This is a postmortem breakdown of my experience, including what went right, what went wrong, and what I think could be improved upon in the future.
My first game, Yomi's Gate, was nominated in last year's SXSW Gaming Awards. If you want to read about that experience, that article is here. I'm going to draw a few comparisons to last year's event, so it might be worth checking out.
SXSW is a city-devouring cultural event that takes over Austin, TX for about two weeks every March. It has multi-day events covering Film, Music, and Interactive, including movie premieres, live concerts, panels, comedy shows, meetups, and more. It truly encompasses the whole city, with the Austin Convention Center at its epicenter and various other events scattered all over Austin.
Gaming is a relatively new track at SXSW, having started just a few years ago while SXSW itself has been around for 30 years now. It's so new that "Gaming" isn't even on the signs strewn about the city, but more on that later. Right now, Gaming includes scattered talks throughout Interactive, with an exhibition show floor that's free to the public running for three days, capped off with the Gaming Awards ceremony at the end. My experience is with the show floor and Gaming Awards, so that's what I'm going to be talking about.
1. Gameplay to Sales Conversions
Breaker Blocks is one of those games where, for whatever reason, you have to play it to make sense of it. I think that’s probably going to be the case with any abstract strategy game, so at least I have the hook of, “I made literally everything you see here,” and the appealing “made with lasers” tag line.
The result, however, is that conventions and other in-person events become the way to make sales, and by extension pay the bills, so SXSW has been the biggest opportunity by far for me to make this happen. There are thousands of people at the show and at least several hundred came by the booth, with many of those sitting down to play the game. From there, the rate of conversion from seeing the game to playing the game to buying the game wasn’t as good as, say, a dedicated tabletop convention, but it was still far, far better than anything I can do online.
Between the short learning time, the $25 price point, and the bright colors to draw people in, I’m reasonably happy with the overall results of sales conversions at SXSW. I realize that’s a mundane point to make, but devs gotta eat and it's important that I remember and others know that there are people attending SXSW who do want to buy games.
2. Diverse Audience
I talked about this last year, too, and it’s one of the mixed blessings of SXSW still, but the audience at the event is a fairly broad one. Since the event is free to attend and concurrent with other aspects of SXSW, there are lots of people who are just passively into games. One of the things I say to people casually looking at my table/games is, “Do you like tabletop games?” and this is an event where many of those people are going to say something along the lines of, “Oh, not really” or “No, I don’t really play board games.”
With Yomi’s Gate, this created a sometimes insurmountable barrier to talking further, since that game is designed for people who like intense war games but don’t have time to play them. With Breaker Blocks, that was more frequently a great selling point for me, because the game is designed to be easy to learn and hard to master and shares some similarities with well-known games like Chess and Dominoes. Those design choices and marketing choices paid off consistently at this year’s event. As a result, appealing to the diverse crowd at SXSW cleanly falls into the “What Went Right” section this year. Depending on the kind of game you want to show, your mileage may vary wildly.
3. Layout and Planning
Compared to last year, the layout and planning for the show floor were drastically improved. Tabletop games were grouped together, multiplayer games were grouped together, single player games were grouped together, and there was an obvious spatial division between the loud bombast of one half of the show floor and the quieter Indie Corner.
Each Gamer’s Voice nominee got stage time this year, all planned and scheduled in advance, and there was minimal confusion about when to pack up and leave for the VIP party and Gaming Awards show on Saturday. All of these are major improvements from last year.
It would be hard to lay out the show floor better than it was this year. I think there are improvements to be made differentiating tabletop from digital, but more on that later in this post. I may have a positive bias here, having a terrible physical spot last year and an excellent one this year, but all in all the venue change and rearranging of this year's show floor felt like a major improvement.
The view from across the show floor.
4. Camaraderie
This a fairly common thread with gaming conventions, but I feel like one of the most convincing reasons to do events like SXSW is the camaraderie you get from spending time with other developers and people involved with the industry in some form or another. I had the opportunity to meet people from other continents and that’s an opportunity only major events can create. You’re always going to bond with people at events, but SXSW continues to play a role in bringing people together from far, far away.
For my part in it, Austin made it easy to get developers together and effortlessly walk somewhere to food and drinks together.
5. Staff Responsiveness
I want to take an entire bullet point just to talk about how much I appreciate the responsiveness of the SXSW Gaming staff. Sydney, Estevan, and Justin are among the best people you could possibly hope to work with when you’re exhibiting at an event. I’ve gone to plenty of shows now and the default seems to be that as long as things aren’t literally on fire, organizers don’t have to be particularly involved one way or another. With SXSW, I feel like just about everything I talked about wanting to improve from last year was addressed in some form or another and that is spectacular. In terms of the overall trajectory of improvement, SXSW Gaming is absolutely going in the right direction under their leadership.
1. Experience Disparity
SXSW Gaming is still a weird place to bring your game because there are so many different things happening in one space. This year, even with ideal general layout, I still had a contemplative tabletop game next to the screaming, rabid fans enjoying Gang Beasts right next door. It was a great opportunity to provide a change of pace for people going from either of our tables to the other, but at the same time it was strange to reconcile two very different kinds of games in the same general area.
More importantly, it felt bizarre to be vying for the same award. “Multiplayer” is such a vague descriptor and doesn’t do a lot to convey the difference between sitting around a table to play games with your friends, sitting on a couch to play games with your friends, and playing online. There is absolutely some overlap, but I feel like there needs to be further delineation between digital and analog games, especially when digital games can offer game codes and giveaways that cost nothing to incentivize voting for the Gamer’s Voice community choice award and physical games don’t have such an option available to them.
When people watching Gang Beasts would stand in my booth space to do so, my approach was simply to ask them if they liked tabletop games.
2. Throughput
This is a term borrowed from the fast food industry, but I feel like it applies here as well. The idea is that given a certain amount of time, how many people can you get to experience your product? It's stuffy and sterile, but I'm learning more and more that it's so very important at events like this.
I feel like in order to do well at busy, crowded conventions like SXSW, I need to work harder on getting more people to experience my game in the same amount of time. With a game this year that’s faster to learn and faster to play than the game I brought last year, I thought I was poised to do well both in terms of sales and in terms of getting more people to experience the game for the sake of voting in the community choice award I was nominated for.
Then I saw Gang Beasts, which did so many things right it made me realize my own process leaves a lot to be desired. With that game, there were often eight players playing at once and a giant crowd behind them watching the game and understanding exactly what it was all about just by looking at it. Compare that to Breaker Blocks, which up to four people could experience at once (two tables for two players each) and which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to onlookers who haven’t had the game explained to them.
As a numbers game, looking at number of players who experienced or understood my game and then funneling that into people who liked the game and then continuing to funnel that into people who experienced the game, liked the game, and were also likely voters in the awards, I truly didn’t stand much of a chance. I’m not complaining about Gang Beasts; I just have a lot to improve about my own game presentation. Maybe that means making a digital version of the game so people can play through automated tutorials. Maybe that means making better signage to show off how the game works. I'm really not sure. This is something I struggle with more than most aspects of game development.
3. Bizarre Awards
The Gaming Awards show last year was bizarre and it was just as bizarre this year. Highlights include a pre-show by an incredibly loud screamo DJ with a surreal shooter game on the main screen at the same time, a multiple-song intermission by an oddly dressed band that included a cover of “Everybody Wants to Rule the World,” and a mid-show advertisement that was entirely composed of hip-thrusting. It was somehow even weirder than it sounds; I don’t have words to adequately describe the awards show. Given that the Gaming Awards are the reason that many of the exhibitors were at SXSW Gaming, the award show itself felt dissonant and at times incoherent.
It's not that ToughCoded and Starbomb were bad, it's that they were out of place given the context.
4. Poor Scheduling
This year SXSW Gaming rolled a 1 when it came to scheduling the event. It was scheduled during GDC, it wasn’t scheduled concurrently with SXSW Interactive, and it occupied a Thursday, Friday, and Saturday instead of the far more desirable Friday, Saturday, Sunday slot. As a result, most of the Austin game development community was out of town for the entire event, people who were in town for Interactive weren’t around anymore for Gaming, groups like Geek & Sundry left before Gaming even happened, and the high traffic of a Sunday was replaced with the much lower traffic of a Thursday.
I realize this is entirely out of my hands and mostly out of the hands of the organizers, working with a complicated and already crowded schedule alongside semi-associated Interactive, Film, and Music conferences happening around the same time, but that only makes the situation more understandable, not any better.
5. No Press
SXSW Gaming continues to have nearly zero press coverage. Nobody I talked to was interviewed by press, no SXSW Gaming press list exists (there is such a list for Interactive, Film, and Music), and I didn’t meet a single gaming writer myself.
Again, SXSW Gaming is a gold mine for members of the press, but right now it’s essentially 100% consumer contact for exhibitors. That makes it tough to make SXSW a financially sustainable event for people like me, since you either make back your expenses by selling games or you lose money going to the event; there’s no investment in future press coverage that could lead to indirect sales when the dust settles or attention outside of attendees themselves.
This void is partially filled by the presence of YouTube personalities and Twitch streamers, but it feels like those relationships are still in their nascence. I met a few people at after-hours bar time, but that had little to do with the event itself and more to do with individual efforts to hang out with people met at the show.
Perhaps that's symptomatic of the larger trends in gaming coverage as a whole, moving away from media conglomerates and towards individuals who all have a voice they want to broadcast. Even so, getting in touch with anyone at SXSW Gaming who might have interest in your game is incredibly scattered and almost impossible at the moment.
Scheduling
My chief request for improvement on the organizer side of SXSW is scheduling. Being scheduled during GDC made it incredibly difficult to pull attention away from that event. Not being scheduled during Interactive made it difficult to get the attention of anyone who did travel into Austin for such reasons, given that they were likely to leave town between the time Interactive ended and Gaming began. Not including Sunday on the schedule was a significant hit in foot traffic. Changing these things for next year should be the top priority.
Community
Somewhat related to scheduling, I think there’s room for improvement in fostering the development and industry community during SXSW Gaming. One suggestion that comes to mind is taking the live performers from the Gaming Awards event and simply moving them to a pre-SXSW Gaming party. Invite developers, set up a space, and make a party out of it where people can meet each other, make connections, and bond before the event even starts. It doesn’t make sense to have a live band play a set in the middle of, or even immediately after, an award show, but moving those bands to a different time and venue and turning it into a party/mixer seems like it would be a much better use of that time.
Clarity
Beyond scheduling, clear communication about what is at the event seems to be another obvious fix. For starters, there are SXSW signs all over Austin during the event, but they all say “SXSW Interactive Film Music” on them. Why isn’t “Gaming” on those signs? There are laptops set up to vote in the Gaming Awards during the show and they’re all in a perfect place, but none of them have signs on them and it’s not clear what they’re for; a simple “Gamer’s Voice Award : VOTE HERE” sign above every laptop or vertical banners in the general vicinity would make a huge difference in attendee participation.
Further, there was a big stage for Gamer’s Voice nominees to talk about their game, scheduled in 30 minute intervals throughout the entire event, but somehow the chairs were mostly empty the whole time. I don’t know how better to tell attendees that the stage exists and to let them know what was happening on it, but it largely seemed like people were only watching because the chairs were somewhere to sit for a while, not because any of the content was of interest to them.
Taken immediately before my time on stage.
Finally, better signage throughout would help immensely. I went most of the weekend not even knowing there was a tabletop room, for instance, because if there were signs for such a thing I definitely didn’t see them anywhere.
Developer Accommodation
When you’re nominated in the SXSW Gaming Awards you get your choice of a Gold badge that gets you into Interactive and Film or a Music badge that just gets you into Music events. I would trade such a badge in a heartbeat for a parking pass. I spent $70 in parking to get to and from the event, since I stayed with a friend in the suburbs to avoid expensive hotels. It was the lesser of two evils, but allowing access to Music, Film, or Interactive while you’re already busy working at Gaming either means leaving Gaming or adding extra travel expenses to get into town before or after the Gaming part of the event; It would make so much more sense to help with parking, just to give one clear example that immediately comes to mind. I can’t say that I know of conventions that actually do this, but it doesn’t hurt to point out that it would definitely help.
Convention food was also overpriced and under-available, as it seems to be with any convention. On the first day I tried to get a $14 “meat plate” of southern BBQ, but they had entirely run out of food by 4pm, which seems bizarre for an event that runs from noon to 8pm. I went for my second choice of a hot sandwich at a different stand, but they too had run out of food. I settled on a pre-packaged chicken caesar salad and a 16oz soda, paying $12.25 for my trouble, and surreptitiously ate other food on day two and day three. This contrasts pretty strongly with the most recent major event I did, where the Smithsonian American Art Museum provided water, pastries, and sandwiches in a developer-only lounge. Even a quiet space, an empty room with tables and chairs, to eat away from the bustling crowd of the show floor would be a welcome improvement.
Award Classification
Last year SXSW Gaming had one “Gamer’s Voice Award” that encompassed all nominated indie games, including tabletop, single player, digital, VR, or whatever other descriptors you want to add. It made it very difficult for single- or two-player games to compete with four+ player party games, such as Speedrunners which won the award.
This year the award was split into Singleplayer and Multiplayer categories, which is very much a step in the right direction. Justin spoke at the award show about wanting to diversify their award categories, such as including Most Promising New Intellectual Property and the Matthew Crump Cultural Innovation Award, and I think that could go even further. I would suggest a Gamer’s Voice Tabletop category, given how different it is to make, play, and promote tabletop games compared to digital single player games and digital multiplayer games. It might also make sense to add a VR category, as the VR scene is currently blossoming and there have already been promising VR nominees like Soundself and Keep Talking And Nobody Explodes that similarly are in weird competition with other types of games.
The acceptance speech for Pandemic Legacy’s win of “Best Tabletop Game” said it best, which paraphrases to, “In a loud show floor of explosions and shooting things, thanks for noticing that our paper and cardboard bits and pieces also exist.”
Press Outreach
The near-total absence of press at SXSW Gaming continues to strike me as bizarre and it seems like an area where dramatic improvements could be made. I don’t know if press simply don’t attend SXSW Gaming or if they do attend but aren’t part of any sort of database, but reaching out to the people who write or talk about games is something that deserves attention for future shows.
While officially gathering such a list would be ideal, I think this is something I individually need to do in the future as well. It’s far more difficult to do cold-call emails when you have no idea who’s going to be attending, but perhaps there’s still some mileage to be gotten from efforts there.
Conveyance and Throughput
My last point for improvement is about making my games even easier to understand to more people can play, and hopefully enjoy, them. Even a great game is destined for failure if it can’t be experienced and understood quickly and easily by new players. Perhaps this means doing digital ports of my games, giving some ground from the physicality of my games to allow for pre-programmed tutorials to teach the rules and an easier means of distribution. Perhaps it means making games that are easier to understand at a glance instead of leaning on abstract, minimalist strategy and intentionally murky war games with numerous, semi-related win conditions. It's hard to parse what makes my games good from what makes my games inaccessible, especially since sometimes that's the same thing.
I don’t think I could have done much better given the setup I had for this show, so this is largely a point about future game design and development.
All in all, SXSW Gaming 2016 was a positive experience for me. I showed Breaker Blocks to tons of new people, I got to talk to some people who actually already knew who I was through my work on Yomi’s Gate, I made new friends in the development community, and I had a lot of fun doing all of that. I was busy almost non-stop from the moment I got to Austin, but the rewarding experience of seeing new people play and enjoy my work is what makes game development worthwhile for me.
I want to thank a whole bunch of people. While my games are something I make start to finish on my own, such a thing wouldn’t even be possible without the wonderful people in my life. I’d like to thank, in no particular order:
Jake is an independent game developer, using lasers to design, produce, and manufacture tabletop games under one roof. His most popular games are Breaker Blocks and Yomi’s Gate, both of which are available at Spriteborne.com. He can be found on Twitter as @jakeninja
]]>6 days ago, 2 days after my first exhibiting convention ended, I started conceptualizing a brand new game.
At the Philly Game Forge, we do monthly game jams. Every month, there's a new topic and we're supposed to spend about 12 hours over the course of a single week turning that topic into a game. The focus is usually on meeting some interesting challenge, such as using a single control axis to make a game for stroke survivors, or fitting a unique theme like modeling a game after a tweet from @_FloridaMan.
This month, it's the Profit Jam. The challenge is to spend up to two weeks making a game, then four weeks attempting to turn a profit with that game. The winner is the person or team whose game makes the most money.
At first, it seemed like a crass theme. Game jams are about fostering new skills or meeting some artistic challenge, aren't they? What place does money have in that? That doesn't seem like a jam theme.
Except it is. Finishing a product is a skill. Releasing a finished product to the world is a skill. Making money with your craft is a skill. Turns out, they're all skills that most of us could stand to improve upon in the same way we could step up our game with art or code or design.
The jam started while I was in Austin, 1,600 miles away from the vast majority of my tools. I initially laughed and completely wrote it off, assuming I wouldn't be able to participate. The convention concluded, however, and instead of making me want to hibernate, it gave me an even greater thirst for creation.
I started driving back from Austin to Philadelphia 6 days ago and that's when my brain started dreaming up ideas.
So on and so on.
It's 26 hours of raw driving from Austin to the suburbs of Philadelphia, you know. That's a lot of time for an idea to take root and churn over and over until it starts to become coherent. It's like when you get good ideas while you're taking a shower because you can't be distracted by anything else, only this was like a 26 hour shower over the course of three days.
So when I got back, I wrote everything down. I opened up Illustrator and I sketched the basics. I tested the physicality of the tabs and tiles to see if what I had in mind would work. I wrote down a loose rulebook and today I created the entire symbology for those rules with the absolute most basic symbols that would get the job done. It doesn't need to be super pretty, it just needs to work.
And it does. It works. I played two games tonight and it's almost exactly what I thought it would be like.
Are there rough edges with the design? Sure, it's barely been playtested. Everything I envisioned plays out the way I thought it would, but I'm only one person and I'm sure I missed stuff.
Is it a fully functional, entertaining game that looks professionally made and ready to ship? You bet.
I don't even know what it's going to be called yet (Breaker Blocks is winning the online survey by a lot), but it will be available here on Spriteborne.com later this week. You can play it for yourself and decide if it's good or not.
What I can tell you for sure:
In the weeks leading up to SXSW, and the impending launch of Yomi's Gate, I wrote a blog series called "Road to SXSW" in which I talked about the origins of the game and some of the challenges I've worked through to make it happen.
Now the dust is settling, SXSW is over, and I have thoughts to share on the experience. A full, stream of consciousness post on the experience would be incredibly long and difficult to follow, so I'm going to do what many game developers do and write a postmortem about it. I'll catalogue what went right, what went wrong, and then summarize with what I think should happen in the future.
Note from Future Jake: Now that it's written, it's still incredibly long. Even at that length, there's more I could keep talking about, so I'm going to leave it at this colossal size and hope that it's useful and interesting for those reading. Enjoy!
+ Camaraderie.
I work from home by myself. Once a week, if that, I get to the Philly Game Forge to hang out with other developers. We play each other's games, do game jams, have presentations, and play lots of TowerFall. That is, however, about 99% of my developer social time.
SXSW was filled with developers, including some I'd already met and had missed terribly, some I knew online but had never seen in person, and some wonderful folks I had yet to meet. Everyone was fantastic.
I loved getting to see people, getting to play others' games, and even just getting food together. It's remarkable how important all of that is when you're so far from it almost every other day.
If I could afford it, I would travel to every show as often as possible just to see these people.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of being around other people who do what you do, especially when those people are great people.
+ People LOVE the Deluxe Edition of Yomi's Gate.
As I was developing the game, I had more than one person experienced with game manufacturing tell me, "You should reconsider making the game from acrylic. It's way too expensive." That got me thinking that people are going to be very concerned about price, so I also became concerned about the price that I would be charging. I made the Deluxe Edition the intended version of the game, then removed the box for the Standard Edition and changed some materials and armies for the Basic Edition.
It turns out everyone who sees Yomi's Gate wants the Deluxe Edition. As Kelly, who won the auction for copy #1, told me, "With board gamers, there is no upper limit to what people are willing to pay for a really nice game."
We brought 10 special, serialized SXSW copies of Yomi's Gate to the show. They were all numbered 1-10 and they were the first copies ever made. We sold them all through various auctions and raffles.
We brought about a dozen standard editions and struggled to sell half of them.
Exposing the game to thousands of people, many of whom only having a cursory interest in games, was a great learning experience in finding out what people wanted. I was shocked that the $120 Deluxe Edition, which I thought would be prohibitively expensive to many, was the version of choice for just about everyone. Making a special version of the game for the show, which I was also worried wouldn't be popular, ended up being a great decision.
+ I managed to get interviewed by Felicia Day live on Geek & Sundry.
One of the great things about SXSW is that it gathers all kinds of amazing people in one place. One of the great things about Twitter is that it lets you send messages to people who would normally be completely inaccessible.
Last week I tweeted at Felicia Day, telling her I had an award-nominated board game, I would be at SXSW, and could I show her my game? She got back to me and said to come by her event on Saturday afternoon, so OF COURSE I did. I brought her one of the special, serialized copies and thought I would be lucky if I got to hand it to her and tell her what it's called.
Well, when she opened the box she loved what she saw, so she did something I wasn't expecting and asked, "Would you like to talk about it on the show?" a live broadcast.
So OF COURSE I said yes.
This is what your traffic looks like when that happens.
For reference, March 13th was when my game launched and 13-15 were general SXSW days.
Messaging Felicia was a great decision. I'm grateful for being on the show and it was a wonderful experience. If you want to see the show, the link is above. The interview with me starts at about 1:15.
+ There are tons of people at SXSW.
Something I have always struggled with is getting out of obscurity. Without advertising dollars, you can only do so much to get word out. I've been posting on Twitter, Reddit, Tumblr, and FB and telling everyone from taco truck vendors to help desk employees about my game. It's hard to let people know that you and your work exist.
Then there's SXSW, where there's a constant deluge of people all day every day for an entire weekend.
I know people seem to like the pieces from Yomi's Gate, so I set aside a bunch of my extras, bought tiny bags, and half business cards that said "Yomi's Gate, now available at Spriteborne.com, Booth 157 at SXSW." It was a little promo bag that had a unit and a card in it and it was super cool.
We had 500 of them and gave them all out on the first half of the first day. Well, when we saw how fast they were going we saved a couple dozen for day two, but the point is we could have brought 5,000 and still given them all out.
That kind of exposure is unprecedented for Spriteborne. Combined with getting on Felicia Day's show, more people now know about Spriteborne than ever did with all pre-SXSW time combined.
+ When you don't know what to price something at, run a blind auction.
The Deluxe Edition of Yomi's Gate is priced at $120. That price is determined by a number of different things, from material costs to hourly rates, and it's something that can be figured out with a spreadsheet.
The special SXSW edition doesn't have those same features, as it carries a special one-of-a-kind characteristic. They're the first 10 games ever made. How do you put a price on that?
My approach was, "You don't." On the first day, I ran a silent auction where the top three bidders each won a copy with their bid. That worked okay, but it was intimidating when people saw a high bid and turned some people off from participating.
On days two and three, I ran blind auctions. In a blind auction, neither you nor the bidder know what the bids have been so far. It's far more exciting and everyone who wants to bid can do so without the intimidation of going against high bids.
The highest blind auction bid was $225 on day 2 and $200 on day 3, so I think that worked out quite well.
On day three I also ran a raffle, but I'll talk about that next...
- SXSW Gaming is free for attendees.
For attendees, this is great news. Show up, get in, see games, leave when you're ready to go. Magical. It's infinitely better than trying to get to PAX and finding out passes sold out in three minutes.
As an exhibitor, this is a mixed blessing.
On the positive side, it means that you're getting totally different market penetration. Since anyone can show up for free, there were lots of families, small children, and people who aren't totally immersed in gaming news and culture. It means lots of people who see your game won't have even heard of your game before, so the exposure is unique. I talked with Dan Adelman, who was representing Axiom Verge (March 31st on PS4), and he said that about 75% of PAX attendees had heard of Axiom Verge or even played it before, but maybe 25% or less had heard of it at SXSW.
On the negative end of things, that meant that you might be talking to people who are less likely to actually buy or play your game. Calvin and Alix brought their game, Upsilon Circuit, and part of their tagline is that it's an action RPG. That doesn't work when the people you're pitching to don't actually know what an action RPG is.
Another effect of SXSW Gaming being free is that people aren't invested in staying all day. When I ran a raffle, I said that you had to be present at 7:30pm, 30 minutes before closing, to win. Almost everyone I talked to in the first half of the day said they wouldn't be around for that, which is so foreign to me. At something like PAX, people are asking you how late you're open. Is it midnight? They're staying til midnight. Is it 2am? They're happy to play games until 2am. After all, they paid to be there and tickets are very hard to come by, so nobody wants to miss even a minute of the show if they can help it.
For me, it's hard to tell if this was more of a boon or a curse, but it did mess up my raffle so I have it listed in the negative column. Your mileage may vary.
- This year, SXSW Gaming did nothing to sort booth locations by booth content.
In fact, the booths were sorted alphabetically. Ska Studios, Soundself, Spriteborne, and so on. This put us in between a huge, fabric-walled tent and a VR game about bomb defusal.
I want to be clear that I have nothing against either of these games. Both of those booths are excellent. It's putting a quiet, contemplative board game in between them that makes no sense.
I don't know what sort of thought went into the floor design for the rest of the show, but the Indie Corner was a mess. So many problems came up because things just weren't laid out well. When Soundself and Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes had a crowd, we struggled to get anyone at all to check out Yomi's Gate. I'd approach people hanging out in front of my booth and ask, "Do you like tabletop games?" or "Would you like to hear about my new board game?" and sometimes people would just point at the VR game next to us and indicate that they weren't interested in mine.
Location matters. Putting similar games together so people can go from one relevant interest to another in rapid succession matters. SXSW did nothing to make that happen, at least in Indie Corner. We did the best we could with what we had, but it often was difficult to fight the environmental handicap.
- The logistics of SXSW were awful, at best.
You're not allowed to bring in any outside food at all, so you have to either leave to eat and drink or you have to buy food at the tiny convention food stand.
For instance, if I wanted coffee while I was setting up the booth at 8am on Friday, I couldn't bring my own. Naturally, I went to the convention food stand. "Oh, we don't open until the show starts at noon."
I've reserved my strongest language for this part of the post:
Fucking seriously?
You won't allow outside food, but you're also holding back on the food we are allowed to have? What the fuck? You want a room full of grumpy exhibitors who are all being deprived of coffee? When the show floor did open, I went to the register and asked for, "the biggest coffee you have," and received a crappy 16oz cup for $3.50.
For food, pizza was $8 a slice. There were taco products that started off at $8 and $9, but during the show they actually raised the price to $10 for all of them.
Unrelated to food, utilities were grossly overpriced. I paid $135 for some guy to spend 30 seconds plugging in what was basically a specialized extension cord so we could keep our phones and iPad, our credit card payment mechanism, charged. That cord was gone within about 10 minutes of the show floor closing on Sunday, so we couldn't even charge our devices while we were breaking down the booth. We essentially paid someone $16,000 an hour for 30 seconds of work and less than a $1 of electricity over the course of the weekend.
Parking was also less than ideal. There are no hotels near the Palmer Events Center, the ones nearby are expensive, and public transportation is awful. The most common travel plan was to stay up to a few miles away and call an Uber ride each morning and evening. For me, I stayed with family about 20 miles away, drove each day, and paid $8/day for parking. It would have been a drop in the bucket for SXSW to give exhibitors parking passes for the event, but that's another in the long list of things that just weren't included.
It's also worth noting that the WiFi was unreliable. Most of the time this wasn't too much of a problem, being that I brought a tabletop game, but I'd like to point out that credit card transactions have to verify via WiFi. At one point, someone's card simply wouldn't go through because Square couldn't get a good connection. Now, of course you can pay for booth-by-booth ethernet, but it's hundreds of dollars to do so and very much not worth it unless internet is critical to running your game.
Even the functionality of something as big as the Gaming Awards show was sub-par. They somehow managed to completely omit the video for Salt & Sanctuary in the Gamer's Voice Award category. How does something like that even happen? Can you imagine traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to be in an event and award show and then not even getting acknowledged during that award show? I hope that reading this, you'll visit the link to Salt & Sanctuary to help make up for the attention that James and Michelle missed out on.
Beginning to end, everything related to the functional running of the booth and being at the show was ridiculously expensive and restrictive. I'm just glad we were allowed to sell copies of the game, because I don't know how else I was going to afford that.
- We needed more people staffing the booth.
The Spriteborne booth was staffed by Nadja and I. Being that Yomi's Gate is a board game requiring lots of individual attention, that was rough.
Video games can actually play themselves. In arcades, games have an "Attract Mode" where there the game plays itself to show people what it's all about. Demos can be set up to be largely automated and many devs will do this so they can focus their time on questions, interviews, and problem solving.
The "Attract Mode" for Yomi's Gate is the game sitting in its box with a demo copy set up next to it. They look great, but they do nothing to speak for themselves. I made a nice sign that gave a three-sentence overview of the gameplay and I had full instruction booklets printed out that people could read. Nobody was very interested in reading unless Nadja or I had already convinced them to sit down with the game.
The point here is that every person or small group requires attention. It isn't as simple as handing them a controller and saying, "Here, play this game."
So on Saturday when I had to leave for the Geek & Sundry event, that left just Nadja to run the booth. Luckily I was able to enlist Calvin and Alix to take turns helping her out, but even that was difficult. I was pulling them away from their game, first and foremost, but they also didn't know my game very well. They could only answer questions in so much detail.
Beyond that, we weren't allowed to leave the booth unattended. That was a problem when, on Saturday night, we were required to be at the Gaming Awards ceremony and had to leave the booth unattended (read: Watched by the wonderful Heather from the Soundself team), but it was also a problem in that we couldn't put up an "out to lunch" sign or anything during the rest of the show.
We really needed three people to staff the booth, but SXSW only gives you two passes per booth. A third would have cost $1,500 and we just didn't have those resources (see UPDATE below). Next time I do a show, maybe I'll bring a digital game with a few stations for a fully automated demo.
UPDATE: I just learned you're actually allowed a third badge per 10'x10' booth and this badge is free for exhibitors. It's worth noting that in the contract the wording says that additional badges can be "purchased," but it's not clear that they can be purchased for $0. We definitely would have used the third badge if we knew we could.
- There is no press connection at SXSW.
The SXSW website advertises that something like 500+ members of the press will be attending the show, but what it doesn't say is how many of those attendees are gaming press. Turns out that number is somewhere in the vicinity of zero.
Personally, I had exactly zero press appointments at SXSW. My only interview was with Felicia Day, which admittedly is like playing the lottery once and winning.
Upsilon Circuit's devs also had zero press appointments and they were 1) featured in a much more prominent place on the show floor; 2) previously featured on major websites like Kotaku; and 3) actually had an on-stage event during SXSW.
If an award-nominated game and a major feature game can both go through a whole show with no press appointments, press coverage at that show is terrible.
For reference, PAX compiles a list of all attending press and sends it out to exhibitors. From there, exhibitors can email press whose interests would match their game. It isn't difficult to organize, it's painless for press and exhibitors, and it's easy for both press and exhibitors to pack their show with interview appointments. Everyone wins.
The only "press" contact I had related to SXSW was with someone representing a list of YouTube personalities. When I got in touch, they asked me if I was informed about their "usual rates" for YouTube appearances and asked what kind of budget I was working with. When I told them that budget was "basically zero," they said they'd set up meetings for me with personalities at the show, then I ended up never hearing from them again. Sorry, but money doesn't flow in that direction unless it's for advertising, in which case you shouldn't be using the guise of "press" to make connections.
SXSW is currently a gold mine if you are press, because you can run wild and interview whoever you want on whatever schedule you want. Conversely, it's currently terrible for press attention if you're a developer who wants to be interviewed.
What follows are the lessons I learned from the show. Some are framed as though they're being told to future-me or someone in a position similar to mine. Some are lessons directed at the organizers of SXSW (Hi Justin, Estevan, and Syd!).
These are the promotional items I brought. They were universally adored, especially by children.
Thank you to Nadja Mummery, who stuffed like 80% of these bags.
Finally, I just wanted to thank a bunch of people for making the SXSW experience possible and enjoyable. In no particular order...
Yomi's Gate is releasing on Friday, March 13th here on Spriteborne.com.
The full release will come in several versions.
For attendees of SXSW, Yomi's Gate is getting an exclusive collector's edition.
I'll have exactly 10 copies of the Deluxe edition, serialized and engraved with exclusive SXSW boxes. It should go without saying, but this is an extremely limited run and it's certain to be a collector's item. Stop by Booth 157 at the Palmer Events Center for details on how to get your hands on the SXSW collector's edition.
I'll also have about a dozen copies of the Standard Edition for those looking to get a copy as soon as possible and save on shipping.
See you Friday!
]]>
This year, Yomi's Gate was nominated in the South by Southwest Gaming Awards. I'll be showcasing the game at the festival from March 13th through March 15th 2015. Between now and then, I'll be writing a series of articles discussing the game, where it came from, how it was made, and the kinds of challenges I've encountered along the way. This is one of those articles.
Week One: Why Yomi's Gate? - An article about why I'm making this game and not something else.
Week Two: The Shape of Things - Insights into how I go about creating pieces for Yomi's Gate.
Week Three: Making the Map - Words about how I made the map and the prototile, modular board for Yomi's Gate.
Week Four: On Ideas and Creativity - Where I address the question, "How did you come up with the idea for Yomi's Gate?"
1:15am, Saturday March 7th. Six days until SXSW starts. Six days until Yomi's Gate comes out.
I was supposed to leave for Austin sometime on Sunday. It's a 26 hour drive from the Philadelphia suburbs. Flying would have been too expensive, given the need to ship heavy, heavy copies of the board game I'm showcasing, so I'm loading up my car and driving. I was going to leave on Sunday, travel for 10 hours until a waypoint in Kentucky, and then travel the remaining 16 hours on Monday.
Instead, I just turned the laser off for the day a few minutes ago. It's been running since about 9:30am. It was running all day yesterday, too, and all day Wednesday and most of the day on Monday. Tuesday was largely lost to picking up the sheets of acrylic that would become the first copies of Yomi's Gate.
Sometime Wednesday night, I realized that parts of my game weren't cutting cleanly. Thursday morning, I cut another copy and found that the problem was still persisting. The laser would go through most of the acrylic, but it wouldn't go clean through the other side. This makes pieces tremendously difficult, if not sometimes impossible, to pop out. When you do get them out, they have this vicious, almost serrated edge to them and are in many cases unusable.
So Thursday I sent out a frantic email to Epilog, the makers of my laser. Luckily I got a quick response and they recommended I check my table alignment inside the machine. This ended up being the problem; The front-right corner of my table was about 1/4" higher than the other three. That means that as cuts get closer to that corner, they become more and more unfocused. When you only have about 1/4" of focal tolerance to work with and you're already slightly unfocusing the beam so that pieces can stand up instead of leaning over, 1/4" is the difference between a clean cut and fighting tooth and nail to punch a piece out from a sheet of acrylic.
This is where I should mention that it takes about 90 minutes to engrave and cut a single set of boards and armies. Acrylic is also fairly expensive.
To fix the table alignment, I needed a 3/32" alan wrench. At this point in my life, I have a veritable arsenal of niche tools. I've got a dremel and tons of attachments. I have a set of screwdrivers that could assemble or disassemble just about anything. I have a multi-attachment torx screwdriver that I've used for computers, gaming machines, and all kinds of different small projects.
I did not have a 3/32" alan wrench.
Also, a blizzard was happening all day on Thursday. By the time I realized I needed a 3/32" alan wrench in order to fix my machine and continue working on this game that's releasing in less than a week now, it had snowed about 8" and it was still coming down hard.
But really, what was I supposed to do? Not fix my laser?
So I walked in a blizzard to buy a $0.69 tool. I also picked up a steel file so I could maybe doctor up at least some of the map tiles.
Both of those things were a success. The laser worked on the first try after I made the appropriate adjustments. The file was also suitable for fixing up the damaged map tiles.
Still, the point is that this happened. There's no way I could have known in advance that there was going to be a problem. Most of what I cut is in the top-left corner of my machine, while full copies of my game are done across the entire table. How could I have predicted that I would need to halt all progress on production, drop everything I was working on while the laser was running, and walk in the middle of a blizzard to the local hardware shop for a highly specific tool I didn't even know I didn't own?
I won't have physical instructions with me at SXSW and I probably won't be leaving on Sunday now. This is just the way it goes. Stuff happens, there's no way to know what's going to happen and when it's going to surprise you, and you just have to be ready to roll with it. Working on your own is simply unpredictable.
]]>This year, Yomi's Gate was nominated in the South by Southwest Gaming Awards. I'll be showcasing the game at the festival from March 13th through March 15th 2015. Between now and then, I'll be writing a series of articles discussing the game, where it came from, how it was made, and the kinds of challenges I've encountered along the way. This is one of those articles.
Week One: Why Yomi's Gate? - An article about why I'm making this game and not something else.
Week Two: The Shape of Things - Insights into how I go about creating pieces for Yomi's Gate.
Week Three: Making the Map - Words about how I made the map and the prototile, modular board for Yomi's Gate.
Everyone has ideas all the time for all kinds of stuff. Sometimes they're small ideas, like adjustments to things that already exist. Sometimes they're bigger ideas, like when you agree with some overarching concept but would personally execute it differently. They can be highly specific or incredibly vague. Ideas come in many shapes and sizes and it's tough to know the difference between a good idea and a bad idea, so I find it's best to pay attention to all of them and sort it out in retrospect. Sometimes an idea is terrible in one context but wonderful in another.
I talked a little bit about this in Week One, but the general ideas that would become Yomi's Gate came from playing other strategy games. I had a smattering of small ideas that each followed the form of, "I like X, but I would do Y differently." Sometimes that "differently" had a specific meaning, like wanting to resolve unit battles through static rules instead of probabilistic dice-rolling, and sometimes it was just a general feeling of, "not the way it currently is." The important takeaway is that most of my ideas arise from reflection on things I experienced and enjoyed. I think creative individuals are generally going to agree with that sentiment, that ideas are almost always a reflection of things that already exist.
One of the big weaknesses of ideas is that they tend to float away quickly if you don't do something to pin them down. To do this, I keep a file in Evernote called a "Spark File." In it, I write down every idea I can write down. Sometimes they're really short, like, "What if Feudal used a hex grid instead of a square grid?" and sometimes they're long, multi-paragraph concepts for entire games. They aren't even all game ideas. The point is simply to capture ideas quickly, knowing they're going to be forgotten if they're not recorded.
Doing this serves two major purposes:
1. It gives ideas a home, so they still exist when they leave your active thoughts.
Have you ever told yourself, "Oh, I don't need to write that down. I'll just remember it?" Of course you have, right? How many of those thoughts end up forgotten? How many times do you have a great thought in the shower, only to forget about it as soon as you left the bathroom? What about the thoughts you've had during long drives or train rides?
Our brains are efficient machines and they do the best they can to free up space and cognitive power for the things that matter. They're constantly clearing out clutter when we cross an event threshold, such as leaving a room or vehicle. For instance, we need to remember boiling water while we're in the kitchen because it's an immediate physical hazard, but when we leave the kitchen our brains are predisposed to discard that information because it's no longer an immediate threat. That's why timers are so useful: We can hear them from other rooms, allowing information to cross event thresholds for us.
The Spark File is your event threshold protection for ideas. You're going to forget your ideas if you don't write them down, so write them down as soon as possible whenever they happen. That's also why it's important to keep your idea log nearby, so you can write in it without crossing any event thresholds. Evernote works great for this because it syncs across devices.
2. It allows you to make connections between ideas that would have otherwise seemed unrelated.
Have you ever wondered why children come up with so many interesting, bizarre ideas? This is because when you're born, your brain has all kinds of possible connections ready to be tested. As you get older, your brain isn't withering away, but rather chiseling away at the connections that don't work and keeping the ones that do. We reinforce good connections and discard bad ones as we learn how the world works.
So really, the key to being creative is to actively foster interesting connections, isn't it?
When you're making this Spark File, it isn't a broadcast-only document. You need to go back and read through it every once in a while, beginning to end. This can take an hour or two, but an hour or two once a month is nothing for the new connections you're bound to draw. Re-reading a Spark File is a magical opportunity to listen to dozens or hundreds of versions of Past You and soak up all of the ideas they've had.
I am absolutely convinced that the most important aspect of creativity is the ability to connect ideas in interesting ways.
Beyond the Spark File and the connection of ideas, I had only one other guiding principle, which was asking myself, "How do I want the game to feel?" I take my cues on this from one of my favorite game designers, Jenova Chen. In this Polygon interview about Journey, he reveals that his design philosophy is about social games as an "emotional exchange."
In this regard, I wanted Yomi's Gate to be a demanding, brutal experience. I wanted to make a game where when you win, you feel like the ultimate tactician, that you barely wrested victory from an equally powerful opponent. When you lost, I wanted you to feel like you did so only because you missed a tactical opportunity somewhere, that your defeat was earned and that you could overcome it in the future.
I am admittedly not as elegant with my game design as Jenova Chen. Brutality is simple. Empathy is not.
With all of that in mind, Yomi's Gate is not some idea blossomed from the ether. It is the sum of many parts, all haphazardly assembled over time without any forethought as to what they would become. I never sat down and said, "I'm going to make a game and this is what's going to be in it." Instead, I built a growing compilation of small ideas and consistently started thinking, "These ideas go well together," more and more frequently.
Eventually I had enough small ideas that I was able to decide on a guiding principle of player emotion to unite them. I would center my game around combat and that combat would be decided with rules, not dice. I would use hexagons for a map because they simulate world space better than squares and I like hexagons. To keep setup short, players would start with their armies off the board and bring them in over time. To keep turns short, the map would be small and attrition would be high to keep units off the board. I would have to include enough units to give players meaningful choice about what to bring in, but not so many that memorizing them all would be a chore.
Much of this would be refined through lots and lots of playtesting and iteration, but the initial package was akin to a stew. You pick a bunch of stuff that sounds good, throw it together, and see how it turns out. When turning your ideas into reality, "a bunch of stuff that sounds good" is gathered over a long time and many different experiences, "throwing it together" happens when you actively revisit those experiences and observe new connections between them, and "seeing how it turns out" is what happens when you play with those glued-together concepts and see how they unfold with real people.
Next week I'll be talking about how I wrote the instructions for Yomi's Gate, which I'm sure will be an entertaining experience.
]]>This year, Yomi's Gate was nominated in the South by Southwest Gaming Awards. I'll be showcasing the game at the festival from March 13th through March 15th 2015. Between now and then, I'll be writing a series of articles discussing the game, where it came from, how it was made, and the kinds of challenges I've encountered along the way. This is one of those articles.
Week One: Why Yomi's Gate? - An article about why I'm making this game and not something else.
Week Two: The Shape of Things - Insights into how I go about creating pieces for Yomi's Gate.
This week I'm going to talk about the map in Yomi's Gate and how I went about creating the modular boards.
One of the earliest goals I had with Yomi's Gate was that it should have a high degree of replayability. Without any randomness in player actions, I knew game to game variance would probably have to come from the map itself. One of the easiest ways to make that happen is modular terrain.
I started by doing my homework on how other games handled it. My friends at Cardboard Fortress are making their game, Kobolds, with perfect squares. You make the map by putting squares together, each of which divides into its own clean, 3x3 grid. This keeps the game interesting, but the map regularity isn't the same for hexagonal grids.
The closest solutions I could find for hex grids were actually on the forums for Ogre, the enormous strategy game by Steve Jackson Games. People who play Ogre want the same thing I want with my own game: A new map every time they play. They did some work into different ways you might be able to regularly break down a hex grid, but their ultimate goal was filling the rectangular map space for a standard Ogre board, so it only took me so far in figuring out what might work for me.
In order to more generally get my head around the kind of patterning I had in mind, I actually started a wiki walk from the Wikipedia page for tessellation. The loose concepts regarding tessellation in general combined with the functional goals of the players on the Ogre forum were enough to get me started drawing out some ideas that could work.
Luckily, I have this amazing art program called Hexels that lets you paint on a hexagon grid. I previously used it to make the art for my Ludum Dare 27 entry, Hexlaser, so I'm reasonably comfortable with the interface. Hexels also makes everything look fantastic, so it makes brainstorming sessions seem kind of brilliant no matter how good or bad they are.
Here's the final canvas from my tile brainstorming session:
It looks a bit of a mess, but there are just a few things going on.
Everything seemed to work, so after that it was just a tedious process of going tile by tile and making the map in Illustrator, then cutting it out. I tried wood and I tried thin acrylic, but wood splintered and thin acrylic warped, so thick acrylic was the only way to go.
I wasn't sure what was going to work for terrain, so I didn't start out etching terrain onto the boards. I went to Staples and bought plain-colored stickers with green to represent forests and yellow to represent mountains. This way if some configuration of terrain was broken in some way, I could simply add, remove, or rearrange stickers.
People sometimes ask, "How did you decide where to put the terrain?" I started by assuming that about 20% of each board should be obstructive terrain, which in retrospect is kind of arbitrary but it seems to work so I decided to run with it. From that, I wanted approximately an even split between forests and mountains, I wanted to have some clustering instead of a totally random distribution, and I didn't want any two boards to be identical.
What this meant was that I did the first board somewhat randomly, abiding only by those simple rules, then I put it underneath the second board. Since boards are clear, I could see where I had already laid out terrain, so I could make the second board knowing it wouldn't be the same as the first. I repeated this for several boards, then through playtesting I learned where to remove or rearrange terrain. The maps still aren't perfect, but play is supposed to be a little asymmetrical so I think it works. As long as there isn't a map layout where one player is guaranteed to win, it's good.
After that, all I really had to do was agonize over actual terrain art. I did this for several days, throwing out many drafts before I finally said, "Eh, this works." Ultimately, there are two distinct terrain tiles, one using curves and round shapes and the other using sharp lines and triangular shapes; My only goal is that if I tell you one represents mountains and one represents forests, you can figure out which is which. So far, not a single person has gotten these confused, so I think that goal has been achieved. I'd love to revamp that art, but doing so is currently far down on my to-do list since the current art is functionally quite effective.
In case this is your first time seeing Yomi's Gate, here's what the game currently looks like, replete with engraved terrain.
Thanks for reading. Come back next week for another article about what it's been like to make Yomi's Gate!
]]>
This year, Yomi's Gate was nominated in the South by Southwest Gaming Awards. I'll be showcasing the game at the festival from March 13th through March 15th 2015. Between now and then, I'll be writing a series of articles discussing the game, where it came from, how it was made, and the kinds of challenges I've encountered along the way. This is one of those articles.
Last week I talked about why I'm making Yomi's Gate. This week I'll dig into more technical details about how the game is made.
One of the most common questions I get about Yomi's Gate is, "How did you make the pieces?"
The first important part of that is that I come from an art background in stencil art, specifically in single-layer and one-color stencils. With that kind of art, there's an artistic challenge in conveying an image with minimal detail. It's not explicitly minimalism, but when your x-acto knife can only cut so fine, when bleach bleeds, and when your stencil medium can only take so much detail, you have to learn which corners you can cut and which ones are still necessary. Those skills were absolutely vital to making my board game pieces.
The samurai unit is one of my best examples, so let's start with that one. I'll detail my thought process as I went from initial concept to the final version.
The samurai was my first piece after the initial meeple test, so it was also the unit with the most trial and error. Above, you can see the five distinct iterations I went through, not counting micro changes that didn't warrant a new version number. The fifth is the current samurai that is actually in Yomi's Gate. I'll walk you through what I was thinking as I went along.
V1: I wanted a realistic stance, since samurai are human and we're pretty good at recognizing when humans look wrong, so I started with a photo reference of a kendo student. This was useful for stance and proportions, plus I knew that in kendo stances I could be liberal with using loose clothing to fudge the details. I roughed some shoulder armor and the horns of a helmet.
Unfortunately, most of the sword was immediately vaporized by the laser, as were the horns.Eventually I learned that the amount of vaporized material is called the "kerf," so now I know that my laser vaporizes about 0.05" with its beam. When your sword is only about 0.1", the path to the end and back is enough to vaporize the whole thing. This was crucial knowledge and is still absolutely critical in everything I laser-cut that requires any sort of precision.
V2: I thickened up the horns and the sword. They weren't immediately vaporized anymore, but they were still getting stuck when removing the piece from the sheet it was cut from. Those sharp corners were all causing the laser to double back on its own path, melting some parts of the unit back onto the sheet. Further, the sword felt pretty fragile in that it seemed like it could break off at the hands.
V3: I removed the points from the helmet horns and they worked a little better, but they still looked very, very small since much of that material was being vaporized away. I also smoothed out the lines from the hands to the abdomen, eliminating those sharp, concave corners, and I enlarged the hands such that they would be truly gargantuan on a real person. Turns out that's hard to notice anyway, so it wasn't a big deal. I also made the front foot a little smoother and larger, since it was giving me some trouble.
V4: Almost there! I thickened up the sword and completely abandoned the pointed tip, which worked wonderfully. Still, those horns...
V5: Forget the horns. As much as I wanted them, they just weren't working for this unit. Instead of having a head that looked like a human wearing a helmet, I literally replaced it with a circle and squished it around a little bit. With no sharp corners anymore, samurai pieces can be popped out of the sheet cleanly, there are no fragile parts, and they still generally retain the original shape and idea.
The key takeaway here is that I started with a general idea of where I wanted to go, then I got rid of everything that didn't work. I wasn't shooting for perfection, but rather something that was functional and good enough to serve my purpose. At the end of the day, I have a piece where you can clearly look at it and say, "Yes, that's a person with a sword."
Here's the final piece cut from acrylic.
Pretty cool, right?
From a design standpoint, the visuals of the pieces serve two purposes: Once you know what they are, you can 1) remember them and 2) distinguish them from one another on the board. I don't expect anyone to intuit what a unit can do, but my hope is that once you know that there's an archer who can shoot, you can look at the pieces and pick out which one the archer is. I hope that people can look at the units and think things like, "That one is on a horse, so it's probably a cavalry unit." I also hope that there's zero confusion between, say, a samurai and a mounted samurai*.
*The Shogun and mounted samurai are supposed to be a little bit confusing because I want people to pay careful attention to whether or not they're looking at a mounted samurai or a far-more-powerful Shogun. I see this as a passive ability of the Shogun.
Size also comes into play here in a subtle way. All of the unique, powerful hero units are bigger than the expendable army units, for example. The Daimyo, who's a monster on the battlefield, absolutely towers over the samurai. The ninja, one the other hand, is a sneaky hero who's actually crouched to be about the same size as a samurai. Bigger units are supposed to be functionally more threatening in-game and for the most part that's true.
So really, that's how I make a physical piece from beginning to end.
Thanks for reading! Check back next Thursday for another article about the process of creating Yomi's Gate and getting it ready for exhibition at SXSW!
]]>At any given time, someone who makes things has so many ideas, it's remarkable that anything gets done at all. I've learned that along the way, it's helpful to ask the question, "Why am I doing this and not something else?" Even now, when Yomi's Gate is my focus, I have ideas kicking around for new factions, new terrains, a game about potion-making, a turn-based RPG, a procedural action shooter, and an action platformer. Those are just skimming the surface, too, and I'm certain that other designers have even more going on than that.
Yomi's Gate came about because it was the intersection of criticism and opportunity. I grew up on strategy and war games thanks to my dad, including Feudal, Risk, Axis & Allies, Chess, Stratego, and tons of others. Over the years, several recurring thoughts happened:
Now these criticisms are well and good, but without an actual game addressing them, they're just these ethereal concepts that are, well, kind of worthless. An idea is only as good as its execution, so for a long time I had no clear plan for execution to take these concepts into some game that made sense. They were more of a disposition than anything else.
Sometime last year, I got a laser. With it, I found I could engrave and cut all sorts of materials and it quickly became apparent to me that I could use it to make board game pieces. I prototyped basic meeples, tried more detailed designs, and soon created the first functional version of what would become the Yomi's Gate samurai piece.
I couldn't make dice, I couldn't print anything on paper or cardboard, and I couldn't make any 3D pieces that weren't just 2D designs with depth, so my options were pretty limited. It just made sense that without dice or cards, a deterministic game that addressed all of my previous strategy game criticisms would be a good choice. I would make a game that could be set up quickly, played with minimum environmental randomness, and played quickly. This would be something I could play with my dad.
So really, Yomi's Gate is the game I decided to make for two reasons:
Compared to any other idea I have, having the ideas and means meet each other so perfectly made it clear that Yomi's Gate was what I should be working on.
]]>The "Wizards" series from Ben Hatke's Inktober 2014 work is now available! There are 15 Wizards in total, 12 of which can be purchased individually. There are also three sets, each including a Wizard exclusive to that set, as well as a Complete Set of All Wizards that includes all of the exclusives.
I hope you like them. It's been an exciting trip to this point and I'm looking forward to hearing what everyone thinks.
For more Ben Hatke things, check out his website and his Twitter.
Here are a few Wizards to whet your appetite:
]]>So that's my first news.
In terms of functional stuff, this week I experimented with wood staining. I have no idea what I'm doing, but that's never stopped me before. Let's skip straight to the results:
That's Crowquill, one of Ben Hatke's October Wizards. I think it looks quite cool, with the light color of the wood cut out from the black stain.
The problem is that I don't really know what I'm doing with the staining. I stained the front of the coaster on Tuesday in the early afternoon and it just didn't ever dry. I re-read the directions and apparently you have to wipe off the excess stain after about a minute or else it doesn't dry properly. Knowing this, I tried staining the back side and...had slightly better results? On Wednesday afternoon it was kind of dry, so I just tried it as-is in the laser to get some results I could work with.
The whole thing is still, like, damp, I guess? If you touch it, there are various spots that will leave black stain on your fingers. Not good. Definitely not something I could sell right now.
What I do know, however, is that lasering stained wood works beautifully. It's just the staining process I don't have a handle on. The plan, then, is to order wood that's professionally stained and finished by someone else, then simply do the laser work myself. It's more expensive, but I don't think I'm prepared to stain wood like this on my own with the resources and space I have available.
That leads me to the next thing I plan to offer in my store: Photo engraving! Soon you'll be able to send me any photo you want and I'll be able to laser etch it into dark-stained wood like this. I have a few friends-and-family projects I'm working on to prototype photo-engraved wall plaques and I'm looking forward to sharing the results soon.
That's it for this week.
]]>It's been a hard transition, moving from Etsy to Shopify. About 80% of my traffic came from passive Etsy views, people searching tags that happened to include things I used to make. Everything works just a little bit differently on Shopify, which is really a back-end service and not a unified marketplace. It'll take time, but my hope is that if I make things that people like, the traffic will follow.
That leads me to my next thoughts:
TowerFall. I can't possibly say enough good things about TowerFall. The game is amazing. The team is wonderful. I'm flattered and grateful that not only do I have complete permission to make crafted TowerFall goods, but the team seems to love my stencil work. It's been a great experience doing all of that stuff.
That said, there's an expansion coming up: The Dark World. There are at least two new archers on their way, so I'm going to have new stencils to share soon, including the Red Archer, the Vainglorious Ghoul, and an as-yet-unnamed skeleton archer. I'm excited for the opportunity and I'm looking forward to sharing the results as they come along.
You can find my existing TowerFall work here. I'm still learning how to display Collections naturally, as opposed to via direct link. More growing pains from moving to Shopify, yeah?
Outside of TowerFall and any other indies I get to work with, I'm largely dropping fan art as a thing that I do. Having built my store on it for two and a half years, that's a hard thing to do.
Right now I'm looking to replace it with collaborations, working with other people to produce things they might not have considered making.
My first direct collaborator is an artist named Ben Hatke. I saw one of his Inktober 2014 tweets of a strange wizard and thought, "This is fantastic! I have to make things with this guy!"
So I did.
I laser-cut a wooden coaster, worked some magic on the image posted to his Tumblr, and laser-burned the image into the wood. I came up with this.
I'm proud to announce that Ben was gracious enough to give me complete permission to turn his Wizards series of ink work into a wooden coaster series. Right now there are 12 wizards of varying eccentricities, but Ben is working on a few more as the month comes to a close. Expect them in the store soon as I experiment with wood types and finishes.
Thanks for reading!
]]>If you've been a long-time Spriteborne follower, thank you for sticking around. It's been a long journey to this point and I'm happy you've been staying on for the ride.
If you're new to Spriteborne, thank you and welcome to the site.
Either way, I hope you enjoy your time here.
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