Geoffrey Versus The Sunk Cost Fallacy

🃏 It’s been one week since you looked at me I launched the Kickstarter for ALL-CARDS, the trading card storytelling game. The response has been super positive! There are 80 backers supporting ALL-CARDS from all around the world, excited comments on the Kickstarter page, many folks sharing the game on Bluesky, and ALL-CARDS was featured in a video by a terrific game zine YouTuber JP Coovert. Thank you to everyone who has supported the game so far by backing, sharing, and offering kind thoughts.

66% funded in one week is excellent progress. We’re off to a good start! But I’m guessing you know how Kickstarter works. If funding isn’t complete by February 27th, the project doesn’t happen. *Kermit Gulp*

If you haven’t already, I’d love if you checked out the ALL-CARDS Kickstarter. Here’s the link.

The game means a lot to me. I’ve put a lot of blood, sweat, and Sliders trading cards into this. I made a ridiculous trailer with my wife Amanda that I’m definitely going to write more about in the coming weeks. There are rewards for as little as $1. You can get your name in the zine, and possibly on a funny fake trading card. Sharing the project with friends is also hugely appreciated, especially those who love trading cards and tabletop games.

That was your weekly ALL-CARDS update. Now for the proper newsletter…

I have a lot of ideas. Amanda sometimes calls me “The One Man Think Tank.” That’s an accurate description, assuming think tanks mostly think about underrated public domain characters and reverse engineering Disney attractions. I don’t have trouble coming up with creative project ideas, but I sometimes struggle with which one to pursue at any given time.

Last August, I was wrapping up Motion Picture and printed the ALL-CARDS zine for Gen Con. I was thinking about what to make next. I had 18 viable ideas in my game ideas list. I needed to nail it down to one. More and more, I’m trying to winnow my slate to one project at a time, so I can give it my full focus and avoid feeling overwhelmed. It’s a struggle, but I’m getting there.

Years ago, I took a virtual class on paper prototyping from the Indie Game Academy. The instructor recommended listing out your studio’s game ideas, then rating each of them across a number of categories. The average rating will tell you which ideas are superior… mathematically! Woo!!! When it comes to creativity, you know I love a self-survey.

In the class, they recommend these three categories: Ease of Shipping, Marketability, and Personal Excitement. This survey is designed for indie game studios looking to make a profit. Since my goals are artistic, I took Marketability off the table as a category. This would be a personal project. Who cares if it’ll do well on Steam? After thinking it over, I went with these five categories:

Excitement – How hyped was I for the concept?

Enrichment – How much would I learn from making it?

Challenge – How difficult would it be to implement?

Collaboration – How many other developers would I be teaming with?

Cost – How expensive would it be?

I put all 18 game ideas into a spreadsheet and rated them from 1 to 5 in all five categories. Out of 18 games, I ended up with… a seven way tie for first place. Ughhhh!

Since I might pursue some of these some day, I’ll post vague descriptions of the seven games here:

A Traditional Solo Gamebook

An Interactive Audio Toy

An Interactive Pepper’s Ghost

A VHS Board Game

A Point-and-Click Horror Game

An FMV Visual Novel

A Retro Business Simulator

To help nail it down, I eliminated any project I rated a “1” in any category. The solo gamebook would be a solo project with little outside collaboration, so I nixed it. The retro business sim was going to be difficult for me to program, so out it went. The FMV visual novel would be expensive to make, so I’d have to save some cash for that one. This left me with four main contenders:

A Traditional Solo Gamebook

An Interactive Audio Toy

An Interactive Pepper’s Ghost

A VHS Board Game

A Point-and-Click Horror Game

An FMV Visual Novel

A Retro Business Sim

My brain pinballed back and forth between these four projects. I just couldn’t decide. All four of them were projects I’d wanted to work on for a long time, in one form or another. The indecision was like a cloud of confusion in the otherwise clear sky of my brain. Kind of an odd simile, but you get it.

Luckily for me, Amanda and I had a weekend in Palm Springs planned for my birthday. The best present she could give me was helping me decide what project to pursue. We had a two hour road trip through the desert and the New Pornographers hadn’t released a new album in a while, so the timing was great. (She ended up giving me a very nice pair of Bluetooth headphones. 💖)

I ran through all four pitches with Amanda. On a whim, I decided to add a fifth: a Kickstarter for ALL-CARDS. As I was developing the game, I had Kickstarter’s annual Zine Quest in mind for it. A month celebrating game zines seemed like the ideal venue to release a card game with the semi-anti-capitalist conceit of using cards you already own, rather than buying starter decks and booster backs.

However, I was skeptical about how much fun running a Kickstarter would be. Kickstarters are a lot of hard work. They’re very sales and marketing driven experiences, as opposed to purely creative ones. There was a part of me that felt like ALL-CARDS wasn’t finished until I gave the game a proper layout and release, but I’m also aware of the Sunk Cost Fallacy. Just because I already put a lot of time into ALL-CARDS doesn’t mean I should necessarily put more time into it.

Amanda thought carefully about the process for each project and made some smart inferences. The audio toy would require learning how to 3D print and build a complex Arduino device. I might need a few “ladder” projects to fully understand how to make it. The VHS board game would be expensive to manufacture and keep me away from practicing Unity for some time. The horror game would be a year to develop, at least. Was I ready to make that kind of commitment?

Amanda encouraged me to finish ALL-CARDS. She loved playtesting ALL-CARDS and saw first hand how the game captured players’ imaginations. She thought the idea was worthy of a nicely made edition, and while a Kickstarter can be a slog, I’d never attempted Zine Quest before. It might be more fun to launch a small-scale project as part of a festival of creators, rather than launch a large, high pressure project with an IP attached, like I had a decade ago with the Wet Hot American Summer TTRPG. ALL-CARDS was pretty much already done. Why not take it across the finish line? And while I waited for layout passes and quotes from printers, I could noodle with the Pepper’s Ghost project, which would be based in Unity.

I only had one hesitation left about ALL-CARDS. It was largely a solo project. I would work with a designer and maybe an artist, but they would be paid contractors. I didn’t have a true collaborator. Amanda said she’d love to work on it with me. She could edit the text and help me run the Kickstarter. In my interview with Nicole Amato, the Games Outreach Lead at Kickstarter, I asked her what would make a Kickstarter fun.If I had to summarize her answer, it was having a partner to do it with. A collaborator. So once Amanda said she was in, that’s all I needed to hear. It was time to get ALL-CARDS ready for Kickstarter.

🎲 Your Turn: Do you have trouble narrowing down which project to work on? Do you get advice from anyone about creative projects? Who is your favorite creative collaborator? Why do you like working with them? I’d love to hear from you! Reply directly to this email or leave a comment by hitting the orange button below.

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