Tabletop Gaming Live - Doncaster
Photos -
Over the weekend, I visited a local tabletop gaming convention with my partner. We went to this convention both to look around at all the games on sale but also as a networking opportunity with people in the TTRPG industry. The event was on the smaller side but had quite a few large companies attending such as Chaosium, Mantic and Warlord Games. Below are some photographs I took from the event.
Industry Talk -
While there, we attended a talk about how to make your own games, specifically talking about playtesting, trademarking and funding projects. Some of the individuals at this talk were:
Gareth Edwards from Frog Hall Games (cat earth, clean the castle, cryptic killers), The creators of Cubyria, Aaron Grove from Ocean City games ( salvage hidden treasures, isla), Josh Fox from Black Armada Games, and Emesh De Zoysa creator of Black Metro.
The first question the panel was asked was "What is the first thing you should do when making your game" the first point to be made was securing your name, everything about your game will be built upon this so it's important to find something that fits and actually make sure that name is available. Gareth Edwards explained that it is only £170 to get a trademark in the UK (this takes about 2 months to obtain through the GOV.UK website), and that will secure your name and brand associated with the game so that nobody else can swoop in and take your idea. When doing this, always double check that you are not infringing upon already existing IPs. Linking to this, you should also check that your game is patentable, if you want to go down that route, if you have already posted your game online without securing a patent, technically the mechanics of your game now fall under Public domain.
Once you have a name for your game, work on the actual content of the game. The best way to do this is to work on things you are interested in, do things that you like to do, look at games you already like and use them to inspire you. Generally just let things come naturally, don't force things and just let the game develop as you go. With this in mind however, try to make the most minimal viable version of that game, create an outline of the rules, prototype from that and build up organically. Thar way things don't get out of hand very quickly. This also ties in with manufacturing considerations, if you make your game too big too quickly, it might not be viable to produce.
A great inspiration resource to use seems to be Boardgamegeek, which can offer you insight into what is popular at the moment, how long games should be, age range for your target audience, and what mechanics and genres of games are popular right now. Use this to boost the potential of your game as well as looking at what games are on the shelves at shops to build up more of an idea of what you should be incorporating into your own work.
From this point onward you should be aiming to do regular playtests of your game with people who will be brutally honest in telling you how to improve. Play your rough prototypes with people who will NOT be nice to you. At the end of the day, constant compliments do not tell you how to improve, and so finding people who can tell you good honest advice is extremely important. ( as a little bit of extra information apparently there's a specific play testing group in Newcastle that meet several times a week, while this is quite far for me to visit it is worth looking if places near me do similar events.)
Something the panellists also said was that you shouldn't be afraid to make mistakes, sometimes things don't work, and the best thing you can do to fix it is try something new and take on advice that your play testers give you. Also, see how people naturally want to play your game, take that into consideration, is it different to how you thought people would play your game? If you find people naturally try to play your game in a different way to how you thought, that might be due to your rulebook, if they don't understand from brief rules then your instructions are not good enough. Also remember to Proofread rulebooks! Typos can easily be missed so it is important to get an extra set of eyes just to look over everything you've written.
Finally for this section, remember that you can't please everyone. Learn to differentiate between good and bad advice, obviously take on advice but also stay true to your vision. Just because a small group of people do not like your game, does not mean your game is bad.
The final topic that got brought up in the chat was by far the most eye opening. Honestly I'm very glad I went to this chat as the topic of Crowdfunding my project was something I was feeling very nervous about and I'm glad these people were brutally honest. There's obviously the discussion of Crowdfunding or publication? which is best and what are the pros and cons. Generally, Crowdfunding is hit or miss, it's high risk, high reward and requires a LOT more thought than reaching out to a publisher. Its much better in the sense you have the possibility of getting 100% of the projects and it can help people who have a very unique idea, but if you're not willing to take the risk of losing a LOT of money, probably reconsider.
One of the professionals, Gareth Edwards, used publishers to help him produce his games. He talked a little about how to go about reaching and pitching to publishers and throughout this talk I gleamed that publication companies seem better for board games than ttrpgs. I think with my own projects I might consider crowdfunding for my TTRPG zines however honestly I think either looking for a publisher or buying the trademark and putting a pin in my boardgame project to crowdfund later when I have more of a following might be the best bet. Gareth explained that to actually reach out to a publication company you should: 1. "Have a DAMN GOOD sell sheet!" you really want these companies to get behind your idea, and 2. try reaching out to these people in person, in his experience they give you the time to actually play through your game and get a good feel for the product you are trying to sell. Always look for investors with games that already match what you are trying to pitch to them for a higher chance of success. Also, when it comes to actually getting your game manufactured look for other indie companies who are willing to partner up to split the price of a shipping container of your games.
Looking back at kickstarters [which I may look at in the future but right now I really don't have the money to risk losing on producing my game :( one of the people on the panel said "oh well its ok if you are willing to risk potentially throwing 20k down the drain" and that is a LOT of money, I just at this point in time don't have the audience on social media to gather enough funds to make my product and I also don't have the funds for advertising to get more people, so i need to work my way up and get a few more eyes on my brand before I can attempt anything like that. HOWEVER, that isn't to say I don't have plans of how to produce my game and get it out there, but I'll cover that soon] look at how other games have been promoted and Kickstarted to gather inspiration on how to create your own campaign. Its best to start creating your campaign towards the end of the project, or at least far enough that you actually have a product and vision to show. You need something physical to actually show your investors and encourage them to support you. It also helps a lot to advertise to a captive audience, that way you don't have to spend as much on advertising to actually get eyes on your page. Joshua Fox crowdfunded one of his games (which were ttrpg books, he talked a bit about how zines do quite well crowdfunded so that is something to bare in mind for the future), and he said that the first 48 hours on your campaign donations is people who are really interested, and the last 48 hours are people who forgot to back it in the first 48 hours, between that, there's really not much activity. So, if you aren't at LEAST halfway funded in the first 48 hours you have a REALLLY slim chance of your game actually being funded. Generally, kickstarters are not recommended for products (single unit) under £30, you can always give it a go, just don't set your minimum fund too high.
To actually work out how much your goal should be, Joshua fox implored to consider your scenarios, just funded, double funded or lots of money, how much do you actually need to make your product and can you feasibly deliver those products still if you suddenly have much more units to produce. Factor in manufacturing, shipping (usually you will have to get it printed abroad and then sent to fulfilment centres wherever your audience is which can add to the cost). Add in a 10-20% contingency cost, as well as the Kickstarter listing charge and then you have a general idea of how much you should be asking for (You can sell directly to retailers if you are selling in small numbers, but if you want to aim bigger you will need a distributor, so add that into the budget considerations.). As Fox was mostly experienced with books he gave the advice of less than 500 books is usually not worth it and that price wise, £10,000 minimum is quite good for large TTRPG books (that was including money to pay for writers and artists but since I did all that myself, the cost might be a bit lower. Honestly listening to all of these people I am of the mind of if I can do it myself, give it a go, there are a lot of skills needed in board game creation and if I can boost my skills in these areas it might make me more employable.).
A little more on the economics side, there were some points brought up about VAT: If you start earning over £80,000 you need to start registering your games with VAT, unless you are selling into the EU you will automatically need to add VAT to your games regardless of how much you earn. For the USA, tax is only applicable if you are spending $100,000 worth of products into a single US state. You can also do a risk assessment and mitigate risks yourself to cut down on manufacture safety testing costs, And if you're really not that bothered about your game's name there's no point in getting a trademark really - if someone asks you to change the name do it, aside from that as long as you yourself are not infringing on IPs it doesn't really change much. Finally, Print on demand for books is low risk but more expensive.
I think one of the most important things to take away from this is I need to get myself out there and network more before I can attempt anything huge. Cut my cloth accordingly and make sure I'm not throwing myself in the deep end. I met up with Joshua Fox after the main talk for some more advice on how to build an audience and get into that network of people. He suggested that BlueSky and blogging are very useful tools, social media gets you connected whilst blogging helps you interact with your followers [I already really like blogging so this was great to hear!]. He suggested that on your blog, make sure to actively post, interact with people, say and do interesting things , Write about what you're interested in and, in amongst that, show images of what you're creating. Just generally reach out to people, you are not alone in this industry! There are people out there who will guide you and give you the information you need. Work out what you can do with the audience you have now, start small and work your way up, and make sure the amount you put in is less than what you get out.
How am I going to Publish my product with this information in mind?
After doing some thinking, I really don't think I am in a place right now to be able to produce more than one copy of my game. I would love to do this in the future but first I need to get a little bit more well known to give me a better chance of a successful Kickstarter campaign. What I am going to do however is put the digital file download on the Itch.io for use on Tabletop simulator or Owlbear, that at least gets my product out there [ I might even be able to earn a little bit of money to put towards improving the game if I put it on there for a small cost, I'm thinking £5 ish?] and there is no risk of me losing money. I really want to put a pin in this game idea for later when maybe I am in a better position to fund the game, so I think I will look into buying the trademark for Hotel Bunga so that I have that option available in the future. I thought this talk was very informative and I'm very glad I got to get an industry professional's opinion on what they thought was best for my game.
Playtesting Draggos -
Just before we left, we playtested a game in development called Draggos by kittenpokercreations, which was a card game about collecting dragons with toys. All of the artwork and game mechanics were done by one person and it was really interesting to see how to do a proper playtest [I brought the prototype of my game along too but we didn't get a chance to playtest it as the convention ended soon after the talk we went to]. This was a really fun game and I look forward to it coming out!.
Capstone Trello -
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/112wXJW27lFJjkPjQHZk7fCMT7VPCanDHE-cVP0tGDUM/edit?usp=sharing
This adds into the Job role and industry research section of my trello, I felt attending this event was very beneficial as it gave me some insight on how to go about producing my game. On top of this we managed to get some contacts with some people over at Chaosium, who gave us some very useful resources to make ttrpg modules [we talked about making a module for Call of Cthulhu in the future and the representative who we spoke to said they would love to support us with anything in the future. He also passed me on to someone on the art direction team of call of cthulhu which was so cool of them to do!], I also managed to get a contact with a potential distributor to sell some of our TTRPG games in a local store which will also help out massively with building my network of contacts. In terms of my project work, Last week I finished off another client card and created my employee card template. My Next step is to create another client card, and two more furniture cards to get myself back on track. As I have now finished my Dissertation I have a bit more time to work on this project, so I am feeling much better about getting everything done for the deadline.
Comments
Post a Comment