Brandon the Game Dev

Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Just here for Highways & Byways updates? Click here.

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Sometimes the pace of life is hectic. I’ve had one of those weeks. My daytime job has me extremely busy on an important project. In the same week, I’ve released a blind play-test version of Highways & Byways and ordered a physical prototype.

It reminds me of another hectic week I had because of game development. Between December 30, 2016 to January 6, 2017, there was a lot going on.  I shipped over 100 sets of War Co. cards to Americans for the Kickstarter. I coordinated international shipping with Snakes & Lattes for Canadian rewards and Games Quest for European rewards. I also signed the closing papers on a new home and moved in a little later on a bitterly cold day.

Needless to say, I don’t recommend that you do this. It was the unfortunate result of two major life events awkwardly colliding. Yet the fact that I was able to pull this off is a testament not to herculean work effort, but rather lean processes. I’ll tell you how to practice the same lean processes as well as how you can avoid the circumstances entirely.

While I’ve described in detail how you can fulfill rewards yourself, I don’t recommend it for more than a couple hundred packages. There is a substantial cost benefit to fulfilling low order quantities like 100 yourself. You lose this advantage pretty quickly as third-party fulfillment companies such as Fulfillrite become more attractive. While I left international shipping to Snakes & Lattes and Games Quest, I took on all the domestic shipping to the USA by myself. In fact, I still fulfill domestic orders for War Co. (Don’t believe me? You can always buy a copy 😉)

Self-fulfillment involves a lot of moving parts. To be any good at it, you need software like Stamps.com, adhesive labels, a fast printer, bulk shipping supplies, and transportation to get those packages to the post office. This isn’t like when you have a little box and you put it in the mailbox with the flag up. Nuh-uh, that won’t work for 100 packages.

Days prior, I’d ordered all the supplies I needed. On New Year’s Eve, I started printing off postage dated for January 3, which was the first day the post office would actually be open. It was also the day before I moved. I spent most of New Year’s Eve putting War Co. in ULINE mailers. Then I slipped those ULINE mailers in priority mailers and slapped the postage on them. I wound up paying somewhere in the neighborhood of $500-600 on the postage.

I was unable to run the packages to the post office myself on the weekday, so my brother helped out. He picked up boxes full of packages and loaded them into his car. They took up all of the backseat from what he says. The post office scanned a single sheet that corresponded to all packages I had to ship. Then they got to work putting them in the mail system after my brother dropped them off.

It was initially my intention to stagger the fulfillment where Americans, Europeans, and Canadians would all get their cards at the same time. Then a handful of Australians would get them a few days later. I wasn’t quite able to do this, but I got close. After all, in order to do this, I would have had to hold on to the American stock for another week, thus hauling 200 pounds of packages into my new house. That’s U-Haul space I wasn’t willing to give up, so I fulfilled American rewards about a week early. The day after the packages were dropped off at the post office, I got the keys to my new home. Two days later, I started moving in.

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I have five pieces of advice for anyone who finds themselves in a situation like this:

Buy everything you need to ship – and buy it early. That includes a postal scale, packing tape, mailers, bubble wrap, cardboard inserts, and boxes. Calculate what you need in advance and buy twice as much as you think you need. You can find most of this stuff pretty cheaply through ULINE and Amazon, but you need to account for time for your shipping supplies to be shipped to you.

Learn how to batch import addresses to postage software. If you’re entering people’s addresses by hand after Kickstarter or online orders, you’re doing it wrong. You need to export them as a CSV and upload them into postage software, such as Stamps.com. Don’t try to use the USPS site for something like this. Don’t do something as time-consuming and error-prone as manual entry.

Make sure you’ve got money ready for postage. It seems like a no-brainer, but you need to have cash available for postage. You’re charged when you print postage, not when you ship.

Make sure you’ve got an elegant system to track what you’ve packed. I recommend keeping an Excel spreadsheet. You want to know what you’re sending and who gets it. With War Co., every order was a little different because you can get any combination of two, four, or six out of six decks. Nobody got the wrong order, because I was tracking each one and only checking them off after I packaged them, checked the contents, sealed them, and applied postage.

Turn up the music. Seriously, do you know how mind numbing six hours of preparing packages can be?

Phew. I feel waves of stress from that time even now, ten months later. Do you have a war story of fulfillment? Questions on a campaign you’re about to fulfill? Leave a reply in the comments, I’d love to hear from you 🙂

Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Just here for Highways & Byways updates? Click here.

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Highways & Byways is nearly complete. It still needs some art and I’ll want to do lots of double-blind play-testing. Yet I don’t see it dramatically deviating from the framework it currently follows. The subtlest of tweaks are all that’s needed at this point.

Since I have 4-5 months before launching a Kickstarter campaign and the game is mostly complete, my main focus is elegantly drawing attention. This is somewhat of a mysterious process for a lot of game developers, as I pointed out in my article this week: A Crash Course in Board Game Marketing & Promotion. There is no shortage of fantastic ways to market and promote your game without spending a dime. Yet I’d be remiss if I taught you to dismiss entirely the many tools available to you that cost money.

Paying for marketing and promotion can dramatically speed up the process, opening up entirely new doors for you. A lot of new game developers outright dismiss the possibility of paying for marketing since a lot of other parts of game development cost money. That’s a mistake. Even if money is a constraint, time and energy are bigger, more permanent constraints. Anything you can automate or outsource to save time at least deserves your consideration.

With that in mind, I’d like to share 4 clever ways to market your game for $30.00.

4 Clever Ways to Market Your Board Game Online for $30.00

1. Order a Targeted Social Media Report from BirdSong Analytics

BirdSong Analytics sells Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube reports for $29.99. These reports give you all sorts of useful data, the most important of which is probably followers and followings. In addition, these reports can be run on anybody – you or any popular social media user. That means you can export the followers of a popular board game account to get a list of people who might be interested in what you do. That lets you know who to make friends with.

Information will come to you in the form of a CSV. That means you can open up the raw list in Excel, turn the data into a table, and start filtering by phrases. For example, from a list of 50,000 of someone’s Instagram followers, you can get a list of all people who use the words “board games”, “tabletop games”, and so on in their bio. Then you can make an effort to make friends with them.

2. Run a Facebook ad campaign for 15 days at $2/Day

Facebook ads are some of the most effective advertising methods around today. You can use them to get Facebook likes, promote posts, generate email sign-ups, and even get clicks on your website. You can do them for as little as $1 per day, too.

Facebook ads are not something that you get into halfway. You need to commit to running an ad for at least a week to watch its performance. You’ll need to make subtle tweaks to your ad and your audience to make sure you get the best result possible.

This kind of advertising is super effective because of two things. First, you can target people based on the pages they like, sometimes requiring them to like multiple pages that you specify before they can see your ad. That lets you zero in on the absolute perfect person to see your ads. Then once you launch the ad, you’ll get nearly immediate feedback on how well the ad is performing.

3. Run a Google AdWords campaign for 15 days at $2/Day

Likewise, you can run a Google AdWords campaign in a way that’s very similar to Facebook ads. You can pick super specific search terms and make sure your website shows up at the top or near the top of the search results in the sponsored section. You can tailor your ads to perfectly respond to the search terms you choose.

As with Facebook, much of the magic here is that you can target really specifically. You want to pick obscure search terms, making sure that people will still click them, though. For example “make board game” is a better search term than “board game” for my site. When people search for the magic words, you give them an ad that’s tailor made for their interests.

4. Send Emails to up to 2,500 Subscribers through MailChimp for $30/Month

Email is one of the most effective forms of marketing online. Yes, even in 2017. In fact, a healthy plurality of my traffic comes from email clicks. As it turns out, Mailchimp provides a fantastic service for free, as long as your mailing list is under 2,000 subscribers. It’s what I use for my email campaigns since it helps me make pretty newsletters without a lot of hassle or technical knowledge.

If you exceed the 2,000 subscriber limit for free accounts, then you have to start paying and costs gradually rise from there. For $30/month, you can send emails to a mailing list of up to 2,500 people several times per month. If you’re selling something and even a small fraction of your mailing list buys, you pay for Mailchimp’s fees many times over.

I encourage you to do your own research and experiment from time to time. Marketing and promotion online is quite dynamic and there are new ways to spread the word of your game every year. Use my ideas to give you a sense of where to start.

If you have any questions, suggestions, or stories from your own experiments, please share below in the comments 🙂

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• Highways & Byways is going to be ready for double blind play-testing as soon as I get some vehicle art. Everything’s ready on my end, I just want a little more art first.
• Highways & Byways is ready for physical prototyping pending that last bit of vehicle art.

Dev Diary posts are made to teach game development through specific examples from my latest project: Highways & Byways. Just here for Highways & Byways updates? Click here.

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This week with Highways & Byways, I’ve been making little improvements to the game to make it more usable and easy-to-understand. I’m at a stage where I’m optimizing instead of iterating, which makes me thankful for the extensive background in board gaming that I’ve gained in the last couple of years. Yet it has just been a couple of years – I’m not a lifelong board gamer. I wasn’t there when Catan came out in 1995. I built up my knowledge of board gaming quickly and inexpensively, two things I don’t think a lot of people think to do.

Playing a lot of board games is necessary to creating great board games. Playing games exposes you to mechanics and design trends. It helps you know what gamers like and how they interact. You learn what you find awesome and what you find annoying, and you come to have convictions about changing what you can change. I don’t take issue with the belief that you can benefit from playing a lot of games to be a good designer, I take issue with the invisible scripts people think they have to follow in order to play lots of games.

Before we get to how you play lots of board games with little time and little money, I’d like to put three myths in the ground right now.

First, you don’t have to play hundreds of board games before you start designing. In fact, I think the point of diminishing return is somewhere in the dozens before your own personal experimentation and experience teaches you more than broad exposure to games will. A lot of people, left to their own devices will use the pernicious myth of “I need to play more games” to defend their game dev procrastination.

Second, you don’t have to spend tons of time or money through Amazon shopping sprees or conventions to play lots of games. There are better ways that are more suited to the lifestyles of those with a limited amount of discretionary income. I’ve seen people with shelves of 500 games. That’s awesome and I love that they’re so dedicated to the hobby! Just understand that you don’t have to spend $15,000 on games like that gamer to be a good game dev.

Third, the board gaming hobby doesn’t have to be for the upper middle class like a lot of people make it out to be. In fact, this bothers me a lot. I see gamers making fun of gamers for not having the newest $100 game and it makes me raw. Gaming shouldn’t exclude people because board gaming is intrinsically social and cannot benefit from in-groups and out-groups. If you’re an aspiring game dev, avoid snobbery. 

This all brings me to the crux of this Dev Diary entry…

How to Play a Lot of Board Games with Little Time and Little Money

Broadly speaking, I can think of three ways that you can play a lot of board games without much time or money commitment. To become a good game developer, your goal should be to play a wide variety of games. That means you’ll want to play games that are new and old, for large groups and small groups, and ones that have all sorts of different mechanics. Each of these three ways should enable you to do that.

Method #1: Go to Meetup.com and create an account. Search for board game related events in your community. Odds are good that if you live in or near a moderately populated urban center, you’ll find multiple board gaming groups. I personally live in Chattanooga, TN, which barely cracks the top 100 populated metropolitan areas in the United States and there is no shortage of meetup groups near me.

Method #2: Go to a local board gaming store. If you don’t have one, you might be able to find a video game store or comic shop that also carries board games. Odds are very strong that if you find a place near you that sells hobby board games, they’ll have meet-ups every week or every two weeks where you can play the board games in the store. All you have to do is look them up on Google and give them a call.

Method #3: Let’s say for example that you live in a remote place like the desert of Nevada. There are no meet-up groups or game shops for a hundred miles in any direction. As long as you still have a broadband connection, you can download Tabletop Simulator, a $19.99 Steam game, that will enable you to play board games online. You can then find other players by searching around in the Server Browser. Better yet, you can find Facebook groups that coordinate Tabletop Sim games. Not only will this tool allow you to play lots of games cheaply and from the comfort of your home, but it will also give you the ability to play other designers’ prototypes if they make them available on Tabletop Sim.

Like I was saying earlier this week in 5 Games to Make You a Better Board Game Dev for $64.63, it doesn’t have to be expensive or difficult to get started in board gaming. Sometimes it helps just to have a sense of direction, and I’m happy to provide that 🙂

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• I’m experimenting with new components on Tabletop Simulator. This lets me approximate size, color, and shape to see if they pass basic play-tests before I test with actual components.
• I added a small token for the first player – a simple accessibility gesture.
• I applied James’ art for the card backs and templates to Tabletop Simulator – this will let the play-testers and i catch readability issues before I spend money printing a physical prototype.
• I rebalanced the Event Cards. I had one card that was overpowered and a couple others that were awkwardly worded and had unusual implications as a result.
• I improved the Reference Cards to be simpler.
• I rewrote the rules from scratch to be simpler – no major changes to actual gameplay. This is purely a usability fix.