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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One of the biggest challenges I’m facing right now with Highways & Byways is that the audience I’m courting is different from the audience I won with War Co. In fact, I’ve been thinking this week that in the absence of major game development or logistics challenges, this will be the defining challenge of this Kickstarter campaign. War Co. was an expandable card game about the sci-fi post-apocalypse. It was gritty, complex, and grim. Highways & Byways is a casual family board game set in a nostalgic vision of the United States of America. It’s hopeful, approachable, and exciting.

I did this on purpose. I was looking for a change after War Co. and wanted to court an entirely different audience. There are a lot of good reasons to chase a new audience: it could be a bigger market, or they could shore up a weakness in your portfolio of games for sale, or maybe you just simply want a change. For Highways & Byways, all three of these reasons are true.

There are many dangers with pursuing a different audience than the one you’ve pursued in the past, too. When you market to a new audience, that requires either a lot of time or a lot of money. Both represent a sacrifice, and you can only hope that it’s worth it to do so. You might also run the risk of confusing people about the direction you’re taking with your business, something I’ve encountered a couple of times.

You might expect me at this point to say “here are 5 ways you know you’re ready to change your audience.” If you’re a solo developer, it’s a deeply personal decision. If you work in a team or a larger business, this is something you will have to consider with the unique evidence in front of you.

What I will offer instead are five guidelines for reaching out to a new audience:

1. Make it clear you are making something different.

Reinventing yourself or your company is one of the most powerful things you can do to reset your strategy. It is also a great way of courting attention. The only trouble is that you have to be crystal clear about what you are doing when you are doing something totally different.

If people expect you to make heavyweight games, but you really want to make a family game, you have to be crystal clear about that. Make sure your marketing materials make it very clear what you are doing. Put it on the box, the Board Game Geek page, and the pitch emails to reviewers. Make sure your new audience and your new intentions are written everywhere you can write it and spoken about everywhere you can talk about it.

Clear communication builds trust. When you’re breaking from the norm and doing something totally new, you need to make people trust you. That makes clear communication extra critical.

2. Invest heavily in the new audience while keeping your current customer base.

If you have launched a successful project, as I have with War Co., it’s tempting to pitch your new idea to the same audience. Yet if your new idea is in a totally different niche, you’d be breaking a foundational rule of marketing. Every product has a different target market, and you need to seek that target market out. Don’t sell gas to people who don’t have cars.

Stay in touch with your current customers – they trusted you enough to buy your earlier game or games. They may buy your stuff because it’s you and not because of the game itself. This is significant, but it probably won’t be enough to meet your new product’s potential. That’s why you have to build another audience.

3. Reach out to new channels.

A great way to grow a new audience is to reach out to new channels. You can do this through passive means such as advertising or active means such as social media and conventions. You can also get on blogs, podcasts, and live-streams by helping other content creators out. Don’t confine yourself to the same people you’ve worked with in the past. Find new collaborators. You don’t even have to stick with people in the board game industry! Remember: not everyone who would be willing to play your game spends all day on Board Game Geek or /r/boardgames.

4. Use your reputation to your advantage.

When you make a new product, many people won’t know who you are. They can find out quickly, though, and if they see you’ve already successfully launched a project in the past, that will help you. If you have a reputation for making good games, fulfilling on-time, helping others, or having great customer service, then use that reputation to your advantage. Play it up. Make sure it’s prominently stated or at least implied in your marketing materials. People who don’t know you can still come to trust you through the “social proof” provided by people who trusted you before.

5. Understand there will be misunderstandings.

Despite all your best efforts, some of your old customer base will be confused by what you’re doing with your new game. I’ve had people expecting me to make another rules-heavy game of sabotage-based mechanics like I did with War Co. I didn’t want to do that with Highways & Byways, and despite my best efforts, some people still had the impression that Brandon = War Co.

If you change up your style, people will still associate you with your old ways. McDonald’s has stepped up their game with coffee and nicer locations, but people still think of it as being a pretty bad fast food restaurant. The Beastie Boys never totally shook their party boy reputation even after they released the seamy, dark, weird, eclectic Paul’s Boutique. And at the root of every movie with a hero seeking redemption for awful deeds long since past, you can see this truism at work.

The only responses I have are simple. Be persistent in pursuit of your new idea. Be patient with others who can’t keep up with your every move. Be consistent in your communication. Over time, you’ll be able to reinvent yourself 🙂

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• Reviews for Highways & Byways are starting to come in, such as this positive and descriptive one from Pawn’s Perspective.
• Highways & Byways has a Board Game Geek page now!
• I’m still working on getting on blogs, podcasts, and streams. I’ve worked with a lot of cool people, it’s a real privilege 🙂
• I’m starting to get printing samples in – I want to nail down a first-choice and second-choice printer before the campaign so my pricing estimates are super accurate.

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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Many have lamented that people in the modern era don’t treat their word as bond like they did “back in the day.” Maybe we’re flakier than we used to be, maybe we’re not. Either way, keeping your word is very important. You don’t have to be 100% perfect, but if you’re reliable, people will notice, especially your customers.

There’s one big problem, though: modern tasks are complicated and unpredictable. How do you come up with a reliable estimate of how long it takes to make a board game? It’s not an easy question – board games can take anywhere from several months to several years to create. Even individual tasks that you do on a day-to-day basis such as play-testing, writing a blog post, and managing social media can take a lot longer than you think. This puts you at risk of promising too much and delivering too little.

I’ll be honest, there is no way to be 100% reliable. Yet I personally have several rules I follow before I make promises to others, four of which I’d like to share with you today.

1. Make bold announcements only after you are prepared.

Once you’ve got a lot of commitments, take on new work slowly. If you take on too much responsibility, you won’t be able to fulfill most of your commitments as well as you would like to. It’s good to be ambitious, but there is a very big difference between private ambition and public promises. Knowing the difference can save your reputation.

If you want to take on an exciting new project, do at least some of the work before you publicly announce what you’re doing. Sure, you don’t want to wait too long since showing people the development process is great for marketing. No matter what, though, you want to make sure you at least have some idea of what you’re committing yourself to before you say you’re committed.

For example, after I found out how difficult it was to publish a game with War Co., I was more cautious when creating Highways & Byways. I had some experience publishing a game through Kickstarter, plus I had already drafted up a version of the game before I said online “I am working on a new game.” Furthermore, when I made that announcement in March 2017, I used a somewhat vague public timeline for when it would be on Kickstarter, opting to say “early 2018” or “Q1 2018.” It’s only this week that I finally settled on the launch date of March 26. (Shameless plug: click here to get an email when it goes live.)

2. Use your resources to estimate timeframes for delivery.

When it comes time to commit yourself not just to a project, but to a project date, you’ll be doing that oh-so-dangerous business task of estimating timeframes. This is really, really hard to get right. You can Google search for terms like agile, scrum, and systems development life cycle to see just how much thought people have put into estimating timeframes. Big corporations sink billions into better processes for estimating timeframes and they lose many billions more by being bad at it. (And let’s have some sympathy for them here, it is truly hard to get right.)

The best way to come up with a time estimate for something complex like making a board game, growing a blog audience, or creating new software is to use experience. You can either draw from your own prior experience or ask someone who has experience. But hey, sometimes you’re doing something really wild and you don’t have experience and you don’t know anyone who does. That’s where I was with War Co. (even though I could have totally found experienced people if I’d bothered to try).

In that case, research as much as you can online and make your best guess. Experiment and keep track of how long it takes to do certain things. Improve your guesses as you go along. As long as you follow the last guideline – being careful about what you publicly promise – this should get the job done.

3. Keep two timeframes – an optimistic one and a cautious one.

This is a personal favorite technique of mine for making sure I can make both accurate estimates and avoid promising more than I can deliver. My own personal timeline is pretty optimistic. I thought that I’d personally have Highways & Byways on Kickstarter by the first week of February. That’s not too far off, but if I’d promised that to my potential backers, that wouldn’t have looked so good.

When I’m held accountable for delivering something, I use a more cautious timeline. I make sure to account for all the odd little things that can come up, which I call incidentals – surprises which you can’t predict. Folks familiar with the original Star Trek might even liken this to the Scotty Principle, which goes a little something like this…

Kirk: How long will it take you to fix the engines?

Scotty: Aye, it’ll take me sixteen hours. I have to recalibrate the technobabble machines.

Then he delivers in twelve hours.

This principle could be cynically referred to as “padding estimates,” but that’s not the point. The simple fact is that underperforming on a big promise looks way worse than slightly overperforming on a small promise. People are not rational, and you have to deal with that when you make promises. Furthermore, if you’re working as part of a team, people may very well be waiting for you to finish your tasks before they start theirs. If you can’t keep your promises, you could make liars out of them, too.

4. Be transparent when you can’t do what you said you could.

The three principles I’ve laid out above will help you keep your promises, but you’ll still screw up every once in a while. It happens. Creative projects are way too complicated to reliably predict all the time, no matter how much we want them to be predictable.

If you fail to meet your promises, the next best thing is to apologize sincerely, provide an explanation, and stay in touch with the people you’re reporting to more often. It’s so simple, but a lot of people screw this up. If you get this right, you might even benefit from the pratfall effect by becoming more popular after handling a mistake with class and grace.

Do you have any good tips for keeping your word? Share them below, I’d love to hear them 🙂

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• Highways & Byways is going live on Kickstarter on March 26. Click here to get an email when it goes live.
• The Highways & Byways giveaway contest is over and a winner has been chosen and you can see this on Facebook.
• I’m still working very heavily on outreach: you’ll see me on a lot of podcasts, guest blog posts, and even a few Twitch/YouTube streams!
• Highways & Byways reviews are still ongoing – it’s a lengthy process.

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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It’s no secret that I’m a fan of travel. I don’t think anybody would expect anything less from a guy who created a board game called Highways & Byways. Right now, as I write this, it’s January 27 at 7:52 am and I’m on a Greyhound bus leaving Chattanooga and arriving in Atlanta. I’ll be flying to Hawaii using my long-since saved up travel points and SkyMiles. Yet here I am, on my time off, on my chance to unplug, writing to you because I love what I do 🙂

I think travel makes people better equipped to handle tough challenges. You have to be independent, organized, and adventurous to travel to a place you’ve never been, especially alone as I am doing right now. At the same time, it’s not nearly as hard to do as you think. A Greyhound bus is a few bucks, road travel is cheap, and even domestic flights can be inexpensive if you’re not too picky.

In all my travels, I’ve noticed that there are five particular uncanny similarities between travel and business. By sharing them, I hope you can either relate to or emotionally understand some of the trickier parts of business that are terribly difficult to explain without the use of metaphor.

1. Sometimes you’re on a tight timeline.

The plane boards 45 minutes before the flight time. Please arrive two hours early for domestic flights to allow for enough time to pass through security. Airports, trains, and buses run on tight, tight, tight timelines that don’t have a lot of room for negotiation. I have literally had to run through the Charlotte airport to board a flight on time during the world’s shortest layover.

The board game business can work like that, too. Kickstarter campaigns, in particular, have a way of compressing time so tightly that it threatens to give birth to a black hole. There have been days where I have gotten home from work, cranked out blog posts for a few hours, scheduled social media, texted my girlfriend good night, and fallen asleep only to do that again. It’s not good to do this all the time, but it happens sometimes and it’s really hard to avoid. You have to be ready for that.

2. There are lots of details to remember.

All luggage that will not fit in the overhead compartment will need to be checked at the gate. You may bring a carry-on and a personal item into the cabin. All liquids must be in containers 3.4 fl oz or less and must be in a quart size resealable clear plastic bag. Please make sure your boarding pass matches your government issued ID. Please make sure your state’s license is compliant with the Department of Homeland Security’s new REAL ID program, or else you’ll need your passport. (Tennessee is, in fact, compliant.) Show up to your flight on time and the right gate. Did you grab your headphones? It’s a long flight. Hope you didn’t get the middle seat…

Business can be like that, too. I’ve had to check every single component in 10 copies of Highways & Byways and send it to reviewers. I’ve checked cards for color consistency and printer alignment. I made sure the boards and all the pieces looked good. I made sure there were no typos in the rules. I have to make sure my website looks good and the mailer is working. I have to use metrics to track my marketing plan, lest I fall flat when trying to launch this game on Kickstarter. My Google Calendar is a mosaic of different colored time boxes, each representing a different commitment, accurate to fifteen minutes. My brain has more dates and times rattling around in it than a Delta airlines mainframe.

3. You will be under a lot of stress.

Hopefully nothing goes wrong with security. Hopefully nothing goes wrong that keeps me from getting to my Atlanta flight. Hopefully I’m not late to arrive in LAX and unable to catch the only flight to KOA that day. Hopefully I can sleep on the plane. Hopefully my cell phone gets reception on the island. Hopefully that rental car’s collison insurance is really good if I need it…

In business and in travel, the stressful elements will keep coming and they won’t stop. You can do plenty to try to reduce the amount of stressful experiences you have, but you will ultimately need to work on your ability to manage stress. Over time, you’ll adapt and keep a level head. Even if your printer doesn’t print samples to spec, even if your artist is late, even if your website is down, and even if your Kickstarter campaign fails to fund, you will be okay. You must make peace with the unknown.

4. You may encounter unexpected expenses.

Because travel requires facing so much of the unknown, you may encounter unexpected expenses. Sometimes it can be silly little things like not having a disposable razor. Sometimes you forget to pack critical items of clothing and have to buy new ones. Food can be surprisingly expensive if you don’t have a good idea of where you will eat. You never know when you will find the perfect souvenir either…

I’ve had similar unexpected expenses pop up in businesds. The first time I encountered state tax was a big one. Federal tax on Kickstarter income the following year was another one. I’ve also paid out the nose for prototype copies. One of the biggest thorns in my side with this coming Kickstarter campaign is that I will need to spend around $1,000 (and therefore raise $1,500 more) to cover the cost of child safety testing for Highways & Byways. Since it is marketing to children under the age of 14, I need to be compliant with EN-71 and ASTM F 963. So it goes.

5. Travel and business can both bring tremendous benefits.

For all the logistical hijinks and stress, travel and business both bring incredible experiences. Both can teach you more about yourself and both can help you grow into being a better person with more skills and interesting stories to share. Stories of my poorly planned European train tour have gone over well at parties for years and chasing my childhood dream with War Co. opened more doors than you can imagine.

I end this article with a challenge to you: try something you’re afraid of. It can grow you and make you a more complete person 🙂

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• I’ve been on vacation this past week, so I’ve relied on automation to keep my business running.
• Before leaving, I made sure all review copies and all RFQs for printing prices were sent.
• I started editing some early Kickstarter footage and audio that I had pre-recorded while flying/a layover in LAX.
• The giveaway contest on Facebook wrapped up last Monday, February 5. You’ll know who won on Monday, February 12 if you check on Facebook.