Surveys and Sabertooth Tigers
Playtesting, Shipping and New Projects
Over the last month or so, I’ve been kicking the final steps of The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station into overdrive. I finished writing and preliminary layout for ULTIMATE BADASS, the last remaining stretch goal (other than the soundtrack). I quickly moved it into playtesting, finalized my Backerkit survey questions, add-ons, shipping costs and more. Now, I’m wrapping all those things up.
Playtesting is one of the harder aspects to organize, especially for new designers, because it requires some sort of audience who 1.) wants to play your stuff and is excited to play something early and 2.) gives good feedback.
I playtested the ruleset with my usual crew after finishing it and got some solid takeaways for tweaks and adjustments, both because my players are somewhat experienced playtesters at this point and because I was able to run the pamphlet “as intended.” Still, it is one thing to know the mechanics work well under ideal and intentional circumstances and another thing entirely to let someone take the thing itself (in this case, the pamphlet) and just attempt to use it as if they picked it up off the shelf of their local game store.
For UB, I will have 4 total groups of entirely different playtesters which is definitely the most I’ve had yet. If you are outside of the indie space, that number may sound low but you would probably be surprised to find that many well-regarded and great things were playtested very little (and sometimes not at all). It takes time, organized feedback collection, thoughtful GMs and players, and an audience (or LARGE group of friends). Large-scale playtesting is essentially only available to large-scale publishers like Wizards of the Coast and Paizo. With all that in mind, I’m extremely happy about the amount of playtesting I was able to receive for Ultimate Badass, and I think it will be a better, more honed ruleset because of it.
Beyond the creative content of the project itself, most of the work I have left on finishing and fulfilling The Bloodfields is on the logistical backend side. Specifically, these last few weeks I’ve been dealing with Backerkit.
Backerkit has a finnicky and fairly dense backend. It can really be quite daunting at first. Thankfully, they actually have really responsive customer service and (more importantly for me) a lot of great tutorials and resources that meant I was able to work almost everything out on my own as a first timer as long as I stayed focused and methodical. There’s adding add-ons with prices and weights and corresponding shipping costs and skus and tying all of those to tiers and decisions to make around what can and can’t be added-on and how it could positively or negatively effect your ability to easily and cost-effectively ship everything to your backers. It really is a lot. I took the approach of working on it, piece by piece, over a number of weeks to make sure I wasn’t losing track of anything and wasn’t burning myself out on the administrative backendy tasks of it all.
The biggest things that have helped me in this aspect of the project are 1.) partnering with Floating Chair for fulfillment and 2.) coordinating all of my stretch goals to easily fit and ship in a standard zine-style mailer.
Knowing I’m working with someone that is experienced in larger-scale shipping and fulfillment and having a second person to talk to on some of these topics is worth the slightly added cost in shipping and handling. Having all my stretch goals lay or fold flat in a relatively small size and low weight also means estimating shipping costs, even for add-ons, was significantly simpler than it could have been otherwise.
Once I had all of that in place with Backerkit, I made sure to add a few survey questions about correct e-mails for DriveThruRPG and Itch digital fulfillment and another to see if they wanted to be subscribed to this very newsletter. After that, I sent out a smoke test and it all went well. So now the full survey is out now. 65% of folks have already responded in the first day and a half with no issues (so far) so I’m feeling good about the whole process (despite some headaches along the way).
For about the next 30 days, you can still pre-order The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station at it’s Kickstarter prices (about $10 less than post-campaign retail sales will be!). Check it out HERE!
Sabertooth Tigers and Unstuck Spacetime
My creative brain doesn’t really stop, no matter how much logistical and administrative work is on my plate with The Bloodfields so I do have some new projects in the early stages of development. Since The Bloodfields has been largely MY project in so much as I am the writer, layout designer and project manager, I’ve been interested in dipping my toes into some single-role work: something where I am just writing a project and handing it off to others to add to and complete. Plus, I’ve been looking to broaden my scope of full, paid projects beyond just Mothership. I do love Mothership but I love so many other cool games too (and even have games of my own I’d like to make - like Tacticians of Ahm, which I’m still working on and playtesting with my core group fairly regularly).
That said, I’ve been leaning into the things that have really been grabbing my attention and inspiring me along with talking to more of the great folks I’ve come to talk to pretty frequently on Discord and Twitter.
Primal Quest by Diogo Nogueira just recently launched over at Exalted Funeral (and also as a pay-what-you-want title on Itch) and after getting to play it with Diogo at EFCon and reading through it, it instantly jumped up to one of my top games to make something for. Right now, I’m on the early stages of working on a bestiary of the prehistoric world of the game that gives lots of expected and lots of weird fodder for enemies and unique interactions across the game world.
It remains to be seen if this will just be a third-party release of my own or something more “official” that I work with Diogo on, but either way, I’m really excited to go into something that isn’t the sci-fi I’ve been in or the typical style of RPG fantasy.
The second new project is in an even more nascent stage at this point but it would be sticking with my strong suit of science fiction but would be more of a “season of play” style open-void hexcrawl. I love open exploration but often find the hexmap itself does little more than just act as a “I guess we’ll go east?” kind of experience so I am hoping to craft something where navigating the hexmap is creating difficult and interesting decisions in the actual story of play, possibly by taking a more board game-y approach. Time will tell! This is also likely be an “official” type thing (as much as that concept means anything in the indie space anyway) for an upcoming game which is really exciting!
MORE COOL STUFF
I recently did a read-through thread of Primal Quest over on Twitter!
I played some Through the Void with Tony of Plus One Exp over on his stream as part of EFCon!
I made stickers and will be at Gen Con, handing them out to cool folks! If you happen to see me around, come say hi!
I also did a read-through thread of Perplexing Ruin’s Fallen which is another game I’m dying to run/play!
The first annual Exalted Funeral Con was an extremely killer weekend of (virtual) games and panels. If you missed it, I recommend checking out Plus One Exp’s recordings of a bunch of the great panels and games that were livestreamed during the weekend.
If you made it all the way down here, congrats! You are a true Missive Champion!
Thanks for your continued support! - Christian