I suppose my ambitions all centre around my wild west game. This is the first game I have paid a professional writer to create content for. I am also looking at buying in professional art and it will be my first kickstarter project.
I spent some time this afternoon auditioning music clips for the promotional videos to go along with it as well. There are two videos I would like, one for the quickstart version and one for the full game.
In many respects it feels like this game has crossed a certain threshold or reached a new level in production quality.
The nice thing is that it hasn’t really cost me that much money and even if the kickstarter fails, when I get around to launching it, it is really of little consequence. Freelance writers are shockingly underpaid as are artists without an established reputation.
One of the cornerstones of a successful kickstarter apparently is to have your game virtually finished before you even start the kickstarter campaign. This means that whatever happens you can deliver a playable game to your supporters. That is where I want to be. The easy bit of writing the core mechanics is done. All the content for setting and background is being professionally written and is being delivered daily.
This week I have been writing the quickstart. The condensed rules is done and I am writing the starting adventure now. I then just need the pre-gen characters to complete the content for that document.
All the playtest documents are written and ready to be released but they need the quickstart to complete the download package.
The last piece I need for the quickstart is a great piece of cover art. I have never commissioned art before so there is a first time for everything!
Off the page there is a forum all ready for any play testers to share their findings and make suggestions.
This is a game where there is significantly more in the ticked off list than the to do list. It has also been a really fun learning experience.
So to put it neatly my ambition for the coming year is to successfully launch my Wild West role playing game.
One thing about having the material written prior to the Kickstarter is that you can avoid the situation Gareth-Michael Skarka is in. The Kickstarter for Far West was successful. In December, the product will be 8 years overdue, and still isn’t written.
My publishing ambitions are to get into print on demand, move on to other selling platforms than OBS, get something published on one of the community content programmes (probably either DM’s Guild or Dragonbite), get into models, both 3D printing (which means I can get a 3D printer as a business expense!) and paper, and see if I can get some audios done. That will probably have to be outsourced, and I’m unsure whether it will be worth it. Similarly, I’d like to get some apps done, converted from my various name generators, but I really lack the time to learn to do them myself and I doubt that they will be big earners. Sharing ad rotation would perhaps be the best.
So, that’s this year sorted out, now for next 🙂
Amazon POD and kindle are dead simple snd would inly take you an afternoon to grasp. POD covers are the hardest aspect in my opinion.
I have found DMs Guild disappointing. There are so many releases that mine just lot lost in the noise.
I get a lot of success with 7th Sea but it is very hard to write for and Traveller which is really easy to write for.
You can get an app built for £20 by an asian developer but as you say the question is will it make the money back. I csn code Android apps but not apple. The time it takes to develop an app makes it not worth my while.
I have published – unsuccessfully in terms of sales anyway – for Kindle, but not POD. I also want to take a look at sites such as the Open Gaming Store, Warehouse 23, Indie Press Revolution and, also for POD, Lulu.
The main reason fro DM’s Guild is that I’m fairly familiar with the Forgotten Realms, and I was planning on trying something setting-specific rather than system. You’re right, though, that it’s better to publish for popular systems that have little support. Although I haven’t tried writing for the modern Traveller, I have published one supplement for Cepheus Engine, which is essentially Classic Traveller (Michael Brown publishes a heck of a lot of short adventures for that).
£20 is low enough that it;s probably worth risking to develop a few apps at that price. Several linked apps tend to be more valuable than one (the law of networks I think that is).
I’d love to see my modern stuff move forward this year, possibly to publication, but since it’s currently tied to RMU I don’t think that’s likely to happen. It’s frustrating, because I do think there’s a market for it and I have three genres covered already (espionage, military special operations, and undercover law enforcement) with different systems for each. But it’s hard to even playlets when the core stuff (at least in terms of basic skill and character creation stuff – my combat is different in many ways) is still in limbo.
Is your intention to submit your works to ICE as official releases?
That had been the original intent as discussed with ICE, but as the delays continue and as my stuff matures I think it would be better-served as a licensed product in that it uses some of their system but not all of it. In fact, I’d say now it’s really only character generation and elements of the skill system (aside from the concept of critical hit tables in combat) that remain “true RM.” Plus I’m drafting setting concepts for each genre, and I’d really rather retain control of them as opposed to signing them over. So while my stuff would work with RMU, it certainly isn’t RMU in some key areas.
One problem is that ICE don’t seem to be hugely interested in granting RM licenses.
I suspect that ICE are reluctant to grant licences to people wanting to promote to RM2 and RMSS. They may have a totally different attitude to RMU licences after the launch.
I had wondered about that, but it seems to me that having licensees in place ready to support RMU immediately would have been beneficial. Not only is RMU going to be a major piece of kit, there may well not be any supplement support for months.
I cannot help but think that ICE is not that forward thinking, or maybe it is a case of they have sufficient experience of of the Final Draft -> Final Release process that they have a time scale and that could be measured in months. Until you have the final draft rules then no one can write adventures as we don’t know what we are writing against. An entire module just compounds that problem as then you are dealing with many encounters that have to be somewhat balanced so that they are significant a threat to be meaningful and yet the characters have a hope of surviving to complete the module.
You cannot charge people for a license for a game that is not even written yet. Surely the price/value of the license is derived from the potential sales/audience size. Right now that somewhere from zero to nothing. You could not release a module today for RMU as we don’t even know the final name of the game, probably simply ‘Rolemaster’ and if you did release something then you would almost certainly be in violation of the NDA which we all agreed to before D/L the beta rules.