I’ve been trying to fine tune my creative process for maximum fun and enjoyment. In fact, this newsletter is about how to make game development as fun as playing games. It’s right there in the tagline!
I’ve found a big part in making art more fun is to put process over product. What good is spending hundreds of hours to complete your “masterpiece” if those hours were painful, fatiguing, and regretful? It’s difficult to come away from a heartbreaking creative process with love and joy for the final result. We only have so long on this Earth. I want to spend it having a good time! (Woo, party! 🥳) Making art is one of the greatest joys in my life.
Now that my Kickstarter for ALL-CARDS is finished, I want to look at the process of taking the beta version of ALL-CARDS, polishing it, and crowdfunding it for Zine Quest. Specifically, I want to get a better understanding of whether the process was fun.
Before I dive in, I want to acknowledge two things:
• I’m really proud of the final game zine. The cover and interior look great. ALL-CARDS plays really well. Not only that, but it’s fun to watch other people play it, which is another level of cool.
• The ALL-CARDS Kickstarter was a financial success, to my shock and amazement. Well beyond my expectations at +175% of the goal! I’m incredibly grateful and excited to send the game to more than 200 players.
These things aren’t unrelated to whether I had fun with the ALL-CARDS project as a whole, but they’re not the same as “process.” I’d put them in the “product” camp. I’m happy with what I got out of the process. In this newsletter, I’m going to drill down and see what worked and what didn’t for me in terms of pure enjoyment of process. It’s all in service of a larger question: Would I want to crowdfund again as part of my creative process?
Polishing ALL-CARDS: FUN! 🥳
In the past few weeks, I wrote about designing fake trading cards and playtesting at Glitch City. I’d describe both of those as great experiences. I also enjoyed working with graphic designer Mike Reddy on the cover and interiors. He’s a terrific collaborator. There’s nothing I would significantly change about the development of ALL-CARDS from its inception to finishing the final layout. That’s not a big surprise to me. I love designing tabletop games, particularly card games. I feel a deep connection to the process, since my dad designed tabletop games, too.
Creating the ALL-CARDS Campaign Page: MIXED 🤔
Last week, I wrote about how the campaign page came together. The copy was easy to write, but felt like a chore. The images were time-consuming and frustrating to make. But the video was a joy. I’m so glad I took the time to make it. One of the main reasons I decided to crowdfund ALL-CARDS was the opportunity to collaborate with Amanda. Our Kickstarter video challenge weekend was a blast. I won’t forget how weird it was to shoot multiple close-ups of my wife turning a Fat Bastard trading card 90 degrees.
Guesting on Podcasts to Promote ALL-CARDS: FUN! 🥳
I love being a podcast guest. I don’t get a lot of opportunities to perform, and being a podcast guest is the most chill type of performance. You sit around with friends and/or other cool people. You shoot the shit. You have profound conversations. Maybe you play a game. You make each other laugh. It’s a party without the music and food, which sounds bad when I put it that way, but I like it. Hanging out with fun people is the thing I value most about a party. I can listen to Beck and eat Trader Joe’s pretzel chips with hummus on my own time.
To get the word out about ALL-CARDS, I asked my friends with podcasts if I could jump on their shows in February and a few graciously complied. (Thanks again, Sonic Weekly, RPG R&D, and War Rocket Ajax!) Apparently my opinion that the new Sonic the Hedgehog audio fiction podcast should’ve starred Sonic the Hedgehog was highly controversial amongst Sonic fans and has echoed through multiple episodes of Sonic Weekly, which brings me residual joy.
Crowdfunding ALL-CARDS: NOT FUN 😵💫
I’ve run three crowdfunding campaigns now. The first was for The Devastator, a humor magazine turned full-line press I co-founded with Amanda. It was a fun campaign, because Kickstarter was new and novel in 2010. Many of our friends chipped in. It felt like our community was helping us build a goofy barn. A barn we lived in for eight years. The second was for Wet Hot American Summer: Fantasy Camp RPG, a licensed tabletop roleplaying we thought was going to launch The Devastator into another stratosphere. Instead, the project broke even and the press shut down soon after. We put a lot of blood, sweat, and dick cream into that campaign. We had a fun and unique game, and a lot of good press, but the audience was more niche than we thought. (And we knew it was niche!)
ALL-CARDS was the weirdest feeling of the three campaigns. Not the best, not the worst, but definitely the most rollercoaster-like.
To try and avoid the missteps I made with Wet Hot RPG, I did a lot of research going into the ALL-CARDS Kickstarter. As a Zine Quest shopper myself, I had a good feel for what type of games do well. I figured ALL-CARDS would be a solid fit: a quirky, small-scale concept with a strong hook.
I wanted the game to look more polished. I already made the ashcan version for Gen Con on my own. If I was going through the trouble of crowdfunding, I wanted the end result to be something I was proud of. To determine my goal and budget for the project, I used a common formula based on my newsletter audience. Take a small percentage of your audience and multiply that by the average backer reward. I used a very conservative percentage and multiplied it by $20, which led to $2500. That was a comfortable amount for me to make a high quality zine, taking into account art, printing, and my own time. I researched other Kickstarters and found my goal was pretty reasonable.
A few days before launch, I got the good omen. Kickstarter named ALL-CARDS a “Project We Love,” which would help with placement on the site and possibly lead to a spot in one of their newsletters. Between my newsletter readers and this endorsement, I felt like I had the project on lock. This was going to work.
The opening few days is when projects typically get the most funding. That’s why so many successful projects have “Funded in 1 Day” or “Funded in 22 Seconds” badges on them. That is what I was hoping for with ALL-CARDS. I would fund quickly, then turn my attention to finishing up production.
Instead, the opening weekend left me with a total of $1040. My biggest fundraising period was gone and I wasn’t even halfway to my goal. I panicked. I remember thinking I’d made a big mistake. I gambled the good feelings I had developing ALL-CARDS on a Kickstarter. If the project failed, it would be a dark cloud cast over my fun memories of design, playtesting, and collaboration.
I don’t actually look at my phone a lot during the day… with one notable exception. (Hint: *Flush*) But I refreshed the campaign page over and over again on my phone, everywhere I went, hoping for a big jump in sales and a reassurance that everything would be alright. Amanda was there for me every day, when I was frustrated and worried about the campaign. I became an absolute bore, obsessing over a progress bar on a website.
Something interesting happened though. It’s true that my first, second, and final days of the campaign were my biggest jumps for funding, but the total ticked up steadily every day. There wasn’t a single day when I made no sales. In the middle of the campaign, some days had decent spikes. I can hear my grandma Nonny, who read me Aesop’s Fables as a child, telling me that “slow and steady wins the race.” That’s not generally true in crowdfunding campaigns, but it was in this case. I kept anxiously waiting for sales to dry up mid-campaign, but they never did.
So what happened? The data told me the story. I put a lot of work into marketing, like appearing on podcasts, posting regularly on Bluesky, sending out review copies, and telling my newsletter audience about the campaign every week. According to Kickstarter’s backend data, those activities had a less-than-anticipated impact. Only a small fraction of my readers backed the campaign, even less than my conservative estimates. Though that tiny fraction represented 1/5th of my total to 100%, so that was heartening. The few, the proud, the loyal. A lot of my current newsletter readers came from my Adventure Snack newsletter. I bet if the game were an explicit Adventure Snack off-shoot, it would’ve been more enticing to my readers.
The vast majority of my funding came from Kickstarter’s ecosystem. Their newsletter placement, their homepage placement, their recommendation engine. The way I see it, if Kickstarter hadn’t made ALL-CARDS a “Project We Love,” it might well have failed. So, in one sense, I was right. ALL-CARDS was a great fit for Zine Quest. But for about two weeks, I had a nauseating time. When I made my goal in two weeks, I was a little excited, but mostly relieved. By the time the campaign was over with 170% funding, I felt like I’d gotten away with something. I shouldn’t have succeeded, but with a genuinely fun game, a unique pitch, and the blessing of the platform, it all worked out. Phew.
Likelihood of Crowdfunding Again: Outlook Hazy 🎱
I didn’t have a fun time crowdfunding ALL-CARDS. The idea of doing it all again for a future Zine Quest isn’t thrilling. When I initially talked about doing Zine Quest with Amanda, we thought it would be like exhibiting at an indie comics show. But there’s an electric energy at shows like TCAF and SPX that’s hard to replicate online. More importantly, if you have a bad sales day at an indie comics show, the comics you made still exist. You just have to haul more heavy boxes home.
An argument for pursuing Kickstarter again: maybe this part of the process isn’t fun, but sometimes it’s good for you to do things that aren’t fun. I’ll get a lot more feedback on ALL-CARDS with over 200 new players, which will be enlightening for me as a designer. ALL-CARDS will be a strong addition to my portfolio and could lead to future gigs. ALL-CARDS having a prime place on my trophy shelf of past projects will increase my confidence. Maybe it’s worth knuckling through an un-fun process if there are enough tangible benefits.
Or I could’ve taken the time and energy I put into the ALL-CARDS Kickstarter and put it into multiple fun game jams. 🤷♂️
I know what I could do to improve the process for a future Zine Quest: Scale down the scope of my project. That way, I wouldn’t be (unknowingly) relying on a Kickstarter feature to succeed. At a goal of $500, I would’ve easily succeeded in a day and could’ve saved myself a lot of stress. There’s a version of ALL-CARDS I could have funded for $500, but I wouldn’t have put in as much polish, and as I said earlier, the polish was very fun! If I have an idea for a game zine I can make at that scale, I’ll hesitantly consider it.
In the lead-up to ALL-CARDS, I was imagining big, awesome crowdfunding projects I would take on if ALL-CARDS was a success. It could be a new path to bring all sorts of ambitious creative projects to life. Ironically, ALL-CARDS was a success, but I have no desire to go bigger. Going bigger means more stress and less fun. Frankly, I’d rather be making games.
🎲 Your Turn: Have you ever crowdfunded a project? Was it fun? Challenging? Frustrating? Rewarding? What’s the most fun part of the creative process for you? 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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