Hitting the Books: The Current State of Killshot

Confession time. I haven't paid any significant attention to Broken Ruler Games over the past few months. Pretty much the entire past year. With a lot going over during 2014, all of this was put aside and left to run on its own accord. If you've tried to get onto the BRG site, you may have noticed the domain doesn't work any more. That's actually due to extremely annoying communication problems with the host and Google (with whom I purchased the domain name, brokenrulergames.com) and now the site is out of reach. Yeah, I've been a bad owner.

With a renewed fire under my belt (thanks to a certain vacation providing some time to think), I finally had a chance to go back over all the sales, checklists, emails, and everything. And in the interest of full disclosure, I'm happy to say that Killshot has made a profit. The below chart shows the entire line's total sales and earnings as of October 1, 2014.

After the additional costs of doing business (domain name, POD test copies, marketing, stock art, assorted business expenses) running at $506.21, what's left is $285.48. 

Killshot was an experiment in every way. I toyed around with stuff, tried out a few different settings, gave away a shitload of copies (61% of all sales were freely handed out by yours truly), and stumbled with Pay What You Want options (more on that in a bit). Not the least of which was to spend more than the money raised on the Kickstarter (unaccounted taxes and shipping being the usual culprits). Seeing these results makes it very worthwhile.

Though not profitable. 

The idea machine is clicking away on something and it's all thanks to my recent trip out to Prince Edward Island. Meeting with a couple of store owners about the possibility of carrying Killshot in their stores has lit a fire under my butt, yet it'll all be for not unless I get all the records caught up and stable so I can start moving forward on towards Phase 2. 

THE PWYW LEARNING CURVE

Over the past three months, there have been a total of 81 downloads for Killshot products. For a grand total of $0. Between free and Pay What You Want titles, not a single person put down a single cent. While very helpful for getting this game into as many hands as possible (particularly hands that are likely to actually read it, unlike those who receive them as part of a prize bundle), it does make things difficult when you are a small indie game. There's no reason for anyone to trust your enough to pay for it. The PWYW Learning Curve solidifies the greatest lesson I've learned throughout this entire endeavour: it's all about the connections. Whether its a pre-existing connection with your customers familiar with your previous work and ready to trust you once again with your next project or by meeting fellow designers, editors, and artists at trade shows, having connections goes a long way on the Internet. 

Do I recommend it for indie publishers looking to get their game out there? Yes, for sure. But do not depend your entire line on it. Tease, do not give away. Give them a reason to trust you, but don't allow yourself to be taken advantage of. 

With these updated numbers in tow, I'll be able to start looking at a few things. Time to perform the autopsy and see how it all went down so that we can learn and adapt. 

Unexpected Delays

I am the Warden!!

It's just past 6AM on a Monday morning as I start to write today's post and there are two things I'm waiting for: a review of Killshot and an email from Lightning Source accepting my POD files. Both have taken longer than expected, yet not unexpectedly longer than expected, if that makes any sense. In other words, while I was hoping both issues would be resolved and happily promoted by now, it's inevitable for either matter to be more complicated and/or slower than desired.

There's nothing to do about the reviews, such matters are out of my hands. The fact that there are three websites willing to perform a review (including Game Knight Reviews) is very good news considering Killshot's another game in a crowded field from independent publishers like me. Combined with the issues I've been having with the POD (print on demand) files makes it a little more stressful.

My original plan was for all the POD copies for the Kickstarter backers to be in production at this point with an expected delivery time of August's last week. It's now looking like September. It's my first time using a POD printer - being Lightning Source through OneBookShelf, owner of DriveThruRPG - and there's a unique twist to dealing with these kinds of printers: they're all computerized. In my past life (or one of them, at least), I was a printer/press operator. Whenever we received files, we'd run a preflight check on them, perform some checks to ensure what's missing, wrong, or perfect about the file(s) and fix whatever needed to be fixed right away. In many cases, what a computer would consider imperfect, we could manually override as a minor or insignificant glitch. For example, if an image in the interior pages came in at 293 dpi instead of the standardized 300 dpi, that's not a big deal. Skip. Computers don't see if that way.

It's also come to light I'm very inexperienced at creating layout files and I'd like to take this opportunity to apologize to every graphic designer out there I cussed out during my press operator days. Perhaps it's not as easy as I insinuated and now I'm learning my lesson the hard way. Not that my files don't work, but it's another matter entirely to get minor details in order (which is complicated by my technology issues address in the last post). As of last week, I've had three POD files rejected and am waiting to hear back on the fourth.

The process has been incredibly eye-opening, just like everything else in this process of building and publishing Killshot. A very welcome process, I might add. While I've dabbled in every step before, it's never been to this level and I'm planning to take it even further. It's like the old saying goes: We learn better from our mistakes. I'd be a fool if I thought these were the only mistakes/problems/hiccups I'll ever encounter and that does not make me a screw-up. It makes me human. 

Killshot & The End of the Beginning

I am the Warden!!

It is with great pleasure I can finally announce we have a Killshot. The Director's Cut is now available on all OneBookShelf sites for $8 (American). For more information, check out the Broken Ruler Games site for links on where you can get yours plus some free goodies to make the decision a lot easier.

Twenty months. That's the amount of time I spent working on this project. While it's not the longest amount of time I've spent on a project, it is by far the largest and most dedicated I've ever been on anything ever in my life. I don't think there's much more to say which hasn't been said over countless posts before and the time has come to let the book do the talking.

The conclusion of it all comes at a strange time. While my make-believe life is starting to pick up and things are moving along ahead of schedule, my real life is starting to close in around me as the 2-year mark of the accident arrives and it's time to start going through the assessments to see what the long term effects are before someone else sitting behind a desk decides what to do with me. Despite whatever you hear or read over the coming months, my commitment is to make my work in game design, Broken Ruler Games, Killshot, the Optional System, and all that my future. Because it's my choice.

And that's something no one can take away from me.

I hope you enjoy and thanks for taking the ride with me thus far. Now let's gas the car up and hit the road, we've got more highway to travel!!

Website or Blog?

I am the Warden!!

After a long weekend plus an extra day away from work to handle the pain of a long weekend trying to do stuff you're not supposed to do, I'm back at getting ready for Killshot's release in August. After making some updates to the Broken Ruler's blog and the Killshot page in particular, I'm looking at purchasing a domain name for Broken Ruler Games to step things up a notch.

I'm left wondering which direction I should take the Ruler. Using a simple blog has been effective and saved me time and energy keeping an online profile and there's no reason to ditch it for an actual website at the moment, yet there's nothing a blog can provide in the way of a website's flexibility. But it also comes down to cost. A lot of independent game publishers start off with blogs to keep their costs low - why spend money on a website unless you have the traffic to make it worth the effort? Right now, I'm literally on the fence for this one, so I'm turning to all of you for advice.

What do you think? Blog or website?

Kickstarting Broken Ruler

I am the Warden!!

Over the holidays, I made two big decisions about my work. One, that I needed to start taking it seriously ASAP so I wouldn't go mad from all this waiting for medical crap. And two, to put Killshot's money with my mouth is and put it up on Kickstarter to try and raise some awareness and extra cash to do it up right. Nothing crazy, I'm merely thinking in the $500 range and see what goes from there. Anything I get will go towards paying for original artwork; while I have more than enough stock art, being able to populate it with something new and original to suit the type would be supreme.

That means having a website to go to. I've only been playing with it a little bit tonight, but thought there was enough to post a link here. What the hell is a blog for if not bragging about everything you're working on? Click here to check out the Broken Ruler Games blog and feel free to become a fan or just bookmark it. I'll be making all my Killshot updates on there, many of which will have significant impact on how the Optional System sees the light of day in the future.