👋 Welcome to the many new subscribers who signed up for Equip Story via the ALL-CARDS Kickstarter! This is where I write about my creative process and thoughts about game development, like how I playtested a game with my family in the bathroom and how a Japanese elevator music singer convinced me to defend my cringiest work. I’m mostly looking for ways to make game development more fun. Thanks for joining me here!
Since I have a lot of new subscribers from ALL-CARDS, I thought I’d talk a bit about the project today. The Kickstarter is almost completely over! I’m waiting for seven backers to answer their backer survey with their current address, so I can ship them their copy of ALL-CARDS. (To the backers who filled out their surveys, I love each and everyone one of you.) A word of advice: Don’t use a junk mail address to back a Kickstarter, because you’ll miss the important project updates. You can go to Settings > Notifications on their website to unsubscribe from all emails except project updates.
When you put a game out into the world, you never know who (if anyone) is going to respond to it. The Nancy Drew game inspired a lot of fun conversation on Itch, whereas the Itch page for Space Station Self-Destruct Simulator is as desolate as a black hole. (I think you get more comments if you launch as part of a game jam.) That’s why I try not to hinge the success of my personal projects on whether I’ll generate a lot of fans or players. Luck is a factor in whether a game makes an impact with players and I’m not a betting man. True Story: Gambling addiction runs in my family. Our current world of addictive gambling apps is kind of a nightmare for me, like navigating a narrow strait full of mines!
Anyway, I wanted to take a moment to say how fortunate I feel that ALL-CARDS was received so well by players. I’ve gotten a meaningful amount of complements about the game via comments, emails, and videos. For example, here’s a TikTok of players doing an ALL-CARDS booster draft, and here’s a 30 minute review of the game on YouTube!
One player I want to highlight is Travis Morton, an enthusiastic Kickstarter backer who interviewed me for his blog Cardboard Resurrection. He asked about how I came up with the idea, advice for adapting the game for tournament play (!), and what IP expansions I’d love to see in the world. If you’ve been reading this newsletter regularly, you won’t even need to click this link to know the answer. Travis has written extensively about ALL-CARDS on Cardboard Resurrection, including custom decks he’s made and learnings from hosting local ALL-CARDS events, which I think is super cool.
When I ship an indie game, it’s like throwing a rock into a pond. Sometimes the rock hits the water and immediately sinks. Sometimes my hand slips and the rock flies behind me and hits my friend in the leg ahhhh sorry Jonathan!
Once in a while, I develop a nice, smooth rock that skips across the pond. Skip, skip, skip. With every jump, the rock sends vibrations to all the ducks and frogs in the pond. It’s very satisfying. ALL-CARDS feels like a skipping rock. I’m grateful for that. Thank you, Travis, and to all the backers and players out there. I hope the game leads to many fun nights and laughs at your table, whether I can see them or not.
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When I turn my game development experiences into newsletters, I leave a lot out. I usually write about something when it’s story or opinion-shaped. I’ll be like, “Hey, that thing I just did? That’d be a good newsletter!”
Equip Story is an accountability tool for myself. I want to focus on improving my creative process, and writing about my process helps me examine and improve it. The newsletter can have a distorting effect, too. When I write about something that happened to me, like when I ship a new game, it’s like putting that particular event up on the fridge for myself. It’s an acknowledgement. But there are a lot of aspects of the game development process for ALL-CARDS I haven’t been acknowledging, because I didn’t think they’d be interesting enough stories on their own.
So, to that end, I just want to acknowledge for myself some of the less eventful tasks that went into making the ALL-CARDS Kickstarter happen.
* Message backers about how they’d like their names to appear in the zine.
* Register ISBN numbers for the print and electronic versions of the game.
* Finish the final edits of the manuscript with Amanda.
* Find a place to put backer names into the zine. (There were too many for the originally designated space.)
* Pick a winning backer and edit their name onto a fake trading card.
* Sync the edited manuscript with the InDesign file of the zine.
* Set-up an email to distribute digital PDF to backers.
* Re-send the digital PDF email because I screwed up something in the backend!
* Send the final version of the digital PDF to press.
* Send the final version of the digital PDF to potential retail distributors.
* Send final print PDF to the printer!
* Send a bunch of emails back and forth with the printer, because they always say something in your file is wrong.
* Ask my layout designer to fix the “mistake” the printer caught.
* Place the final book order!
* Ship the books to the product distributor.
* Send out the backer survey to get shipping addresses.
* Sign with retail distributor and setup account for May 26th launch. (More on that in a few weeks!)
* Export shipping data to product distributor.
* Export shipping data multiple times in batches as the backer surveys came in.
* Message backers to remind them to fill out their backer surveys.
* Film, edit, and post a short tutorial video on YouTube. (More on that in a few weeks, too!)
* Write backer updates for every major milestone.
Not every part of the creative journey is a funny, interesting, or surprising story, but every step in the journey matters. The first step, the last step, and step 24,861. (Whatever step that was. Probably an email to the printer.)
🎲 Your Turn: What’s a less-than-glamorous part of a creative project you had to do? Acknowledge your hard work! What IP extensions would you like to see in ALL-CARDS? Or how about Magic: the Gathering? (They’ve already done so many, lol.) I’d love to hear from you! Reply to this email or hit the orange button below to leave a comment.