentioned to me is that we have to ask whether it's going to be worthwhile to actually start a publisher here anyway? It makes more sense for Skycastle to continue to sell games in SA and import them, but not actually to publish and produce here to then ship elsewhere. So, offering contacts for getting stuff made is the best thing for them to do for us.

I guess, I'm wondering what your expectations here are?

Tuism

So I did not have ANY of those information prior to right this moment. So all I did was ask what Skycastle has done under the publication heading, and thank you for the info that is being provided now.

I said died because my info was always "MMMA was gonna get published!" and that was the case for a long long time until nothing. That info is wrong, apparently, so thanks for the new info.

dammit

Cool, so I went through to HobbyX on Saturday. What I noticed there was that people came to buy stuff. A lot of stuff. Eugene was running out of a lot of games and was having to tell people he couldn't sell them what he wanted. At the same time, people were not spending much time at the stand itself because it was noisy and parking was hellishly expensive so it was a get in and get out mission.

For this reason, I decided not to put Worst Warriors on display because showing people a game they couldn't buy or kickstart or anything was just going to frustrate both parties.

On the other hand, chatting to Eugene about Spiel gave me some insight and a plan. This year, Ancient Terrible Things is going to the Essen one (there's one in Munich too...no one seems to know the difference or why there are two) and paying for a stand to sell copies. Next year, with enough of us going together, we could split the costs and include SkyCastle games to make it more viable for all of us to go and sell our own stuff.

I think 12 months is a good lead time to get this organised - an MGSA boardgame stand at Spiel could be pretty badass. @LexAquillia - any chance the government might have funding for this??

Tuism

I daresay physical things are easier to talk to the government about :) Though that may be offset by the difficulty of producing physical copies at a cost reasonable enough for sales for physical things :)

Definitely interested :D

dammit

Rad :) Yes, well, I'm still not sure how to get that done...but 12 months! I'm sure the world will be a SA boardgame filled place by then ;)

dislekcia

@Dammit: I spoke to Eugene yesterday too, probably just missed you.

I think we really need to sit down with the Ancient Terrible Things people and talk about what could and couldn't work in terms of bringing more SA games to market. They've got the experience from a development perspective, we need that.

Tuism

I would *love* to speak to the ATT guys. Have been wanting to for a while but it would be great if I was there.

From what I know they worked with Games Salute which has had a bad reputation on BGG. BUT it's hard to tell whether it's all hot air by some isolated incident (with a whole bunch of people coming out of the woodworks to agree with said incident with their own experiences) or if it was genuine concern.

I mention this especially because I suspect some kind of fulfillment may be our best bet, being so far removed physically from most of the major players, and Games Salute is definitely on the radar for indies.

dammit

Necro-posting.

I'm in the process of getting a full prototype together to be able to send to publishers which means also getting professional printing and packaging done. In order to get a box printed and cut, I'll need to pay for a die which can be very expensive. Once the die is paid for, however, then you only ever pay for the printing. I'm looking at getting an A4 box made and was wondering if anyone wants to get in on the cost of the box die and then be able to share it?