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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Entrepreneurship is hard. One of the hardest parts of entrepreneurship is knowing when to change your mindset. We all go into our day-to-day endeavors saddled with a set of assumptions on how life works. Our assumptions are always a little bit wrong, but the act of assuming we know how to act is sometimes a useful way to deal with the bigger enemy of indecision. That said, from time to time, we all must undergo the painful process of changing our belief systems to move forward in life.

1) You must build an audience before you launch a product.

In February 2016, I launched War Co. on Kickstarter for the first time. It was a dismal failure. The game was about 50% complete and I had not spoken to any board gamers or card gamers prior to launch. In fact, I had no real understanding of the board game industry as a whole. I had no idea what I was doing. On this very blog, I’ve analyzed things that I did wrong with War Co., viciously eviscerating my own work despite the fact that I’m pretty happy with it.

We’re not talking about a laundry list of things I did wrong today, though. We’re talking about earth-shattering paradigm shifts that rewired the way I think. This failed Kickstarter launch did just that. I immediately understood – both intellectually and emotionally – how critical it was to build an audience before launching a product. “Build it and they will come” is false in the board game industry.

There are a few ways you can build an audience, but they more or less boil down to “talk to a bunch of people” or “get your game in front of people who’ve already done that.” For your own sake, I recommend you do both. People you talk to individually will be the most loyal to your cause, and people who find you through others who have a larger platform – who will come in far greater numbers – will be more likely to stick around if you’ve already got a lively community of your own.

There is a reason why A Crash Course in Board Game Marketing & Promotion is one of my most popular articles on here. A lot of people have come to realize just how important it is to build your own audience.

2) It takes more than one game to make a viable business.

I’m going to tip my hand a bit here. I’m still a pretty new game developer. I’m committed to sharing all my knowledge for our greater good, but I should not be regarded as a veteran like Jamey Stegmaier or James Mathe. Why? A little something I realized in March 2017: it takes more than one game to succeed in this industry. I’m working on my second: Highways & Byways.

It took me a long time to realize this. I wanted to just make War Co. and call it a day. I didn’t intend to get into the board game industry, but I ended up really liking it anyway. Still, it took me until March 2017 – ten months ago, mind you – to finally take Pangea Games seriously and start working on a second game.

Why does it take multiple games to make a viable business? There are several factors at work. You need money to have a viable business and board game development businesses have a tough time with this. Bringing in steady money requires an audience and a backlog of different games. Both the audience and the backlog take a long time to build, and there is no shortcutting that. Even if you decide you’re not crazy enough to self-publish like me, your publisher won’t pay you a lot. It will take several games to start racking up royalties that will bring you decent amounts of cash.

I’m not saying “don’t make board games if you want to make money.” I think there are far too many negative people who act like you can’t make a dime in this industry. I don’t buy that. This is a $1.4 billion industry with fairly low barriers to entry. You just have to have a big enough audience to take advantage of large print runs OR a backlog of games that sell.

3) I began to think about “the After.”

This hit me around March 2017 as well. When I launched War Co. to the general public on Valentine’s Day 2017, it didn’t sell well. A lot of the stock sat in my garage for a while before it finally started selling a little bit. The reason why is simple: I didn’t think enough about sales. I was myopic in my past, thinking the Kickstarter alone would get my business, well, kickstarted. It’s not that simple. You have to build up a sales system, you have to think about “the After.” Kickstarter, or “launch day” if you launch your game through other means, is not the end-all-be-all. You need a way to sell your inventory on an ongoing basis. Otherwise, it will just sit in your garage or a warehouse. Needless to say, I’ll be handling Highways & Byways differently.

4) I started using social media for leads and connections, not followers.

One of the nasty and seductive parts of Twitter, Instagram, and other social media networks is that it’s easy to focus on followers. Followers do not really matter. If your followers are not targeted, then your channel won’t do your business much good. The War Co. Instagram account is giant, but the Brandon the Game Dev and Highways & Byways accounts both bring me more actual business.

Instead of focusing on followers, focus on leads. I started doing this in June 2017. Try to find people who will be interested in what you do, and follow them. Don’t abuse the system, just follow a few people every day. Then you can reach out to them individually and you’ll have real common ground. This is called lead generation, and this is the main mindset I use with social media now. This helps me get email addresses and grow the Discord server that I run. This is infinitely better than tens of thousands of followers who simply don’t care about what I’m doing.

Even better than leads, though, you can start making connections to important people. I’m talking bloggers, podcasters, and reviewers – people who can really help you get your board game seen by a larger audience. You can find other game developers, make friends, and find mentors. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and other social media networks make this a lot easier.

5) I learned the importance of playing matchmaker.

Last but not least, in June 2017, I started building up the game dev Discord server that many people know me for. It’s got over 1,000 people in it and I recommend that you join it if you are starting to make board games. I realized just how incredibly powerful it is to be able to connect people with other people they’d like to meet. I’ve learned that it is a wonderful thing – and good for business – to be able to connect developers and play-testers, bloggers and designers, artists and paying customers.

What sets businesses apart is often intangible qualities. The reason campaigns go into the millions on Kickstarter is because the people behind them have built up – either individually or through a larger organization – goodwill. That goodwill translates into trust and eventually sales. One of the best ways to build up goodwill is to help people with their goals. Matchmaking is the most time-effective way to do this.

Have you had any massive mental shifts in your own game development endeavors? Share them below in the comments 🙂

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• I’ve ordered 10 review copies.
• I’ve started sending out a few copies to reviewers.
• I’ve got a lot of guest posts in the works.
• I’m starting to show up on podcasts – keep an eye out for me!
• There is generally a lot of exciting stuff going on with Highways & Byways – got to spread the word.

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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In my quest to test Highways & Byways 100 more times before I release it to reviewers, I’ve found myself with relatively little to say. That’s a good thing! After all, I’m checking to make sure there are no serious balance issues that come out of repeated plays. I’ve already play-tested this game a ton. People like it, it’s been blind play-tested for over two months now. I even blind play-tested it at a game design convention.

In absence of a Byways-related update to inspire this week’s Dev Diary, I’m answering a question I got from a new game designer a few months back. “How many blind play-tests does your board game really need?”

Predictably, my response to that is “it depends.” Blind play-testing has a set of very specific purposes in board game development. You need it for five reasons:

1. It confirms that the core engine and mechanics of your game make intuitive sense.
2. It confirms that your rules are not unnecessarily difficult to pick up.
3. It can help you identify accessibility issues before you get farther along in development.
4. It puts your game in a situation where people are less likely to protect your feelings, since you’re not directly involved.
5. It’s great marketing.

It makes an intuitive sort of sense that more blind play-testing is always good. I’m not convinced. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had dozens of people blind play-test Highways & Byways, but there are diminishing returns once you hit a certain point. Let’s take this apart reason by reason.

It confirms that the core engine and mechanics of your game make intuitive sense.

If three or four different game groups all play your game and have no trouble understanding the strategy and tactics of the game, you’re probably good to go here. Granted, it might take you a long time to get to this point, but if your first three or four blind play-tests go well in this regard, you’re probably fine.

It confirms that your rules are not unnecessarily difficult to pick up.

Again, if the same three of four different game groups understand the rules just fine, you’re probably good to go here as well. That means no misunderstandings, no deer-in-headlights looks when reading the rules, and no major suggestions. They might find a typo or two, but that’s different.

It can help you identify accessibility issues before you get farther along in development.

If your game is blind play-tested by lots of different people, the most common visual, physical, a cognitive inaccessibilities should become clear to the perceptive game developer. If you don’t find any after a while, you’re probably good to go here as well.

It puts your game in a situation where people are less likely to protect your feelings, since you’re not directly involved.

If your game is loved or even merely liked with a few minor suggestions for changes, you’re in a good place with blind play-testing. If your game can get a consensus of 7/10 on feedback surveys with some consistent and easy-to-implement suggestions for improvement, you may not need additional blind play-testing.

It’s great marketing.

Of all the reasons to keep blind play-testing once you confirm your game is clear, accessible, and likable, this is the most compelling. People who play a game in its early stages are more likely to buy it later on. This is a simple fact. However, blind play-testing can be time-consuming and difficult to arrange. I would argue it is more effective to use your time and money generating email leads online through social media or going to conventions to mingle.

You don’t need hundreds of blind play-tests. You don’t need hundreds of blind play-testers. All you need is enough to confirm that your game is clear, accessible, and likable. That might take 10 games. It might take 200. There is no hard and fast answer here.

Every once in a while, a fresh project will try to wow everybody by posting astronomical numbers showing how much a game has been play-tested. I’m sure there is a benefit to blind play-testing on a massive scale, but it’s not so great that the new game developer working on a very tight budget with limited time should feel the need to pursue. My approach to blind play-testing is one based on lean business process design: figure out exactly what I need and how to get it efficiently.

To conclude, let’s flip these five reasons into a five-prong test you can use to tell if you’ve done enough blind play-testing.

Your Game Has Been Blind Play-Tested Enough If…

1. Your game is intuitive.
2. Your game has clear rules.
3. Your game has no major accessibility issues.
4. People like your game or you have consistent and easy-to-implement feedback that would resolve outstanding issues.
5. You have played with enough people to spread the word OR you have a good marketing plan.

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• With the physical prototype in my home right now, play-testing is going much, much, much faster.
• I’m still aiming for 100 play-tests.

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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In the frozen Canadian arctic of the Northwest Territories and Nunavut, there is a famous road known as the Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road. It’s a long haul road for ice truckers that’s over 300 miles long and most of it is built on frozen lakes. Sometimes it’s hard to know which direction to go in, but by far, the hardest part is that there is a limit to how fast you can go – 16 miles per hour. When I heard about this, I said to myself sardonically “sounds like game development.”

Testing, manufacturing, shipping, and building an audience all take a lot of time and there is no way to really shortcut this. Whether you work 20 hours per week or 60 hours per week, you cannot meaningfully reduce the amount of time it takes to do certain tasks. Manufacturing and shipping can’t be changed at all by extra work. Testing can be expedited, but only as fast as you can afford to bring in fresh testers or make changes to the game. With building an audience, sooner or later, you will run into some kind of constraint…

You can spend money on ads, but only until you run out of money. You can talk to more people, but only until you run out of either people to talk to, energy to talk to people, or – in the case of things like Twitter or Instagram – you hit an API limit set by a web developer. You can bring up your game multiple times, but only until people get sick of hearing about it. You can keep talking, but only as long as you have things worth saying.

Game development…no, creativity itself, requires a mix of commitment and downtime. In fact, I’d hoped to speak about this on a post about mental health with a real licensed psychiatrist on this very blog. That post fell through after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico and left my contact without power for months. (He’s physically okay but was unable to respond to questions.)

You can’t speed run this. A single project, even with a large team of creators and administrators will still need to go through several stages, listed below. Let’s imagine you have infinite staff and money at your disposal. Where will you hit a bottleneck?

• Early Game Design: If you’ve got tons of game designers and you work in shifts where 2-3 designers are working on a game 24/7, this will take several days. You can’t have much more than 6-9 people working on game design or else communication will get really weird, really fast.
• Artwork: Let’s say you create great art specs and break discrete parts of the game up between artists. This will still take a few weeks because each artist will have a contract, some will flake on you, and some will not meet the spec.
• Game Tweaks: Let’s say you have an infinite supply of fresh play-testers. Yet every time you make a new tweak, you’ll have to iterate the game. Even with 24/7 shift work, it will take several days to get this right.
• Sample Production: You’re going to have to have another place print your game. If you know exactly what you’re doing when you make the order and you have it rush shipped, this is a two week process.
• Reviews: Once your game is ready for review, go ahead and wait six weeks for reviewers to get back to you. They’re busy and do their work with full-time jobs and kids most of the time. You can’t rush them because you need their trust to continue on.
• Kickstarter: Okay, you don’t technically need Kickstarter, but a lot of people like using it to estimate demand and have some degree of certainty in success. Take two weeks for a short campaign.
• Manufacturing: Let’s say you start the print run as soon as the Kickstarter ends and front the cash even while waiting on the Kickstarter check to clear two weeks after the campaign. It will take six weeks to print and two weeks to air ship it. (Most people can’t afford to air ship, and sea shipping takes up to three months).
• Fulfillment: Let’s say you rush ship all your rewards from the warehouse – that’s a two week process.

Without factoring in sales and marketing, it is not even theoretically possible to create a board game and fulfill it in less than six months of time. This is assuming you have tons of staff and tons of money, which very few of us do.

What I’m driving at is simple: if you work alone or in a small team, be patient, pace yourself, and have fun. You can’t sprint a marathon. You’re not missing out on anything by not working yourself to exhaustion. There are structural limits to how fast you can move.

If you get bored along the way or feel like you’re not making enough money, here are some suggestions:

1. Stagger your game projects so that you’re working on more than one at a time.
2. Launch another project or start a different business entirely.
3. Help other creators make something they’re proud of.
4. Spend time with your friends and family.
5. Take a vacation.
6. Binge watch YouTube. Yes, seriously.

I don’t even think business geniuses like Bill Gates or Warren Buffet could build up massive empires from nothingness in a year or two. They could do it again and probably do it in less time than it took the first time, but if they were truly left with nothing but their knowledge – no contacts, no cash – it would take a while to build back up to where they are now.

Let’s put the myth of the obsessed genius creator in the ground. The most effective creator is the passionate one who puts in consistent effort regularly BUT who does not burn out or isolate themselves in the process. The effective creator takes in the world around them, reaches out to others, and generally lives a life outside of their work.

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Most Important Highways & Byways Updates

• I’m chugging along on the final 100 tests. I’m feeling good about Highways & Byways. I’m on track for the late March Kickstarter I’ve been aiming for.
• It looks like I’ll be getting the prototype game in the mail today!