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 – it will take you right to the updates at the bottom of the page.

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Last week in the Dev Diary, I talked about how board game development is a long, ongoing process with a lot of different stages. Every once in a while, you’ll find yourself waiting on something in order to continue. Common situations include:

• Waiting on the manufacturer to print a sample run of your game so you can complete product testing or send copies to reviewers.
• Waiting 4-8 weeks for reviewers to cover your game, while praying that their feedback is positive.
• Waiting for Kickstarter to approve your campaign.

Waiting is a big part of self-publishing a board game, as well as entrepreneurship in general. I know it’s not sexy. Nobody grows up and dreams of waiting days, weeks, and months to get a dream off the ground. Yet it’s important to accept its inevitability and have a mindset that allows you to make the best use of your time.

In my case, I’m waiting on James to finish up art for his last project. Then I’ll be waiting for him to rapid prototype the Highways & Byways board. I’ve just about exhausted my close circle of family and friends as far as first-time play-testing is concerned. With the amount of visual data being used in the game, it will make it much easier to get useful feedback with a proper board drafted. In short, I need a prototype board to do efficient play-testing. It’s going to take a little while.

So what does one do with all this extra time? Remember that if you are making a game and publishing it on your own, you’re running a business. Businesses need more than just a product or service to survive. When you are not able to work on game development, there are several other things you can work on.

Artwork: If it’s really early in your project’s timeline and you find yourself stuck for one reason or another, you can always start looking for artists. You can start making lists or curating special feeds of artists you like on Instagram and DeviantArt. You can start jotting down your art direction thoughts, even if you’re not ready to write an art spec document yet.

Production: Once you have a basic idea of what’s going to go into your game physically, you can start asking manufacturers for quotes. Most manufacturers will give you a free quote. I suggest asking for a quote at the MOQ (minimum order quantity), MOQ x 2, and MOQ x 10. That gives you a wide range of figures that will let you figure out which company is best depending on your financial situation later on.

Where do you find board game manufacturers? It’s not so hard. You can Google “board game printers” or “board game manufacturers” and start finding them that way. You can also peruse Reddit and Board Game Geek threads, since they tend to be gold mines of information on this sort of topic.

Reviews: Start looking on Twitter or Board Game Geek for board game reviewers. Make lists. Get to know them. Learn their styles. When it’s time to send your game out to reviewers, this gives you the advantage of sending your game to people who are both reliable and fans of the type of game you’re making.

Kickstarter: It’s never too early to start a draft Kickstarter page. It’s also a great idea to start backing campaigns for $1 just so you can watch their newsletters. Plus if you back 20-30 campaigns, people will take you a lot more seriously when you do intend to Kickstart your game. Nothing says “red flag” on Kickstarter like a creator who hasn’t backed anyone.

Fulfillment: If you’re an American, read up on my first and second guides about shipping. Order some free USPS mailers to your home just to get a sense of their size. Ask Snakes & Lattes or Games Quest to send you free materials on international board game fulfillment pricing.

Preorders & Sales: Figure out how Celery and Amazon work before you need them. Their set-up is more complicated than you might think, so you need to plan ahead.

Marketing: If all else fails, it’s always a good idea to get more email subscriptions, social media followers, likes, subscribes…whatever your most valuable metric is. You can never have too many people ready ahead of time if you plan on Kickstarting your game. Have lots and lots of genuine, heartfelt, one-on-one conversations over several months and you’d be amazed what you can make happen.

So to bring it all together, what does my use of downtime during Highways & Byways look like? What have I done this week to practice what I preach?

Well, I’m about to launch a new blog series called Start to Finish: Publish and Sell Your First Board Game on Monday. I’m also making a brand new companion email newsletter for the series as well, which you should totally sign up for.

I’ve been growing my game developer Discord by seeking out people on Twitter who seem cool and inviting them personally. At the same time, I’ve been growing that email newsletter list like crazy. Meanwhile, I’ve been cleaning up my social media channels so I can more clearly see what’s relevant. I’ve been experimenting with advertisements. I’ve had lots and lots of one-on-one conversations in the downtime.

Part of the fun of self-publishing a game is that you get to take on a variety of tasks. You never get mired too much into any one thing. Much of your success will depend upon waiting like a champ and making great use of downtime.

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• I play-tested version Highway 3 with components.
• The components I’m testing with are clearly not going to work.
• I’m waiting on some preliminary art before getting much further into play-testing.
• I’m launching a new series on the blog, growing the newsletter, and growing the Discord community.

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 – it will take you right to the updates at the bottom of the page.

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Everything snapped into focus this week. Highways & Byways now has an artist. His name is James Masino. He created all 300 of the original pieces of art in my first game, War Co., and he’s back again to do everything in Highways & Byways. To say he is a freelancer that I trust is the understatement of the year. After all, he’s the guy who drew this…

I could tell you about the methods I suggest for finding an artist. I could opine on how important trust is in business relationships. I’m not going to do that today. Instead, I’m going to talk about something that happened as a result of hiring a stable freelance artist for Highways & Byways. I’m going to talk the importance of timing when you’re developing a board game.

There are a lot of areas of development that you’ll need to consider when you plan out your project. They include early game design, game tweaks, artwork, sample production, the game review process, Kickstarter preparation/campaigning/wrap-up, manufacturing, fulfillment, sales, and the marketing. Having James’ time estimate on art allowed me to make accurate time estimates on every one of these other areas. I’m not ready to reveal dates yet, but I want you to get a sense of how my mind is working on this project so you can learn from it.

Stages of a Board Game Project

Early Game Design: I’m mostly past this stage since Highways & Byways is a playable, fun game that needs subtle tweaks and a lot of play-testing at this point. I’m pretty sure by now that any changes would be evolutionary instead of revolutionary. But I understand that I could always be wrong.

The tricky thing about making estimates about the length of time it’ll take to complete early game design is that…well, it’s not really doable. Some games snap together easily like Highways & Byways and others involve month-long marathons of early testing to be playable, like War Co.

Artwork: Your artist or team of artists will set the time frame on this. Plan for a few months, though, especially if your game requires a lot of original art. Also plan on doing lots of game tweaks at the same time.

Game Tweaks: As you gradually get more and more art, you’ll need to keep testing your game. You’ll need to test your game both to refine it, but also to make sure the artwork is having the desired impact on players. You don’t want to get a bunch of art, end the contract, and find out later that you need to fix it because players don’t understand what’s going on. Take a few months to do this.

Sample Production: You need to have art before you print sample copies of your game for final testing and the review process. In the game tweaking stage, you should really be vetting printers as well. At this point, you’ll need to go with the printer you intend to manufacture with and budget a few weeks to get those sample copies. Go with what they tell you.

Reviews: In order to succeed on Kickstarter – if that is the route you choose to go – you’ll need to get your game reviewed. There are a lot of ways to go about this, but you need to have a game that very closely matches the production quality of your game after you fulfill the rewards, assuming you succeed on Kickstarter. Reviewers often wind up with a backlog of games to play, so you’ll want to give them a minimum of 6 weeks to do their thing. Ideally, you should give them two months – longer around the holidays.

Kickstarter: Most campaigns take about 3-4 weeks, but you should prepare far in advance. Your campaign page should be ready to go some time in the middle of the Review stage. You should block off a couple of weeks before the campaign to focus specifically on Kickstarter. You should also block off two weeks after the campaign to handle the chaos of the campaign while the payment clears.

It should go without saying, but to go any further than this stage, you’ll need to successfully fund on Kickstarter. If you don’t, you’ll need to push back everything else for a little while and relaunch your campaign.

Manufacturing: Manufacturing often takes a month or two PLUS the shipping time. Shipping is most commonly done by sea for cost reasons, which can take a full three months. Budget four to five months for manufacturing time.

Fulfillment: It will take a few weeks to ship your game, too. It’ll take a week or two for your distributors to get ready PLUS the week or two it takes to actually move games by mail.

Sales: You should plan a couple of months to focus on the sales of your game after your fulfill the campaign if you have inventory left over.

Marketing: Lastly, throughout the entirety of this project, you should be doing some sort of marketing. That doesn’t necessarily mean for your game. You need to make sure people know your name. Spend time building social media. Get email contacts. Get to know people. It’s critical if you want to get past the Review stage.

Long story short: board game projects are 12-24 month commitments. Mentally prepare yourself for that.

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• It’s been a whirlwind week for Highways & Byways.
• I’ve signed a contract with James Masino. He’s the guy who did all 300 originial pieces of art for my first game, War Co., and he’ll be making all the art for Highways & Byways.
• We play-tested together through Tabletop Simulator and his feedback immediately set my agenda for fulfilling the game’s visual accessibility needs.
• It’s looking like we’ll start the art over the weekend.
• I created a project timeline and road map, which is what inspired this post.
• I rephrased some confusing cards.
• I play-tested some more.
• I’ve tweaked the rules for clarity.
• I’m starting to play-test with components.
• All of the above is happening while I’m writing articles for Start to Finish, doing a deep clean of all my social media networks, and compiling lists of people I’d like to play-test with.

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 – it will take you right to the updates at the bottom of the page.

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I’m juggling quite a few responsibilities with Highways & Byways at the moment, most of which are not particularly rife for diary articles. I’ve got contracts, timelines, and budgets going back and forth between a potential artist and me. I’ve got some Gantt charts and knockoff Vizio diagrams explaining my approach to Highways & Byways as a holistic project and not just a game. It’s decidedly unsexy project management work for me right now. This is all very important, but I don’t have specific details ready to share at the moment in that area.

Yet I did have an experience over the weekend that will dramatically improve the gameplay of Highways & Byways. I played two games with my parents. Just a couple hours of play-testing revealed a lot of things to me – mostly good but occasionally suggestive of opportunities for improvement. What absolutely floored me was just how productive it was to play-test with my parents. I didn’t expect that! This got me thinking about the benefits and limitations of play-testing with your family.

Let’s start out with the limitations. There’s a good chance that your family members do not fall within your intended audience of hobby board gamers. There’s a good chance they don’t know much about games. There’s an extremely high chance that they’ll give you rosier feedback than you deserve, inflating your sense of game quality.

That said, there’s something absolutely critical that comes with testing with family who aren’t board gamers. There are two major benefits that are hard to find somewhere else.

1. You get to play your game with non-gamers.
2. You get to play your game with people who understand the points you’re trying to make.

My parents are not gamers, especially not my dad. You could see his eyes glaze over when he was playing War Co., and though he was proud of the effort I put into the game, it very clearly wasn’t appealing to him. My mom is a little more experienced in games, but she doesn’t own any hobby games. When playing with them, I paid attention not to effusive parental praise, but rather places they got hung up. I made a note of any game elements that caused them to hesitate, anything they regularly forgot to do, and anything they asked me. I wasn’t testing for their pleasure, which will always be at least somewhat biased in my favor, I was testing for their confusion.

As a note to people following for game updates: Highways & Byways was – as a whole – intuitive. I still walked away with some to-dos such as rule clarifications and the need to make reference cards for game events and processes.

I like testing with family. It’s a good way of catching up and sharing part of my life. It also just so happens to be a fantastic way to vet a certain subset of game problems. I prefer testing alone first to make sure the game functions, with my brother next to make sure the game feels like it plays well, then with family to eliminate communication issues. I want those communication issues sussed out before I start reaching out to play-testers in game stores or online, because that requires a lot of effort on my end.

Highways & Byways tested well with my parents. My dad picked up the game in about 15 minutes, which is a really good sign for any game and any gamer. It’s especially a good sign with someone who doesn’t play board games. My mom picked up the game in about the same time and this was early in the morning with neither of us adequately caffeinated.  Let’s suppose they couldn’t pick it up. What would that mean?

• If I lost them before I even finished explaining the game, something would be wrong with the core engine of the game. The very basis of the game would be confusing. This doesn’t entirely destroy a game’s chances to succeed, but it makes the whole thing an uphill battle.
• If they stared blankly at the board without much of a clue what to do, something would be wrong with the mechanics. I would need to change them to be more understandable.
• If they continually did things wrong when playing, that would mean the rules are confusing.
• If they continually forgot aspects of the game, that would mean there are some accessibility issues – namely, having too many things to remember without a reference. (This actually was a minor issue which I’ve corrected this week.)
• If they complained that the game plays well but doesn’t “make sense”, that could indicate a mismatch between theme and gameplay – a breakdown in the inner narrative, if you will.

Long story short, play-testing with your family can be a great source of feedback, if you know how to interpret it. Know the limitations and be sure to appreciate the loving people who can help you vet your game before it reaches uninvolved strangers.

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Key Takeaways for Game Devs

• Play-testing with family has these benefits:
  • You get to play your game with non-gamers.
  • You get to play your game with people who understand your intentions.
• Play-testing with family has these caveats:
  • They may not play a lot of games.
  • They may not be in your target audience.
  • They’ll almost definitely tell you that your game is better than it is.
  • Constructive feedback often has to be interpreted in a way other than it’s initially said.
• Overall, if you understand the limitations of family play-testing, it can act as the canary in a coal mine that catches communication issues before you share your game with people who don’t know you.

Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• I’m working on the details of a contract with an artist. This involves a lot of back-and-forth on pricing and timelines, as well as legal details. It’s going well and I expect good news soon.
• I play-tested the game with both of my parents in separate play-tests, which uncovered a handful of accessibility issues but largely was well-received.
• I’ve created a rough timeline and business case for Highways & Byways, which is necessary for me to coordinate a lot of what’s about to come.
• I’ve updated the rule set and updated the game version to Highway 2 (version 13) based on play-tests with my parents, who are not board gamers.