The year after my Kickstarter went as expected. I learned about fulfillment and distribution logistics, and playtested my upcoming board game. I surpassed milestones in both regards. Now that a year behind me, and my Kickstarter backers have been taken care of, I feel comfortable lowering the Amazon price of The WoW Diary back to Kickstarter levels.
I’m also selling extra copies of The WoW Diary slipcase edition, which doesn’t have the Kickstarter extras except the spot-varnished pictures, so it’s still a crazy-high quality book. I signed a hundred copies and sent them to Amazon. Each contains a companion booklet of promotional articles about post-launch drama and things we learned after WoW went live. Order it while supplies last!
Board Game News: Fun Ho!
It looks like my simplified RPG is turning out as well as I hoped. Thorough playtesting and iteration are showing that my game’s mechanics are going to be enjoyable in the long run. I’ve done more than two years of playtesting from coast to coast, and I have a working proof of concept. Finding fun was always the primary concern in the early stages of development, so I’m happy to say I’ve crossed that milestone. My game solves something that has been missing from the RPG genre, but innovation isn’t always fun, and I had to make sure I wasn’t giving up one for the other.
My game boils down the RPG genre into two elements: Boss fights & loot. Both were hard nuts to crack, especially when I’m simplifying the RPG experience into something palatable for the casual audience. In each dungeon, players fight four bosses; each fight takes between 15-20 minutes, and full-clears have taken playtesters between an hour and 80 minutes to complete…including teaching time.
If you’re interested in the game’s progress, sign up to my mailing list in the sidebar (I haven’t sent any emails yet, so don’t worry about spam), and I’ll let you know when I’m ready to announce the game’s Kickstarter.
Starting at the beginning of 2020, I’m going to focus on content creation and art, which are my next hurdles to cross. With content, I’ll need to playtest entire campaigns, and balance the loot. With art, I hope to raise the bar and spend a little more time on visuals than you normally see in a board game. I’ve been cruising through museums (Cleveland, NYC, Philly) and artist alleys at some of the biggest cons to build a roster of top-tier artists. Fantasy art has been in a rut, so I’m looking for abstract depictions of monsters. I’m leaning toward fine art examples, like Postmodernism and the Arts and Crafts Movement of the late 19th century, but ultimately, I’ll have to see what works.