We’ve been hard at work prepping to kickstart Lovecraftesque. Exciting times!
Although we’ve both been gaming and designing for a long time we’ve never undertaken a project to make our games available to other people for cold hard cash. It has been an incredible experience and one we are still living moment by moment.
It even included an instructive interlude last week when this modest website got hacked.
We are about a week or so off our Kickstarter launch so now seems like a good time to do a quick update about where we are, some news about our layout artist and artist and some behind the scenes bits.
Firstly I want to share our cover art by Robin Scott which is gorgeous and better in every way than we could have imagined.
Robin is an amazingly talented person bringing an incredible level of detail to her pieces. That firelight on snow effect in the cover, want to know how that happens, how the shadows are just right…
Robin built a model!
Secondly I want to give a heartfelt thanks to our layout artist Nathan Paoletta. Not only has he done a great job on our sample pages but he has been exceptionally generous in sharing his knowledge about kickstarting generally and various printing options. We have learned a great deal just from him and I hope we get the chance to give back to newbie game designers in the same way. Here is a sneaky peak of his layout.
We are so excited that this is the level of detail and finesse going into the artwork for our game. Also you have no idea how grown up it feels to commission art… serious proper adulting happening over here.
Next is a couple of photos we took at our video shoot. We are lucky enough to have a great video guy for a friend who helped us sort it out. We cleared out our dining room for a morning to set everything up and had to hang a makeshift ‘autocue’ off the camera rig with a coat hanger.
Lastly, if you’ve ever met me in real life, no doubt you will watch the video surprised at how tall I’ve grown.
Such is the trickery of video…
Kickstarting has been a totally different experience to simply writing and playing games. There are finances to work out (so many hidden costs and risks to factor in – Kickstarter fees, shipping, Kickstarter processing fees, international shipping, EU VAT, US Sales Tax and even currency fluctuations). There is a video to shoot, art direction to provide, layout proofs to review, stretch goal writers to approach (we have a total dream team lined up, I can’t wait to tell you about it!) project plans to create and enact and then the thorny problem of how to get the word out there and hope that enough kind people have it in their hearts to back us!
It has dawned on me that running a Kickstarter (even an unsuccessful one) requires you to get familiar with a whole load of new skills which go well beyond writing, playing and running games. Obviously I really hope we fund, but even if we don’t I feel like our skills have taken this amazing leap forward. Either way my respect for people who do crowd funding projects is immense, these people aren’t just game designers, they are totally multi-talented, and in ways I probably have yet to discover.
We’ll be announcing the Kickstarter launch really soon so check back on the blog or follow us on G+ to find out when.