I’m still tinkering a little bit with the deck I’m calling the Tinker Deck, prepping the last few touches before I launch the Kickstarter. We’re going to go ahead and roll with the Bicycle brand, though I have my reservations. If it works, great, if it doesn’t, maybe I’ll try again with the lower price point.
In the meantime, though, I’m doing a video and lots of paperwork. If you’re a CPA or tax prep indie, good on ya. If you’re from the IRS, well… something different.
Anyway, just a little tease today. I understand that many poker players like to have two decks ready to go, instead of just one. I’ve made a pair of card backs to cater to this quirk, and if the Kickstarter gets traction, we’ll offer a second deck with that other back… and a new cast of face cards. Specifically, I want to open it up to put backers on the alternate cards, giving us a Tinker deck with the historical figures I’ve already done, and another deck (“The Society”? “The Club”? “Grounders”?) sporting the faces (and costumes, maybe) of backers who are so interested. I’m still sorting out the nuts and bolts of the whole setup, but it’s an idea I want to float, anyway.
Among other ideas, that is. We’ll see how the campaign goes. It might just be a fun little exercise in wheel gear spinning, but hey, learning opportunity.
I’m down to the biggest question for my steampunkish playing card Kickstarter: Price or Prestige?
The prereleaseversion of the deck is live, and ready to go. I’m really happy with how it turned out, and it’s really fun to see it come together and “go live” out there in the real world.
So… on to the last bits of planning for the Kickstarter. I’ve done an updated design that’s a bit more polished, with things like a perfectly rotationally symmetrical back and a simplified and more unified color scheme.
I tweaked the border a bit, too, adding some corner and side braces, since it was looking just a little boring in a spread. (If you guys want to opine on that, please do so; I’m not quite sold on the braces. More of them here.)
But that’s just tinkering with art. I can do that all day long. I’m an artist. The bigger question now is what price point to put on the deck when I offer it via Kickstarter. This is where I want to air my thinking and ask for your opinion. I’d love to hear from you all on this.
Simply, it’s a choice between printing with Bicycle, the “800 pound gorilla” of the industry, or printing with an unknown Chinese printer.
Printing with the former winds up with a price point of $10/deck (which includes U.S. shipping) for a top notch deck of cards. (I could also print with USPCC without the Bicycle label, but that doesn’t change the calculus much. It could save 30-60 cents per deck, which isn’t insignificant, but I’m not convinced that such a saving is enough to compensate for the lack of the brand name.) It’s simple, straightforward and carries the heft of prestige and known quality. It’s not a guarantee of Kickstarter success, but it’s a bit of a force multiplier, leveraging the brand.
Printing with the latter means a price point of $5/deck (also including U.S. shipping) for a deck of cards with unknown quality. That’s a sweet price point. It also means I can do a print run of plastic cards for the same $5/deck (which would be a stretch goal), and even a third run that allows 14 backers to guest star on the face cards. I could also look ahead and do custom dice in China and save on shipping, getting all of them together. (Those would wind up being an addon, $1 for 6 brown and silver custom pip dice.)
Beside those considerations, though, printing with Bicycle means a higher Kickstarter goal. That’s not an insignificant mental barrier. I’d have to start with a $9000 goal and hope for the Bicycle to carry the day. Printing with a Chinese company means I can start with a $3000 goal and scale up as needed and add in stretch goals of similar size if things go well. For the same $9000, we could be looking at three different decks (paper, plastic and “People of the 19th Century”) or some other mix of oddments like the dice or gear-themed poker chips.
I wish I could find hardcore reviews of those printing companies, but such have eluded me so far. I do lean to the Chinese printer because I think it’s more flexible and I’m far more price sensitive than I am prestige sensitive. I’m not sure how many potential customers are the opposite.
I also have this little rebellious marketer in me that wants to prove that Bicycle isn’t the One True Way. I aced the marketing class I took at BYU, making over $200 million in our simulated computer company. (I was one of the top 3 in the class of 100+ students; most made $20 million or less.) I found success by offering a wider range of products at the lowest prices, my lower profit margins more than offset by higher sales counts. It was a simple simulation, though, and I’m a gamer who loves math. It didn’t stand a chance.
Still, it’s all just guesswork at this point. I’ve done what research I can, and I do lean to the Chinese printers, considering the pros, cons and costs, but it’s not set in stone yet.
I’m just ruminating a bit, spurred by a pair of excellent game design posts I read last week.
First, there’s Syl’s post about Why Storytelling in MMOs is Overrated. I love her article, and I’ve wished for a long time now that MMO devs would ease off the reins and let players tell the story. (Tangentially, Brian “Psychochild” Green’s work on Storybricks looks like a good step in that direction.) The developer-driven narrative in these MMO things is a mismatch for the game design from the conception, and the devs seem to cling to their sense of authorship too much. I can understand that, as a creative sort. I’ve done a bit of Game Master work in tabletop RPGs in my day, though, and ultimately, the game always seems to run better when the players feel like they are in control. The GM has to keep everything together, but player agency is the heart of games. Even if it means they do things the GM doesn’t anticipate or even desire.
Second, there’s this gem from The Rampant Coyote, From Whom Much is Given, Much Is Demanded. The discussion there about graphics and how cutting edge technology tends to create absurd demands rings true to my experience both in games and when I got my college degree in computer animation.
That Uncanny Valley looms large. This is one of the huge dangers of chasing the tech edge. Yes, in theory, with enough money, processing power and artistry, it’s possible to make artificial life that can pass for the real thing. The cost is huge, though, and that Uncanny Valley is big.
Also, most importantly, it’s relatively easy these days to make artificial life look good in a still frame, but the real test is when it moves. Motion is ridiculously hard to make, and exceptionally easy to break. We have an instinctive understanding of how living things are supposed to move and behave, from physics to biology to exceedingly subtle emotional cues. (See: Lie To Me, Sherlock Holmes, psychopaths, etc.)
This, perhaps more than anything, is what I really dug into when I was in college. It’s at the heart of the Disney films I always wanted to make, The Illusion of Life that really makes animation work. (By the way, I highly recommend that book if you have any interest in animation, along with a more recent tome, The Animator’s Survival Kit. If you can only digest those two books, you’ll be a long way to understanding the core of animation.) Ultimately, it’s possible for a skilled animator to make a broom or sack of flour (or even a paper airplane) seem more alive than the latest Final Fantasy CGI characters. Or, as I noted over at Syl’s place, animators try to be conscious of the silhouette, making sure it’s readable at all times. You can get a lot of mileage out of just the silhouette, as the XBox LIVE Game LIMBOshows:
So, for a relatively simple-looking bit of animation, there’s a lot of tech under the hood. Some of it is obviously CG, at least to me, having spent as much time as I have watching and producing art and animation, both traditional and computer-assisted. Still, there’s a lot of work going into this… and it’s all to make a stylized bit of art. As with the style of The Incredibles, stylization goes a long way to making something play well. It short-circuits our instinctive evaluation systems, and the errors in animation that pop up are kind of fudged away, filed in mental gaps that we don’t wind up caring about, largely because we have already internalized that these characters are not real, and we don’t expect them to be.
This is how we perceive motion in film and animation in the first place, per the Persistence of Vision theory. The 24 or 30 frames per second that flicker by don’t cover the infinitely reducible time frames that reality can be split into, but they happen fast enough that our brain accepts them as continuous enough to be believable. In fact, sometimes less information works better, as evidenced by some of the kerfluffle around the new-fangled 48FPS The Hobbit movie. All we really need to know is enough to fool our brain into accepting something as real or believable, and then let our imagination and subconscious do the rest of the work. Perhaps we could call it a “Persistence of Cognition” theory when it comes to storytelling and lore; the reader/viewer invests headspace in imagining the fictional world and how it works, or how they could work within it. It’s all about leveraging the strengths of the end viewer/reader/player, making them a partner in the experience.
This is why a lot of the high end stuff fails. It tries to do too much. Our brain takes it at its word, holds it to a higher standard, and finds it lacking.
Most of the time, especially with art, story and anything that really hinges on the viewer getting emotionally involved and engaging the imagination, less, to a certain degree, actually is more, simply because you’re letting the viewer breathe and take a bit of ownership, which tends to be a multiplying factor in the efficacy of a presentation. It’s part of that “willing suspension of disbelief” that’s so important to get people to buy into what you’re doing. There really are reasons not to go into obsessive hyperdetail, not only because it’s a time and money sink, but because it’s also less effective.
Artists tend to understand this instinctively after some practice, since it’s entirely possible to put too much into a piece of art and thereby ruin it. Hinting at detail is often far more effective than rendering it. Even Daniel Dociu’s incredible art, which tends to look really complex, is largely suggestive, relying on the viewer to infer a ton of detail that really isn’t there. Just look at the actual brushstrokes in one of his pieces and compare it to what you thought was there at a glance. Dociu is a master at implying complexity. He’s making your brain do the heavy lifting.
Similarly, as any avid reader can tell you, “head canon” and “mental visualization” of words on the page can never compare to a moviemaker’s craft. They simply function differently. That’s a good thing, and creative types really need to leverage the supercomputers in viewers’ brains to do a lot of the creative work for them. It takes trust, and knowing just what to imply and what to make explicit… but there’s a lot of strength in letting the viewer in on the process, even if it’s only on a subconscious level.
They will fill the gaps, if you can learn what to leave up to them.
OK, I’m committed to doing a Kickstarter for my steampunk/gearpunk poker deck now. Many thanks to those of you who weighed in on it last time!
So… now what? Lots of things, it seems, most of which I’m already busy digging into. Mostly, plenty of research on what it takes to make this happen, mad schemes to make it cool and appealing, and finding ways to spread the word far and wide. Thanks to those of you who have chimed in and spread the word a bit already!
A few questions, then:
Scrusi suggested plastic cards instead of paper cards. The one plastic card manufacturer that has returned my email has a minimum order of 1500 decks (750 sets of two), at $8/deck. That adds up fast, to big, scary numbers for a freshman Kickstarter. I’ll be looking around for more numbers, but that’s a starting point at least. Paper decks will be cheaper, I assume, but they need to be a fair bit cheaper than the price I’d get at a Print on Demand place like TheGameCrafter.com (about $10/deck) or else there’s not a hugely compelling reason to try to leverage the economy of scale and bulk discounts. Sure, a Kickstarter will probably bring more potential customers just via publicity, but I’d really like to get a better deal for everyone as part of the bargain.
So… I’m still looking at pricing. I’d really love to hear what you all think, specifically about what vendors might be optimal in the ol’ cost/quality spectrum. Paper or plastic? (I know, plastic cards will be more durable, but are they worth triple the cost or more? How many players care enough about quality to pay that much more?) What about brands? Bicycle has a well-oiled pipeline for Kickstarted decks, and the ability to license their brand name (extra cost, maybe extra perceived value), and a 56-card standard deck that would allow for two cards to be super special Kickstarter rewards. They also offer custom tuck boxes, which seem like a Good Idea. That’s certainly not the only route, though, but there are a lot of vendors out there.
…and then there’s the art questions. I’ve done 12 of the 14 portraits for the face cards, and they lend the suits themes, as well as highlighting important 19th century people. I like the group I have… but it would be nice to open up the roster and let backers who want to be more involved get their portraits included. I didn’t start this with Kickstarter in mind, so I didn’t leave room. One thing I’ve considered strongly is to make the baseline historical figure deck available as a Print on Demand product, and point it out in the Kickstarter, but then open up all of the roster for people to buy into as a special limited edition of the deck. What think you?
Secondly, and this is perhaps more esoteric… just as an artifact of my design, I’ve altered the layout of the suit pips on the number cards. This is one example.
I chose to do this because of graphic design considerations (the large corner braces), and the desire to make the layout rotationally symmetrical on all cards. (Pip orientation aside, of course.) I like how it turned out, but it’s not traditional. Does that matter to you? Again, maybe this is where I offer the original elsewhere, and make the Limited Edition (gee, that term is starting to look official and all special-like) use the traditional form.
Offering the original as a paper Print on Demand deck opens up the option to make the Kickstarter a plastic deck project, too… but again, do enough players want plastic cards to make it worthwhile? Maybe this means two Kickstarters in the end, the first one in paper, the second one in plastic? I’m really not sure on these things since they are largely based on predicting what people might want. That’s why I’m asking now for as much feedback as I can get. Will you please help me spread the word and get some opinions collected?
I do have some other stuff planned, some spiffy extras to sweeten the Limited Edition, one of which I’ll tease a bit here: I work in 3D modeling programs most of my work day, so I’m adept at 3D work. I spent some time at home the last two evenings and whipped this up, and put it in my Shapeways shop. (The home of theGearpunkdice, which dye and paint up pretty well.)
It’s derived from the Spade suit pip. It’s as big as it is (almost 4×3 inches) to make the gears functional. I can make a smaller version, certainly, but the gears would fuse. It’s a costly beast, even in plastic. I’m going to try to hollow it out a bit to save on cost, but it’ll still be biggish to make those gears work. I’m not sure the gears would ever work if it’s printed in metal, though, so maybe smaller is the way to go anyway to give plastic vs. metal options. I like that large version, but it’s a bit unwieldy and, well, expensive.
Anyway, thanks for stopping by and reading, and I’d love to hear what you all think!
My Steampunk/Gearpunk playing card deck proceeds apace. I have only the Jokers to finish, and then a pass through everything to make sure it all works together visually.
A question, though, if anyone cares to opine:
Is this something you’d like to see on Kickstarter as a project done via Bicycle, to get some top notch cards at a decent price, since we’d be leveraging the “economy of scale” with a group order, or just offer them via TheGameCrafter.com, where it’s purely “print on demand”, no minimum order, but for cards of a slightly lesser caliber (TGC still does good work, it’s just not Bicycle Cards) at a slightly higher price.
I didn’t start this with Kickstarter in mind, but I’ve been poking around in the meantime, and it might be a viable option. Any thoughts? I’ll make them available for sale either way, and maybe both ways in the end, but if I’m going to do a Kickstarter, I’d lead with it. It would just be a way to try to get a better deal and a bit more exposure.
In the meantime, here’s a sneak peek at the King of Diamonds (Jules Verne) and the Jack of Spades (Henri Giffard). Thanks for stopping by!
Just a quick update on a project I’m working on and a cool set of art I stumbled across, both with steampunk echoes. First, the work by someone else, a sort of Steampunk-flavored Final Fantasy-inspired set of fantasy weapons:
And then there’s this little project of mine. It’s more “gearpunk” than “steampunk”, I guess, sort of like my gearpunk dice or my snowflakes, but it’s fun to create anyway.
Once I get this standard card set done, I’ll offer it for sale via TheGameCrafter.com, so I’ll post about it again later. In the meantime, any recommendations for the Kings, Queens and Jacks? I have some ideas like Ada Lovelace for the Queen of Hearts and Tesla/Edison as dueling Jacks or Kings, but I’d love to hear what others think.
Yesterday I was experimenting in the kitchen again, starting with a simple request for white fudge. I made one batch, then decided I had enough materials for another one. I figured I’d try a variant, a French vanilla fudge.
What happened was a glorious failure. I wound up with something more like French Toast fudge than French vanilla. It’s my favorite non-chocolate fudge… so far. I’ll do more experiments later, though, no rest for the mad scientists around here.
The recipe, for anyone interested:
1 egg
1 tbsp vanilla
2 tsp cinnamon
1/8 tsp butterscotch flavoring
1/8 tsp toffee flavoring
1 1/2 sticks butter
6 oz. Evaporated milk
2 cups white sugar
1 cup brown sugar
4 large marshmallows
1 jar (7 oz.) of marshmallow cream
12 oz. of white chocolate (chips, chunks, whatever)
*****
Beat egg, vanilla, cinnamon, butterscotch flavoring and toffee flavoring until well mixed. Set aside.
Mix butter, evaporated milk, and the sugars, bring to boil over medium heat, stir frequently.
Stir in egg/spice/flavor mix, boil for 5 minutes, stir constantly. (Keep that egg from clumping and keep everything from burning.)
Add marshmallows, marshmallow cream, stir to smooth a bit, then add white chocolate. Stir until smooth, pour into 9x13ish pan, let cool.
(…next time, I’m going to add some syrup in the marshmallow phase. Just to see how that turns out.)
There’s room to fudge the measurements, a little more sugar, a little less marshmallow, less butter, whatever, and the butterscotch and toffee are really just a garnish. They could be emphasized or ignored, depending on your tastes. The key is making sure the egg mixes in nicely and doesn’t clump up.
…
So… what? What does it matter that I made some weird fudge?
Well, I’m a creative type. I like to make new things. That’s why I make my own games, like Zomblobs! and Alpha Hex. This weekend I was brainstorming a game for hexagonal or circular cards, because I played Spot It! with my kids, which sparked some ideas. I wanted to see what I could come up with. I also found that TheGameCrafter.com and ArtsCow.com make such cards as print-on-demand projects, so I want to leverage that to maybe make a game I can sell. I love to make game systems and art and photographs, and then throw them to the wild and see what happens. The act of creation is fulfilling on its own, but seeing others have fun with them, and maybe making some money as well, that’s icing on the cake. (This is also why I have a Zazzle storefront and a Shapeways shop. They won’t replace my day job, but I like to offer some of the oddball things that I’ve concocted over the years.)
This is also relevant when taking look at “artsy” games, like the PS3 gem Journey. Y’see, it effectively bankrupted the company that made it, thatgamecompany. It’s an “experience” game, all about the journey, if you can imagine. It’s short, beautiful and atypical. It won a handful of awards at DICE, well deserved. Austin Wintory, the composer, won an award for the soundtrack, and it was the first game soundtrack that earned a Grammy nomination. That’s srsbzns, or whatever the kids call it these days. Journey is kind of a big deal, artistically.
Commercially, however, it wasn’t all that and a bag of chips. It eventually paid for itself “and then some”, but we’re not talking blockbuster Halo, Call of War numbers. There’s a bigger discussion there about commercial viability, gamer tendencies and the intersection between art and commerce, and maybe I’ll dig into that more at some point (there are plenty of articles out there on it already), but at the moment, I just wanted to underscore the creative impulse.
Sometimes, creators just want to create. Sometimes we want to share. Wholecommunitiesarebuiltonthatphilosophy. I think it’s a healthy part of this human condition, and that’s why I keep coming back to this blog and what I do in my “off hours”. I do make games for a living. I also make them on my own because it’s great fun to do so. I write about them and share them because, well… sharing somehow makes it more real, that I’ve contributed something to the world. I kinda like this place, and I want to do my part to make it a little nicer.
CafePress carries one of my shirt designs, but I’ve decided I’m not a huge fan of their limitations on free shops, so most of my products will be offered via Zazzle for the forseeable future.
I also do the occasional commission, but to date, that’s mostly been for in-game currency over on the Puzzle Pirates forums, where I’m known as Silveransom, from whence several of the bits of art in my Mini Portfolio hail, and where one of my art tutorials resides. I’d love to open the floodgates to do commissions for cash, but since I can’t promise a quick turnaround, I’ll just say that I’m very open to requests, I’m just going to be somewhat less than a full-time production house. Somewhat less than part-time, really, but you might be surprised what is possible to do in the wee hours around midnight when the kids go to bed.
…
Y’see, things are unnaturally busy here at the Tesh household. We’re finishing the basement, so my “vacation” from work this holiday season isn’t exactly filled with carefree whimsy and mad dashes to fulfill art requests. Still, I’m working in a bit, here and there.
So yes, Happy Holidays! Merry Christmas, or whatever it is you do this time of year!
…are the Steam sales up yet? That’s kind of an event, right?
I have been acquiring music at a faster rate lately. I’ve collected game soundtracks for almost two decades now (the power trinity of Nobuo Uematsu, Yasunori Mitsuda and Yoko Shimomura are still the backbone of that collection, some of which is noted in my last music article thisaway), but it has sort of been a trickle. Part of that is the expense of getting CDs often only released in Japan. Part of it is just that I have other things to spend money on.
So what changed? The Humble Bundle guys started including soundtracks with the games they sell. The Indie Royale people followed suit. GoG.com always offered soundtracks when possible, but I’ve been getting more of their games lately, too. OCRemix.org has always been great at cranking out good music (free!), but I’ve been perusing their projects more lately, and they recently stepped up with a big Final Fantasy VI orchestral project.
Edited to add: I also just stumbled across this little gem of a site… I’ll be keeping an eye on their bundles. GameMusicBundle.com
Anyway, I just wanted to share a few of my more recent favorites, and a few oddball pieces that just seemed worth sharing for one reason or another.
Thoroughly Blue, Crystal Chronicles… I love the light, almost Celtic feel to a lot of the music for Crystal Chronicles, and this one covers a lot of the themes in the game.
Captain Jean-Luc Picard’s “Inner Light” Ressikan Flute music, performed by a full orchestra. I love that episode. I’m not the only one. (And is that a Starfleet uniform on the conductor? Awesome. Nerdy, I’ll grant, but I love that nerdiness isn’t a kiss of death any more.)
Secret of Mana has some great tracks, and this is but one collection/overview. I really would like to find that soundtrack on CD someday. For less than $30. Pesky imports.
Tangled soundtrack’s town music… sorry, I’m not sure on the title for this. It’s just one of my favorite parts of a movie I’m very fond of. I wish this piece had been longer.
Magic Taboria, Van Canto… this one is really odd. It’s an a capellametal rock group, weird enough to start with, but they also appear to be… nerds. They based this song on the MMO Runes of Magic. There’s just enough absurdity involved that it makes me smile, even though metal rock is far from my favorite. Really far.
The Bard’s Song, Van Canto… this was my first exposure to Van Canto. A coworker submitted this to our weekly “Bad Music Tuesday” event, and, well, I kinda like it. It doesn’t scream “metal” to me, it’s more of the sort of thing I’d expect from a modern “Gregorian Chant”-ish group, infused with gaming and storytelling sentiment. Weird, I know.
The Final Fantasy Piano collections all sound great to me. I’m a fan of pure, simple music (like the FFX piano version of To Zanarkand), and I grew up around pianos. My mother teaches piano, my wife plays sometimes, my sister plays as well, and my daughter is learning. This is one of my other favorite piano pieces, Eyes on Me from Final Fantasy VIII
I like all of it, but Bound in Stone (track 12) is especially fun. Oddly, perhaps, it reminds me of some of the fun music in the recent Sherlock Holmes movies, but with a more epic feel.
NinjaBee’s game A World of Keflings (a game I worked on quite a bit) is on sale this week over at XBox.com, and just in time for our latest DLC to hit the shop. OK, technically it’s a little early, but it’s on sale this week, and the Sugar, Spice and Not So Nice DLC releases tomorrow.
As teased in that trailer for the DLC, we’re also releasing a second DLC, Curse of the Zombiesaurus, giving us a nice double serving of October-flavored gaming goodies. I worked a LOT on both of these DLC releases, and it’s been fun to see them come together.
Curse of the Zombiesaurus!
I’ll be writing about the art and design of these things when I can get something put together. If nothing else, I want to put together an article in praise of noobs. …yes, it’s relevant. Mostly.
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