So Many Ideas, So Little Time...

Here's what we have confirmed through experience. Ideas are easy, good ideas are moderately difficult, and taking a good idea and making a great game is insanely difficult.

Given this information, how do you pick the idea that will eventually get you to the destination of a great game that you will be proud to present to the world?

Well, if any of you have figured out the formula for picking the perfect idea, please do share. While you're at it, could you also share your stock picking formula? :-) 

Needless to say, this is not a science. Picking an idea up front that will turn into a winner is not easy or guaranteed. But, we have found some metrics that will help you to narrow down your search. 

Take each of the following metrics and score your ideas on a 1-10 scale for them. Then add up the scores and see which one comes out on top.

1. Production

Well before you get into any metric, or any detail of an idea, we recommend that you look at the issues related to production. This might seem completely backward to the creative right side of your brain, but let the left-brain prevail for a brief period of time before letting your right-brain take flight. Consider the following: what kind of components are required for your game, how much art will you need to commission, where will you get all the bits produced, what are the options for the bits (wood, plastic, cardboard, cards, etc.), how big will the box be, what will it cost to get art, what will it cost to get the game produced, what will it cost to ship the box to all your buyers. Additionally think about things like do we have or can we find an artist that will be able to deliver on the vision for the look of the game, do we know, or can we get information about where to get the production done, once we have a 1000-5000 copies of the game produced how much space will it need to hold those copies till they are sold. Finally try to put together a ball park for your total costs, potential profits, break even points, then see if you can raise that much money and if you can manage to keep going until you reach your break even point. Also consider the implications of not meeting that break even point. If any part of this equation does not add up score this idea lower. This does not mean that you need to totally abandon an amazing idea. It might just mean that it's not yet time for that idea to take flight.

2. Uniqueness

A truly unique idea is truly once in a blue moon. And something completely unique has a good chance of success. At the same time something completely new has the danger of being rejected for its novelty and unfamiliarity. If you have something people can relate to, feels familiar, and has a unique twist we would recommend that you give it a higher score.

3. Fun

Fun is difficult to measure, at the same time, fun is also quite easy to measure. Unfortunately, this metric will only come into play after you have done some work on your idea. Once the core of your game has solidified, and you have put together a prototype you can start to measure the fun that people are having while playing the game. This is where you need to play-test the game with as many and as varied a group of people that you can get around the table. You won't need to ask them if they are having fun at this point, it will be very apparent. If the fun rating in your game is on the lower side, ask questions of the player to see if there is something easily fixable that is getting in the way. At this point you can assign a score and let the full battery of metrics determine if this is the idea you want to put at the top of your list.

4. Completeness

Let's face it, sometimes a bird in hand is definitely better than two in the bush. If you have a game that is near completion, and people are having fun playing it, then push through get it done. Finalizing/finishing any task is a tedious job. It means that you have to put some other things that are fresh and new aside. It also means that you have to deal with the rigors of marketing, Kickstarter or some other form of financing, production, and shipping. But hey, that's what brings in the dough that allows you to keep baking.

5. Passion

Warning cliche ahead; last but not least, is an interesting metric. That's because it has nothing to do with your game at all. It measures how passionate you are about the idea, the theme, the mechanics of the game idea. All of us making boardgames except a very lucky few do this in our spare time after we have paid our dues to family and work; for most of us this is a passion project. So the more passionate you are about some aspect of the idea the more you are likely to spend that last bit of time at the end of the day getting it done.

There you have it, some ideas to help bring the idea whose time has come, to the top of your list. Use them in a way that works best for you. You can give all these metrics equal weight, or give one or more of them a boost. You might even change how you use them at different times in your journey.

If you have your own metrics that are not listed here, feel free to share them in the comments. If you use our metrics, do let us know how they worked for you.

Game on...

A Man Walks Into a Bar. Code. Store.

Up until recently we had not dealt with direct sales to consumers or even retailers that wanted ready-for-consumer packaging.

All that changed when we decided to sell some dice bags directly on Amazon. In addition to product photography and other details like the exact dimensions and shipping weights etc that we had to put together we also realized that we needed bar codes or UPC codes for our products.

Our first instinct was to ask the Twitterverse for answers, and we did. Almost immediately he got an answer from our good friend Phil of 5th Street Games.

But being designers, we decided to delve deeper into the seedy underbelly of UPC selling and buying. What we discovered was a monopolistic standards organization that charges an arm, a leg, and an arm, and a leg for a pool of UPCs so big that a small company will never use it all. And a small set of approved resellers that charge anywhere from almost nothing to a small portion of your arm. 

Even though all these resellers are "official" some of them don't inspire a lot of confidence (or any) and we could not buy from them even if they were charging  pennies. The cost in time, money, and hassle of changing all current inventory and listings to a new UPC code if a reseller disappears was not worth the savings of a few dollars.

Eventually we did find a reseller that was good and we are now happy customers.

So you don't have to go through all the work we had to do, we have put together a handy reference doc with information about our top two picks.

Thought of the Day: How to Eat an Elephant

We've all probably heard the old adage.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. 

Often times, in our experience designing games, the answer is similar. In the course of making a game there seems to be a nearly endless stream of tasks to be tackled. These range from small and benign to big and foreboding. Some of them you will know how to do already, some will be in completely uncharted territory.
As we have started this little experiment, here are some things we have found that have helped us to keep taking bites so that we can eventually eat this elephant:

Talk often
If you are working with a team or working on your own but getting advice, talk often. This is when we find that most of our epiphanies happen. When you are batting ideas around and looking at them from different angles is when you are most likely to have breakthroughs of inspiration.

Write a list
This may seem too simple, but you won't get everything done if you forget what you needed to do, so write it down. This will help to keep you organized and make sure that things are done in the proper order.

Get to work
That elephant is not going to eat itself and talking about it won't do the job either. Once you've decided what you are going to do, get out there and do it. Have fun and enjoy the journey, but get to work. This is how dreams become a reality.

We have used these ideas and seen great things happen. Remember a dream without a plan is nothing more than a wish and a plan without action is nothing more than hot air. Keep at it, go to work, and start eating that elephant one bite at a time, then your dream can one day be a reality.

Our Experience with Kickstarter or That's What You Call Diving Into the Deep End of the Pool. PART 2

In PART 1 of this post we talked about the lessons we learned as we prepped for our Kickstarter campaign. Here in PART 2 we will continue with some lessons we learned on the rest of the journey.

LESSON 5: Remember it is your project, trust your instincts.

Kickstarter is a very interesting beast. It is amazing how much personal investment and ownership your backers gain when they back your project. This is both good and bad. It is good because, when a backer feels personally invested, they often want your project to succeed and are more likely to share it with others. It is bad because everyone has their own opinions and when it comes to design decisions and options that may be part of your project you will never be able to please everyone. 

In our project, two of the overfunding goals were to bump up the size of the dice. First, from 16mm to 18mm, the second was from 18mm to 25mm. We really liked the 25mm dice and thought that was an awesome goal. The first goal to make the dice 18mm was received very well, but when we announced the goal to make the dice 25mm you would have thought that we were announcing that we were going to kill a baby seal for each set we sold. It was crazy how up-in-arms some of the backers were. Eventually we ended up producing both sizes of the dice and (almost) everyone was happy. The thing we learned through the whole process was that you need to trust your own instincts. It is your project, trust in your vision and do what is best for the project. All of the backers cannot be pleased and it is okay if some backers gripe and complain.

LESSON 6: Limit funding options.

One pitfall we found ourselves in was just offering too many funding options. It is very tempting to offer a lot of different funding options in the belief that it may entice more people to back your project, but this mistake can lead to a lot more work. The more standardized your funding options, the easier it is to fulfill your orders. In our project, the overfunding goals and funding options we provided made fulfillment rather difficult. We basically had to hand compile every order. Do yourself a big favor and do what you can to limit the order permutations so that packaging up the orders isn't so time intensive.

LESSON 7: Get ready to work.

Kickstarter campaigns are much more work than you think they are going to be. Actually, even putting it that bluntly is an incredible understatement. Managing production and fulfillment of several hundred to several thousand orders is no small undertaking. Ordering and managing shipping supplies, compiling orders, managing the mailing lists, the task list goes on and on... Remember to take this time, effort, and cost into account when planning your campaign. 

Another thing that we found very time consuming was international shipping. With our project every international order had to have a customs form and had to be processed individually at the post office. Since then we have been investigating what other options may exist, but we have not had a chance to try any of them yet. If you know more about easy ways of handling international shipping, please share what you know in the comments below.

LESSON 8: Get the word out.

Have a battle plan to get word out on your campaign. It is easy to look at Kickstarter, especially tabletop games on Kickstarter, and think, "Fantastic! I'll put my super-awesome game up there and make a mountain of money.". The fact of the matter is that there are just too many competing campaigns to rely on people stumbling upon your campaign and caring enough to give it the time of day. You have to get the word out. You have to tweet, post on Facebook, blog, comment in forums, email your friends, and do anything and everything else you can think of to get the word out. If you don't, very few people will see your campaign and if people aren't seeing your campaign, they can't back your project.

Conclusion

Given everything we learned and went through with our first Kickstarter campaign, my biggest suggestion is, jump in, but know a little bit about what you are getting in to. I am sure we will be running more Kickstarter campaigns in the future and I think Kickstarter is a fantastic way for a small company to mitigate some of the risk involved in self-publishing a game, but it is not all roses and sunshine. For all of you that are planning Kickstarter campaigns we wish you luck and hope many of you will check out our campaigns in the future.

- Dave & Sandeep.

Thought of the Day: More is Better, Right?

...Right? 

Depends on question actually. When the question is about the number of products you should have, the answer to the question is nuanced at best. 

The fact of the matter is that a majority of small businesses fail or simply close down within the first three years. There are many reasons for this, like not having enough cash, being in an over-crowded business space, lack of experience in the field, lack of experience in business matters like finance and taxes, spending unwisely on advertising, etc.

Another reason companies fail, and one relevant to the question in this post, is that they carry too much or too little inventory. Too much inventory and your capital can get tied up preventing you from seizing an opportunity that comes by. Too little, and your customers are starved and start looking for other places that they can get what they want.

The problem obviously gets magnified and further complicated when you have more products. No wonder there is an entire segment of businesses that do nothing but manage inventory for other companies.

So, when in comes to the number of products you should have, consider the implications that each new product has on your entire product line before jumping in.

Good Luck!

Thought of the Day: The one little word that makes all the difference...

When it comes to game design there is one little word that makes all the difference and it isn't "please". That word has its place too, but in game design the word that makes the most difference is "playtest". Playtest! Playtest! Playtest! The importance of playtesting when developing a game cannot be understated. Playtest with your friends, playtest with strangers, playtest and try out weird strategies, playtest and try and break your game, run blind playtests, playtest your manual, and when you think you finally have a polished little gem of a game, playtest it some more.

There is only one way to take your wonderful vision of fun and make it a reality and that is to put it through the wringer. Each playtest will allow you to chip off a corner here, polish a rough spot there, clarify some ambiguity, and simplify a complication. There have been many times we have talked about an idea, thought it was super awesome, thrown together a prototype and played the game to find out just how far from done our idea was. I have to strain my mind to think of a time when a playtest didn't yield at least some minor polish or change to a design. This is even true of designs that have been under development for a very long time.

So pull out that prototype and play it! Be ready to take notes. Be ready to hear criticism. Be ready to flip your design upside down, turn it inside out, and put it back together again. If you do you may be on your way to greatness. If you don't beware, because when you release your game into the wild, it is going to have to stand on its own two feet. Don't send it when it is just learning to walk. Wait until you know it can run!

Our Experience with Kickstarter or That's What You Call Diving Into the Deep End of the Pool. PART I

Well, in our first post, I mentioned that the next post would talk a little about our experiences with Kickstarter. As you may have noticed, there have been several small posts since then, none of which have mentioned Kickstarter. That is how we plan to maintain this blog. We are going to try to have regular, longer blog posts with some level of consistency, but in between those larger posts, we are interested in sharing other thoughts and bits of wisdom that we have accumulated along our journey. We hope that you will find them interesting and of value.

Now, on to Kickstarter. A few years back, Sandeep and I had this idea for what we felt would be a really cool little product. Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock Dice. We are both fans of The Big Bang Theory television show and this idea just seemed to materialize out of thin air while I was driving to work one morning. It was simple enough and seemed like it could have some solid mass appeal given the popularity of the show, so we thought we would try to bring it to fruition. Around this time, we had been discussing at length a variety of other projects we had in the works and the possibility of running a Kickstarter campaign for one of them. Given the apparent simplicity of the RPSLS Dice, we quickly decided it would be our best candidate for a campaign. Thus began the long path of trying to figure out how to actually run a Kickstarter campaign. Along the way we learned a lot of things. In order to keep this from rambling too much, I've broken the experience up into several lessons we learned and I'll talk about each one as we go.

LESSON 1: Do your homework.

Before we started our RPSLS Dice campaign we had several months of research. We found a dice manufacturer, obtained samples of their dice, worked out costs, determined shipping costs, planned what overfunding options we thought would work well, and so on and and so forth. For quite some time it seemed like each time we answered a question we learned about two more questions that needed answering. Keep at it until you feel you have all your ducks in a row. Then keep at it a bit longer.

Anyhow, back to our story. Eventually, we thought we had everything figured out. We knew how much the dice would cost to produce, package, and ship. We knew what colors and other options we wanted. We had final art done. We knew our plan for our campaign (or so we thought). You get the picture. Then we put our campaign together. That leads us to our second lesson.

LESSON 2: Plan your campaign.

We had planned all sorts of things for our campaign: overfunding goals, funding options, target funding goal, and everything else. Once we had our plan put into place we started our campaign. Then we remembered all the things we had forgotten. Updates, Updates, Updates... It is very important to keep your backers engaged throughout your campaign. Fortunately, writing and posting updates is a relatively easy thing to do, but still it would have been better to have a more solid plan for them in place before we began. This is especially true if you have a shorter campaign.

LESSON 3: Make sure you build in wiggle room.

As we ran our campaign there were various other things that continued to come up. One thing that became very clear very quickly was this: DO NOT PLAN FOR BEST CASE SCENARIO! If you do that you will end up either not making any money at all or even losing money on your campaign. Regardless of your homework you will likely find cases that cost more to ship, produce, or package. If you have built your whole business model on best case scenario, this will land you in trouble. This applies to time tables for delivery, cost, and pretty much any other aspect of your project you can think of. Remember, no matter how much homework you've done, it likely isn't enough. Make sure you have enough wiggle room to handle the curve balls that come your way.

LESSON 4: Expect the unexpected.

In the middle of our project we had one such curve ball. It was really more of a wrecking ball that we had to deal with. The company that we had vetted and were planning on using to produce our dice, was being used by another campaign to produce a custom die for their project, and the dice manufacturer dropped the ball in a very serious way. Not only were the dice delivered very late, but they did not look anything like the quality one would hope for or expect. In the case of this other project, it was a disappointment. But considering that our entire project was dice; for us it would have been devastating.

Given this development, we went into scramble mode and quickly found another production company and had to start the whole process of vetting them and evaluating samples and whatnot in the middle of our campaign. Fortunately, for us this worked out, but there was some very stressful time where the very fate of our project seemed in question. As mentioned before, expect curve balls and unexpected obstacles. Especially if this is your first foray into games publishing.

That's all we have time and space for in this post. We will continue our overview with some more lessons we learned in our Kickstarter campaign in the next post. Hope this post has been useful to you and you will be back to read Part 2.

- Dave & Sandeep.