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.
No comments:
Post a Comment