It has been a couple of months since I last posted to this blog, so I figured it was time for an update. It looks like my first board game will be published around May 16th, 2013. he developer is trying to get hold of the CDC to learn if we can use their acronym in our game title. If we can, I am thinking of changing the name of the game to NY-CDC: INFECTION. The artwork is starting to come in and I am very please with the look of the cards: Back of the Event Cards
Front of an example Event Card
Back of a Lab Card
Front of an example Lab Equipment Card
Front of an example Lab Personnel Card (the barcode at the bottom will actually work!)
So next we are waiting on updated counters and the actually game board itself. I am really looking forward to seeing what they come up with, but am a very pleased with the artwork thus far! Oh, and the play testing went very well. We had about a dozen play testers and they all enjoyed the game. They gave me great feedback and we made many changes to game based upon their comments and suggestions. What else... The game will be in a box (w00t!) and sold in actual stores as well as being sold online, so that great. Anyhoo, that is all I have to report for now on the game publishing front. I am waiting to hear back from FallCon about the Canadian Game Design Awards about whether my game FACTIONS: CITY made into the semi-finals or not... :: keeps fingers crossed ::
So is anyone out there interested in play testing my solitaire game INFECTION? It has to be a "Print and Play" version since I don't have any plat test kits left to mail out. If you are interested you can send me an email at ThatCowboyGuy@gmail.com. Give me your name and email address and I will email you the PDFs you need to make your own copy of INFECTION to play test.
On Friday night I was
interviewed for the 1 Player Podcast by the host Albert Hernandez. When I had
posted my thread on BoardGameGeek asking for play testers for INFECTION, Albert
was one of the dozen so people who responded. Unfortunately Albert had other commitments
that wouldn’t give him a lot of time to play test, but he did ask me if I were
interested in being interviewed for his podcast—and I agreed.
We had a great conversation about my solitaire game and the design process. I hope you find it entertaining. Here is a link to his
website that hosts the podcast episodes:http://fractaloon.podbean.com/
So the OOO (Out of Office) Playtesting started on my solitaire boardgame INFECTION. VPG sent out 6 play test kits to players throughout the US and Canada, plus 1 fellow who got the Print-n-Play version.
The packages when out Tuesday and already I have started to get some feed back from players--the mail system is faster in the US then it is in Canada. 1 Player has played once and won the first game, and another has played 4 times and lost every time. Both players have said the have enjoyed the game so far, so that is good.
I have also learnt that the artist assigned to the game has worked in 3D modelling for props in video games, so it should be interesting to see how he does in the 2D world of board games.
So I betcha some of you are wondering what has been happening with my CDC solitaire game. Is it getting published? The answer to that--for the moment--is yes! I have been working fairly closely (or as close as you can get without actually speaking to anyone) with the VPG team to get my game published. There has been a lot of back-n-forth emails between myself and the developer and publisher going over the game design. There have been quite a few changes from the original design that I submitted to them over a year ago, but it is still quite recognizable as the same game.
At one point it was thought we could actually get it published before the end of the year, but they brought on an every experienced game developer--Petra Schlunk--to play test the game and that brought on some fairly major changes to the game play. I will get into those in later post.
But for now let me say that I am very excited about the process of getting my first boardgame published, and I look forward to posting about it in the future.
Sooo…its been a
log time since I have made a post in my blog. I have been focusing on the
designing of game rather than blogging about it. Last week Luis of GlobalQuestGameDOTcom
commented on my post regarding my solitaire boardgame “The CDC.” He thought it
sounded pretty good and he’d like to play it person. He also wanted to know
about my progress on it.
I replied that I
had not gotten a response from VPG after 6 months and that I was very
disappointed. But his comment spurned me on to give VPG on last try. I sent
them an email indicating that I had not gotten a response from them in 6 months
and if this was normal. Here is the
first response I got:
John,
We're really
sorry about that. The beginning of this year has been very busy for us since we
moved, and during that time we have gotten a laser cutting machine and some
other new machines here at VPG which Nathan has been busy learning as well as
teaching everyone in between sorting out our game release schedule and game
development.
I will be sure he
gets a chance to look at this as soon as possible. We really appreciate your patience.
-Noelle
This was soon
followed by a second response:
Hello John,
I'm really sorry
about the delay. I do remember your game, and I know its something we would
want to look into doing. I just got swept away with all my other tasks and your
game kind of blipped off my radar for a while. You have my attention now. I'll
create a test kit from your rules/files and get it on the table this Saturday.
After that I should be able to give you some good feedback and move the process
forward.
-Nathan
So then I got the
following email on Monday:
Hey John,
I had the chance
to sit down and play CDC this weekend. I did have some issues with the rules,
and I think that Dr. Eppel was a little overpowered, but overall this was a
very well put together game. I ended up playing it 3 times.
I'll probably
take this on myself for development.
As for Dr. Eppel,
I think double funding may be a bit much. How would you feel about a static
increase, like say +2 funding when destroying an antigen?
So I replied back
to Nathan:
Hi Nathan,
I’m glad that you
were willing to play it 3 times this weekend. Did you lose any of the 3 games
you played?
It’s been months
since I’ve played the solitaire version of this game so I will have to
reacquaint myself with it this week. I think a static increase such as the +2
of Dr Eppel sounds like a good change to keep the game challenging. Too much
funding can certainly make it easier to win.
I am very
flexible and willing to work with you on any rules/mechanics/cards changes. I
also have some changes I made to the multiplayer version that could be synced
back to the solo version to make it better.
Soooo…where do we
go from here?
Regards,
John Gibson
And here is
Nathan’s reply:
It was fun. The
first was played wrong, as I missed the part of the rules that said you could
only have one Dr. so... that game isn't a good judge of difficulty. It was very
easy I think I won by turn 6. The second game I lost. I think it was around
turn 7 or 8. I ran out of money. The third game Dr. Eppel came into play again.
This time the game was won by turn 8.
From here, I'll
make a pass at your rules. See if I can make it so we use less subcases, and generally
clean up the readability of them. We'll also need to get an artist to look at
this game at some point, but I tend to delay that as long as possible so we
don't "marry ourselves" to anything and fear changing it. Eventually
it will go to out of house testing. At that point we will likely make a few
tweaks, and clarifications, and fix anything that the testers destroy on
contact. Then proofing and release. But, first things first, I'll take a crack
at those rules and get them sent back to you for consideration.
Sounds kinda
promising, eh?
I am
trying--TRYING--not to get my hopes up in case this falls through, but this is
the closest I have gotten to a publisher taking an interest in one of my game
designs.
So a co-worker of mine posted a blog about a bet we made regarding who would make the most money with a side business. His name is Mike Eppel and here is the location:
A few months ago myself and a few other software developers at work decided we were going to make a bet. The bet was who would be able to start a side business and make the most money in one year. Fast forward about four months to today and we are well under way.
Mike
My idea was to build a software as a service app. In the spirit of so much good advice out there I found a personal problem and set out to solve it. I serve on my condo board where I live and one of the major problems we have is communication. Our property manager gets so many emails on a daily basis from all of his other condo boards he actually requests that we don’t cc him on the day to day conversations. I decided to build an online tool that provides central communication and cuts a ton of need for email. Instead of our property manager getting 50 emails a day he would hopefully get only a few. My product is called Committee Box.
John
One of my other co workers decided that instead of writing software for his business he was going to focus on building board games. So far he’s come up with some awesome prototypes and submitted a few to various game publishers. You can check out his awesome work over at That Cowboy Guy.
Derek
The last of my co workers is also working on a software project. He is building a goal tracking app that will launch with a self published book that his friend has written. I don’t have a link to his website (since I don’t think it’s in production yet) but will link to it once it’s live. See the dig there Derek? Hurry up!
The Money
Now that we are all well under way we need the focus to shift from getting started to getting started making money. After all the goal here is to make money with the side goal of making great stuff. I’m planning on blogging about our progress every few weeks from here on out.
