Wednesday, May 11, 2016
This Blog has moved...
We moved to a new platform: http://www.aktiongames.com/blog Please join us there for our continued adventures in making games.
Monday, May 9, 2016
Movement in Treasure or Treachery
In Treasure or Treachery players take on the role of a pirate captain in charge of a ship and a crew. Pirate ships travel on the "Sea", "Port", and "Home" spaces on the game board. "Sea" spaces are light blue. "Port" spaces are currently maroon, but will probably end up purple in the final game. "Home" spaces are represented by the brightly colored hex spaces in each corner with a unique Jolly Roger emblem.
When sending pirates out to find treasure, the player's pirate can travel on the "Land" spaces, which are tan and green, on "Town" spaces which are orange, and they can pass through but not stop on "Port" spaces. Pirates cannot travel on "Sea" spaces and cannot normally travel past "Mountain" spaces which are grey with a thick black border.
Movement is the first phase of each turn. The player rolls their colored die and based on their circumstances may choose to move either their ship or their pirate on that turn. Their ship may move up to twice the die roll, a minimum of two and a max of 12. Pirates move slower than ships and may only move up to the face value of the die roll. If a pirate is on land then the ship is in port and must remain in that port until the pirate returns to town. If a pirate is already on the adjacent town at the start of the turn the ship may move on that turn, there is no penalty for the pirate to climb aboard. If the player rolls a natural six, they must draw a fate card before moving and follow the instructions on the card, which may end their turn before they can proceed further.
Fate cards can also bestow special abilities on pirates and ships for the remainder of the game. Some may grant the ability to move past obstacles, or move faster or even slower than normal! It all depends on whose side lady luck is that day.
If you choose to attempt to steal gold from your enemies and find yourself successful, you get to run away. Roll the die again and move according to the rules for the piece you are moving. Fate does not lay her hands on greedy, cutthroat thieves, so a natural six here is always a blessing.
Players may not move over or through a space another piece already occupies. Paying close attention to the game board you may notice some choke points, some are not so obvious as they require two players to take advantage of, ignore these realities at your peril. Once you have collected three gold move back toward your home space on your ship to win. Watch out for other pirates on the way, they will attempt to stop you, some even going so far as to sit on your Home Space and wait for you to come to them. Good luck matey!
Saturday, May 7, 2016
From Idea to Game part 1: where do ideas come from?
Let's get a few tools together before we begin. We will need something to record our inspirations, and it should be fairly convenient for us. I tend to use an online note taking tool so I can record ideas on any device I happen to be near. During the brainstorming phase I like to write and draw with by hand, so I use a notebook and pencils. Once I start to get focused, I'll use a variety of digital and analog tools to paint my visions, from photo editors to flow chart software, even construction paper and crayons. Whatever I can get my hands on that I think will let me quickly create and test my ideas. For now, have something handy to take notes and make sure you can keep them a bit organized. A voice recorder, note book, note taking application, or even an online scrapbook are all good choices, use what's most comfortable.
Inspiration should be collected from all over. Start with books or internet searches and look at images and stories and research on things that interest you. Its best to stick with your interests at first because you are familiar with these things already and it is easier to stay interested. Don't be afraid to explore new interests as they come up. Try researching more about these topics by looking into historical information, other artists or media, or by going to museums and talking to people. Take plenty of notes, save links, images, and photos; Start a folder or scrapbook and paste in things that you like and inspire you. Art galleries, movies, theme parks, playgrounds, libraries, the list of places you can go to draw inspiration is endless. Pay attention to different senses, stay in the moment and take in the stimuli around you and think about how each one might be related to a turned into a game.
Another thing that's important here is playing games, and reading about games, game mechanics, and play. There are a number of excellent books including "Rules of Play" and "Challenges for Game Designers" to learn more about games, game play, and game mechanics. Take notes while you read and think through ideas. Don't be afraid to steal, sample, and remix as many good ideas at this phase as you can. There is nothing new under the Sun, great artists steal, and we all stand on the shoulders of giants. And don't forget to play games, seek out new games, go to a meetup or organize a game night. Play new games as often as you can.
Fill up that tank.
Now it's time to brainstorm. They key to brainstorming is three-fold:
- Take copious notes.
- Don't be critical, just put it all down.
- Give yourself plenty of time.
Two other things you should do:
- Exercise, get outside and walk or bicycle or do whatever exercise you like to do.
- Also, take plenty of showers, or baths, or meditate. Showers always give me great ideas.
Once you've got lots of great ideas you should go gather more great ideas. Let the ideas noodle for a while. Find folks with similar interests and talk about the ideas. Get them out there! Its only through contact with the outside world that your ideas will truly begin to take shape and form into something truly compelling.
Eventually, there will be a group of ideas that you will be thinking about all the time or an idea that seems so incredible that you are compelled to explore it. Stop right there and listen to me because you need to do two things right away: focus on that idea and develop it out but you need to do this without falling in love with the idea and getting married to it. This sounds counter intuitive because you need to love your idea to carry it through, and trust me, over time you will fall in love and that is fine. There's a love at first sight thing that happens with our ideas and it's not really love, it's lust. Just like you shouldn't marry someone after a first date, don't marry your idea. It's just a starting point, and you need to be ready to chuck it out if you find it's not a good fit or if a better idea comes along. Trust me, this is harder than you might think, but you can do it.
After a while this becomes natural and you'll find yourself constantly rotating through drawing inspiration, brainstorming, and focusing your ideas. You almost won't be able to stop (I can't!) Keep writing down those ideas! Beware saying yes to new ideas too soon, it is a distraction. Stay focused on completing your goals or working through your focus until you hit a dead end. You'll have a lot of ideas, everything you say yes to takes a little time away from every other idea. Choose wisely, decide on your goals, commit, and then carry it through! It's important to remember that we need to finish something and ship it in order to change the world, even just a little bit.
Now that you've got focus you can start to develop your idea into a prototype. I'll talk about that in the next part coming in a week or so. What's your creative process? Where do you find inspiration? How do you come up with your ideas? Let's talk in the comments.
Friday, May 6, 2016
Treasure Hunting With Map Cards
In Treasure or Treachery players use treasure map cards to locate hidden treasure on the game board. When a ship reaches a port the player pirate is placed in the adjacent town. If they don't have one already the player draws a map card from the deck and keeps it secret. It is now up to the player to move their pirate on the game board to the location represented on the map card and claim their treasure.
Once they reach the target location the player will show the map card to other players to prove that's where the treasure is hid. They can now take 1 treasure from the treasure pile and place it on their pirate marker next to their home space. This lets other players know that the pirate is carrying 1 treasure and is a good target for thievery! This is the end of the player's turn.
Are you a treasure hunter or a marauder?
If no more treasure is available from the treasure pile, players must attack and destroy other players carrying treasure to force its to return to the pile, or try to steal the treasure from other players, which is a greater risk.
Players will now move their pirate back toward the town adjacent to their ported ship. Treasure is heavy, so pirates can only carry one treasure at a time unless they have special abilities. Once they reach town the treasure is transferred to the ship marker, and is considered stowed on the ship.
When the player collects three treasures they should start moving their ship toward their home space to win the game! Watch out, other players are going to come after you now and they will try to destroy you or steal your loot before you make it to safety.
Will you find and claim or attack and steal to seek your fortune?
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Wednesday, May 4, 2016
How to 3D Part 1: little pirate figures.
Treasure or Treachery features several game pieces, key among these are the pirate figures. The pirates venture onto land from ships to find buried treasure and battle other pirates in their quest for riches. When I originally started developing the game the resources available for making your own games were not as rich as they are today. In just a few short years not only has the hobby exploded, but the options available to game designers has expanded exponentially. In that time I've gone from using lego, to plastic pawns, and finally to tiny painted miniature pirates that used to be sold by The Game Crafter, but now I can't find them anymore. We've been playing with these little guys for so long it was hard to think about the game using anything else, but the truth is the options are broad as are the costs associated with them. Now that we were looking at how to produce 1000 or more games we needed a way to get these pirate figs into our final boxed game at a reasonable price...
I'm going to take you on this journey in parts, starting with where I started, the little pirate figs. The truth is we are still working on this aspect of the final game, its part of the reason we pulled our first Kickstarter. We think we can do better. First we contacted manufacturers (in China) that can help us produce the full boxed game, including the painted figs. We've got quotes from $6 to $10 per game so far with anywhere from $2000 to $4000 in tooling costs to create molds. This comes out to around $0.44 per fig, this includes painting costs. This is actually not unreasonable for us, but still requires some up front costs. We got to thinking that since we need to mold our own anyway, rather than simply duplicate the designs we have we should get our own custom models made in 3D, maybe a little larger, more stylized. Perhaps we'd cast them in solid colors to match the color codes on the board and then we don't have to worry about painting them. This will definitely add to the overall presentation and appeal to the game.
With this in mind we set about looking for an experienced 3D designer that could help us out and might have the right aesthetic sense we were looking for and we found a few folks. Now what's interesting here is that developing a concept and turning it into a 3D model, much less one that can be 3D printed for prototyping and later mold casted and manufactured is not a trivial task. There are expenses here, a real artist costs money. And to be very honest, these costs were much higher than I thought. To go from concept to model, including perhaps some adjustments after printing or testing the mold casting, is on the low end $400 per design and toward the higher end $750 per design. This is in Florida, USA, for contract based work, and might vary in your region. I had a little sticker shock there, but you know what? It's worthwhile to hire a good artist, presentation is a key marketing point for a board game and beautiful art is a key selling point for a thematic board game!
This is my first post in a series I'll be posting over the next few weeks. In the next parts I'm going to get into more detail about our new artwork, talk about using die cut cardboard instead of 3D figures and what's wrong with our pirate ships and what we are going to do about it.
Tuesday, May 3, 2016
The evolution of the Game Board in Treasure or Treachery
I've been digging through some old boxes to mine for social media fodder and I came across some old game board designs. I thought it might be fun to show those off so I snapped a pic and posted them to Instagram. It got me thinking about how the current version of Treasure or Treachery came about, especially the game board and map cards.
When I started working on the game I knew I wanted to incorporate a hidden information mechanic and one of the best parts of modern pirate lore is the treasure map. While this trope shows up in other genres, the combination of this and the concept of burying treasure on tropical islands is associated directly with pirates in many people's minds.
When I started working on the game I knew I wanted to incorporate a hidden information mechanic and one of the best parts of modern pirate lore is the treasure map. While this trope shows up in other genres, the combination of this and the concept of burying treasure on tropical islands is associated directly with pirates in many people's minds.
I started with the idea of moving a ship to an island shore and then moving a pirate to a town. From the town there was a path the pirate must take to get to the X on the board and get treasure. They would then try to move back to town to stow the treasure and try to collect two more. There was also combat, although instead of the dice rolls used now, there was a card battle system that had you drawing a hand of attacks and defenses and playing those like a game of war.
At this point, there was no hidden information component, and there was little interaction because of the shape of the board, the placement of the goals, and the poor card battle system. Naval combat never happened. At this time I was thinking of the board as the treasure map, and this concept of the board as a map would heavily influence the later design, especially the aesthetic direction, but I hadn't hit on the idea of map cards yet.
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| Early iterations of the game board before the island format. |
After a few iterations with X's on the board the idea came up about Map Cards. It was the first big breakthrough for the game play and turned into a super fun mechanic. You can see an early version of the board in the picture above, on the right. That was one of the first iterations of the game board with map cards.
The player would move the ship to shore and the pirate across the beach to town. In town they'd get a map card and could move at a slower pace through the woods to the treasure location. Each card had different style X corresponding to the style of X on the game board and you had to match them up to find the spot to dig.
Later, when the island game board design came about, the X's remained on the board but lost their distinct styles. Instead you'd simply match the X on the board to the X + location of the map cards. Even with the X's on the board there were a few problems... mainly that players would often get confused or have a hard time finding their treasure location. The game was starting to move from functional to fun and I was encouraged to press on.
The player would move the ship to shore and the pirate across the beach to town. In town they'd get a map card and could move at a slower pace through the woods to the treasure location. Each card had different style X corresponding to the style of X on the game board and you had to match them up to find the spot to dig.
Later, when the island game board design came about, the X's remained on the board but lost their distinct styles. Instead you'd simply match the X on the board to the X + location of the map cards. Even with the X's on the board there were a few problems... mainly that players would often get confused or have a hard time finding their treasure location. The game was starting to move from functional to fun and I was encouraged to press on.
Once I started to feel more comfortable with some of the movement and treasure mechanics I realized the shape of the board was prohibitive to driving interaction between players. At this time players mostly avoided one another. I wanted conflict. It was also at this time that I began to seek a focus for the game beyond the thematic pirate tropes and decided I wanted something that was fast and fun, combined a little strategy, a little tactics, a little luck. I had initially been focused on something closer to a tabletop strategy game (part of the reason for hexes on the board) but as time went on we realized that faster was more fun for a broader audience.
My initial playtesters were all family and friends, none of whom had spent anytime whatsoever playing tabletop war games. They wanted simpler mechanics and were not driven to conflict. I set about to redesign the board to introduce more conflict and after some thought and research I decided on the design of the four corners with the island in the middle. I wanted the island to look organic, and the first few designs, printed out on my inkjet across 6 pages to get to the full 20x20 inch square, all had the X's printed on the game board.
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| Early game board prototype that was rendered in Bryce 3D |
At the time I was playing the video game "Red Dead Redemption". The game has a map screen and if you zoom out far enough decals of different animals appear all over the map: deer, armadillo, horses, etc.. In game these designate where you can find that animal in abundance for hunting.
I applied this idea to the game board and map cards, viola! Problem solved, folks can now find their way using their own dead reckoning and more importantly we could remove the X's from the game board without confusing players. It was a long process but we finally had a map card mechanic that worked great and was fun to play.
Now that we had a functional board that drove conflict and provided a compelling mechanic for generating the excitement of a treasure hunt with a fun seek and find meta-game we could focus on polishing up the experience. With the new focus on speed, and at this point the card battle system having been replaced with the current attack or steal dice-based combat, the game was getting fast and fun. There were still a few little problems with the board and game play.
- Initially, the green areas around the mountains slowed your pirate down by -1. This slowed the game down tremendously and discouraged players from traversing the board. This rule was removed to speed up the game and make it more fun. We left the green space in for aesthetic and thematic reasons.
- The shape of the board in some areas and the position of some of the cities and ports conferred some advantage to some of the starting positions over others. Moving things around and paying close attention to space counts and choke points fixed these problems.
- We also added the pirate and ship token spaces near the home spaces to help track the location of treasure as it moves throughout the game.
- The map cards were re-balanced to ensure a fair distribution relative to each pirate's home space.
For the Kickstarter edition we are going to refine the board and map card art, and make some tweaks along the way fixing a few minor problems that remain in the design. For example, distinguishing ports and towns with clearer color coding and making ports look more blue so they are associated with ship movement spaces. While the overall aesthetic will remain, we'll make improvements like adding in town and port names, adding location names to the map cards, and other goodies to fill out the thematic presentation and give our backers a high-quality, fun, playable game they can enjoy for years to come!
Any tips on designing game boards? Is there something you'd like to hear more about? What do you think of the map cards? Let me know in the comments!
Monday, May 2, 2016
I Bet You Can't - the latest playtest
Not to long ago we had a high-resolution playtest of "I Bet You Can't" using a printed board, spinner, tokens, and cards we had made at The Game Crafter. Its a little early in the process to get things printed, but this is a pretty simple game overall and we wanted to get a playtest in where we had a chance to test out the board and spinner design. We really feel that readability and color are important to the playability and fun-factor.
Ditto for the cards, the Aktion Cards have full descriptions of each challenge type so we needed to test how readable they were with the graphics and at the final font size. So while we are still working on balancing the spinner and aren't quite sure about all of the Aktion Cards, it was nominal to get this printed and give us something we can playtest and demo without fiddling with paper cards and unmarked plastic poker chips.
The game is pretty simple, players are split into two teams and each takes a turn trying to complete a charade-like challenge after two rounds of betting using chips. In this playtest we let the team learn the game using our printed instructions and brief introduction from us. Some of these players had some exposure to the game already as they were part of our first playtests. Some had never seen the game before. We let them play and work out the rules from there. Everything went really smooth, the only clarifications were really deficiencies in our instructions or things missing from cards. The game played well and was pretty easy to pick up. Both of these are huge goals for us, as the focus is a fun, pick up and play party game you can play with everybody!
There are a few interesting take aways from this playtest and few unexpected things.
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| Low Res Spinner and Prototype Cards |
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| The High-Resolution Prototype for I Bet You Can't |
The game is pretty simple, players are split into two teams and each takes a turn trying to complete a charade-like challenge after two rounds of betting using chips. In this playtest we let the team learn the game using our printed instructions and brief introduction from us. Some of these players had some exposure to the game already as they were part of our first playtests. Some had never seen the game before. We let them play and work out the rules from there. Everything went really smooth, the only clarifications were really deficiencies in our instructions or things missing from cards. The game played well and was pretty easy to pick up. Both of these are huge goals for us, as the focus is a fun, pick up and play party game you can play with everybody!
There are a few interesting take aways from this playtest and few unexpected things.
- Swapping the draw/spin sequence works much better. The game was more intense and more than a few games shifted on a single clutch play. Its something psychological, knowing the aktion card item is critical to determining the right bet for the challenge. The other way around just is not as fun.
- The spinner needs re-weighting. Choice and Twist don't come up often enough. Twist especially.
- Gesture is considered the most difficult category and is used as a weapon when Choice comes up, which is cool. Even cooler, sometimes this backfires.
- There are a few twist cards that could use better or more complete explanations.
- We only found one suspect Aktion Card! Yeah! We got through about 25 of the 100 cards. We are hoping to have 200 in the game box. This is probably the toughest part of making this game.
- Our chip distribution is all wrong still. This time we had 1s, 5s, 10s. It should probably just be 5s and 10s.
- The betting areas and ante track really help keep things moving and let the players stay organized during the betting phase effortlessly.
- I think we need to either make the ante track have some gradient of color or change the ante token color to green. The black token on the black track was hard to see.
The playtest was a huge success. The game is super fun, lots of anxiety and laughter, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, and more important: the teams wanted to play again! I Bet You Can't is shaping up to be a really fun game and I'm hoping we can bring it Kickstarter by early next year.
Any tips for the next playtest? Are you in the Orlando, FL area and interested in being part of a future playtest? Let us know in the comments!
Any tips for the next playtest? Are you in the Orlando, FL area and interested in being part of a future playtest? Let us know in the comments!
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Saturday, April 30, 2016
Lessons Learned around estimating production costs
For Treasure or Treachery, we've made dozens of prototypes and have quotes from several manufacturers to produce the final game. There are several companies that will produce the whole boxed game for you. This can be a good path, especially for new designers, as the manufacturer will handle things like assembly and shrink wrapping you may otherwise need to arrange yourself. You can also get parts made individually and this may save you a little money but may cause you much more aggravation in the process. Its good to get perspective from both sides in estimating your costs.
During this process I've learned a few things about estimating costs that I'd like to share. I keep a couple of spreadsheets to compare costs and track checklists and options. There are sometimes dramatic differences in the costs of a part from source to source. Of course, the closer you get to the actual manufacturer of a part the less expensive it will be, but there are other costs to consider as well, such as tooling costs, assembly, quality assurance, and dealing with losses or delays.
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| Pirate Figures From Treasure or Treachery |
- Make sure you know what you need exactly and be clear about your targets and goals.
- Get at least 3 quotes. Getting 5 quotes is better.
- Get samples if possible, even if you must purchase example product either from the manufacturer or at retail.
- Create a spec and be very specific. Panda games has a good online submission process and you can learn a lot from their forms.
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| Color Coded Dice from Treasure or Treachery |
- Try to quote out parts on your own, don’t forget to factor in final assembly costs. This can be an informative exercise even if you plan to use a single manufacturer for the game and it can really help when it comes to negotiating with manufacturers through comparison shopping. Alibaba is a great resource for this.
- Be patient with the sales staff and answer any questions they have thoroughly. The more detail you provide, the more accurate the quote will be.
- Get quotes early, and give yourself at 60-90 days just to gather quotes.
- Don’t neglect storage, fulfillment, and shipping costs in your final estimates.
- Don’t neglect marketing costs, those should be factored into your per unit cost too.
- Take a look at other crowdfunding campaigns and other games of similar complexity and quality to determine your final reward tier and retail costs. A rule of thumb is that your retail price should be 3-5 times your actual cost.
- If you have extras or different tiers for a crowdfunding campaign, don't forget to project your costs for these as well. You may need to use different sources for some rewards. This also adds complexity to your risk and cost structures. Take some extra time to consider if this is really boosting your campaign or just diluting it.
- Have a plan ready for your goals, moderate success, and run-away success and understand how this impacts your costs and timelines.
- Give yourself time to complete fulfillment and make sure you leave extra lead time for manufacturing. A good rule of thumb is to add 30% to your estimate to account for delays and unknowns.
Do you have any tips to share? Did I get anything wrong? Let me know in the comments!
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Friday, April 29, 2016
Our First Kickstarter... cancelled! - What went wrong?
So we launched a Kickstarter for "Treasure or Treachery", something I've been thinking about and planning for years. Less than halfway into it we've decided to cancel the funding, we are not getting the conversion rate we expected. Rather than spend our money and time on this iteration we've decided to re-tool and re-launch again later this year. Our presentation, pricing, and marketing plan are out of sync with the current reality of launching on Kickstarter. We need to re-examine our strategy, and improve our execution on a number of fronts if we are going to be successful here and get our first game out.
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| Launching a Kickstarter is like putting your baby in the oven |
To be frank the decision to try Kickstarting Treasure or Treachery came rather quickly after we had initially dismissed the idea to focus on developing out another game and making that our first Kickstarter instead. We reasoned this other game, which is Match Kingdom by the way, would be less costly for us to produce and we could start with a lower goal. In the end we decided there were a few problems with this and came back around to pursuing Treasure or Treachery since the game is ready for publication.
We set our goal at 25k because that would give us some additional funds to accelerate development of our next 2 games as well as market and sell the remaining stock from the Kickstarter print run, assuming we didn't sell everything out during the campaign (ha ha).
We set our timeline at 45 days because this would give us a couple weeks to tune things up and experiment with some different marketing methods, before we made a big push for the last 30 days of the campaign.
We made a video, collected some graphics, came up with some bonuses, reward tiers, even some stretch goals, just in case... Throw it in the pot, mix it up, launch and let the world know so they can beat a path to your door... annnnnd.... well mostly crickets. What happened?
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| A friendly message from Kickstarter reminds you of your failure |
We made a few big mistakes:
- We did not develop an audience first and we don't have a large budget for marketing; in other words, our marketing plan was not great. We did have a few tricks up our sleeve to get publicity, I can't talk about them now, and we did not deploy them, but in our estimation given the initial response they would not be most effective without fixing a few other things first...
- We did not have a sufficient presentation on Kickstarter, and both our game presentation and reward tier pricing were out of sync with expectations and our potential audience. To simplify this: we need a better prototype and need to be able to show a high quality end product and be priced in parity with similar offerings.
- We thought it would be easier to get fewer backers at a higher price point, reasoning that some extras, exclusivity, and the Kickstarter community would be enough. Well, this might have worked if we had a top notch presentation with a lot of cool parts and some brand recognition. Hubris! We don't have all the cool parts, we are new and have no brand recognition, nobody knows who we are yet.
- Our funding goal was too high and our stretch goals were tacked on. We need to perform some deeper analysis here and align our goals and expectations with what's reasonably achievable for us at this stage. We've got some great feedback from friends, family, and strangers and are incorporating that into our efforts.
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| Had to draw a Fate card! |
So what's next? Well a few things...
We are working on re-tooling the whole thing so we can re-launch later this year. New artwork, a better final product, and a Kickstarter campaign that is in sync with similar games being successfully funded. We will continue to develop new games: I Bet You Can't, and Match Kingdom being the current ones but we've got a bunch more in the lab.
I'm going to keep blogging here about what we are doing, our successes, failures, stuff we are planning, things we suck at, things we do great at, and game development in general. We'll be posting on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook and working on connecting with fans of pirates, board games, party games, kids games, and video games and hopefully some game developers, manufacturers, publishers, guilds, hobby stores, cafes, etc. etc...
We are also working on additional marketing and a better marketing strategy and execution to build awareness and drive backers to our next campaign.
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Did you know? Aktion Games can produce graphics, video, and sound for your game. Contact us today to get more info: info@aktiongames.com
Wednesday, April 27, 2016
To our Kickstarter backers & fans...
To our Kickstarter backers & fans... I want to say a heartfelt thank you! Your support means the world to us and we are so happy you chose to back us. We feel lucky to have such great family and friends and even luckier to have convinced some strangers to take a risk on us. We will eventually deliver this game to market, unfortunately for right now we are not attracting enough backers to meet our goal. Our conversion rate is dismal and we have decided to cancel this Kickstarter... This way we can focus our energies in the short term on fixing what we did wrong and returning in a short while with a better presentation, price points, and marketing campaign. We launched too soon without the right kind of preparation. In some ways we were aware of our shortcomings but our eagerness to bring this to market overcame our reservations and we leaped off the cliff. Hit the rocks. Ouch.
In the immortal words of Chumbawumba: “I get knocked down, but I get up again!”. This is not the end but the beginning! We hope you’ll join us on the second leg of our journey, when we take another shot at getting the funds to produce the game. Here’s the plan at a high-level:
In the immortal words of Chumbawumba: “I get knocked down, but I get up again!”. This is not the end but the beginning! We hope you’ll join us on the second leg of our journey, when we take another shot at getting the funds to produce the game. Here’s the plan at a high-level:
- We are cancelling funding for the current Kickstarter. :-(
- We will be taking a few weeks to re-tool, in that time we are going to bring our "A-game" to bear for a follow-up attempt:
- We are going to improve the game artwork, quality, and presentation including a better presentation on Kickstarter.
- We are going to produce some compelling special game elements for the Kickstarter edition.
- We are going to fix our pricing and reward tiers to offer better options, including a game-only option at a much lower price point.
- We are going to work on building our audience and reach through marketing, social media, and other means.
We will be announcing our launch here, if you’d like to keep engaged with us in the meantime, we’d love to hear from you:
Sign up for our e-blast: http://eepurl.com/bR3K2f
Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/aktiongamesSign up for our e-blast: http://eepurl.com/bR3K2f
Follow us on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/aktiongames
Follow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/@aktiongames
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