Two Years

I am the Warden!!

That's right, two years ago today saw my world turned upside down. Or at least rammed from the driver's side and shoved into a ditch. At 4:02 PM on Friday, September 17th, 2010, I was nearly killed.

Hence I look at the shape of things two years later and ask myself where things stand now compared to then. For the sake of today's solemn memorial, I'm concentrating solely on the accident and its effects.

Pain: That ever constant bitch gnawing on my right foot continues to this day, so much that I'm off to a pain clinic this afternoon for treatment. And what is that treatment? Pills and a recommendation of various exercises.

Mobility: I get around well enough, though with a moderate limp toned down by orthotics. The dogs still get their frequent walks and I still go up to an hour at a time, but it requires pushing and aggressive force ("I will walk to that park tonight!") to make it happen. Paved walkways only, never hiking and I do miss my hikes.

Phase 2: Planning for Reloaded

I am the Warden!!

The Killshot core release is complete. By that, I mean there's no more game design, editing, or layout remaining. All that's left is press production, sales, and the ongoing marketing that remains eternal for all core rulebooks. It's time to start a new project and, in typical fashion, I'm looking at more than one.

Those of you familiar with this blog, BRG, and Killshot in general know the next supplement will be Killshot: Reloaded (and the ongoing Killshot Files, of course). Four alternate themes/setting applying the Killshot RPG: Hong Kong gun-fu, Wild West bounty hunters, CIA operatives, and ninjas. It's a project conceived during Killshot's early days (there's even mention of it in the original Kickstarter project) and has been on the back burner for months waiting for the opportunity to start investing time and energy. Before I can type the first word, I need to know what I want from this book and how to make it all happen through Kickstarter.

What I Learned And Should Have Remembered About Kickstarter, Part 2

I am the Warden!!

With the demo copy arrived and a list of minor corrections/revisions noted and costs for production written in stone, I was finally able to make a complete tally of all costs involved for the production of Killshot's initial release. Remember when I talked about lessons learned from my Kickstarter experience? Now it all comes into play.

As promised, all relevant costs involved in this Kickstarter project will be posted and I'm hoping to provide a bit more information to match. Not just for the sake of updating my backers, but to pay it forward in a way. Learning as much as you can from as many people as you can before setting out on a first project is huge and my intention is to share my experience with others looking to do the same. It's also by sheer coincidence that I was invited to an impromptu podcast interview specifically to talk about this topic and the timing to post these numbers is too perfect to pass up.

Here we go.

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. 

Out of Date = Out of Touch

I am the Warden!!

Let me start today's post by saying how much I love my office. While we've been in our current house two years now, the office is finally in awesome shape and provides me with a creative space to work. My entire RPG collection is arranged alphabetically to my right, there are dragon figures on all sides, printouts from assorted projects - new and old - on the wall in front of me, and a glass tray balanced on a pewter skull holding a pile of dice, including Big Red. Sometimes I like to sit at my desk, a large corner unit, and admire the space.

There is one flaw in all of it and it's rather ironic: my laptop. I have a 6-year old Macintosh iBook G4, one of the last models before they switched to Intel processors. She's served me well these many years, got me through school, and busted her ass keeping up during Killshot's various production phases. Her age is showing as she's been horribly overworked on a daily basis; the cooling fan's broken, I can't get more than 6Mb of memory available no matter how hard I try, and she freezes up at least once a week. I've known for a while now she needs to retire, it's just impossible with money being so extinct nowadays.

Despite all those technical issues, her current state is not what bothers me. It's the exclusion from nearly every computer-related activity. The processor's the biggest issue because with the new Intel chips came new coding and resulted in the old Macs like mine being incompatible with everything out there.

I'm not talking about programs, apps, and games (though it counts, but is understandable). It's even things online. Little things one would hope is universal. Google Hangout, for example, cannot run on my laptop. There goes my plan to attend CONCurrent and run Killshot as a replacement for Gen Con. Skype still works, so I'm not completely in the dark, but there are quite a few professional options eliminated just from my inability to access Google Hangout alone.

I have an iPhone supplied by my insurance company to help keep my scattered brain organized, but there's not much good hooking it up to my laptop unless I want to use it for charging. Because I can't upgrade my iTunes to a version that understands there a device called an iPhone, I can't perform some of the simple actions like swapping music, photos, and such. I've eventually been able to find third party apps to help with those issues and that's the point. I have to "cheat" in order to performs tasks the commercials proclaim as basic on their products.

This past week almost became the final straw when preparing to upload PDFs for Killshot's print copies, I noticed they required an export standard (PDFx:1/2001) only available on InDesign CS3 or later. I'm working with CS1 (and Illustrator 10). For a while, it seemed as if even PDFs were out of reach. PDFs!! That universal format of all universal formats. After some research, I found out one my CS1 export standards was equal to the requested one and had only been renamed a few years back, but it was a disturbing and frustrating moment to that point.

I hate new editions and the constant stream of updates, upgrades, and eventual exclusion in our technology-dependent era. Desktop publishing is horrible for that as Adobe alone seems to release a new CS every year. Add to that new hardware launches every year and everything gets drastically out of hand. I understand the intention of upgrades - it's technological evolution combined with a conspiracy theory of money grabbing by their owners - and I accept it in some cases. When it starts to get out of hand like it is now, I shake my head.

It's a losing argument, I know, and nearly pointless to make. Perhaps my frustration is more at my financial situation preventing me from doing anything about it mixed with the realization nothing can be done to fix the problem until next year, if everything works out for Plan G. Or maybe it's that all this upgrading crap is itself an upgrade of exclusion from when we were kids. If your parents didn't buy you the latest clothes, toys, or school accessories, you were excluded by the other kids. Now we've found a way to do it as adults.

Somewhere in the Toronto area is a woman named Wendy laughing cruelly for no reason and calling my family poor on a Google Hangout.

Independence

I am the Warden!!

The word "independence" has a lot of meaning right now. It's something I've been struggling to regain for the past couple of years and it's really been coming through in my work.

Since Killshot went live (just over 48 hours ago), I've sold 8 copies of The Director's Cut. For me, that's a stupendous increase from what I used to get publishing 3pp supplements for D&D - 1 per day. Tops.

It's not so much that I'm surprised by this upswing so much as relieved. During my research over the last year, I've noticed the shift in PDF sales from third-party material taking some of the top spots to more independent/original systems. I think the download market is best suited to independent systems and publishers. For me, these sales are proof.

The ironic effect to it all is that nagging feeling I've "wasted" so many years publishing material for other systems that have gone unappreciated. Perhaps the glass was half empty, yes, but my previous experience put the water in the glass. Without the experience of putting a PDF together, assembling Killshot would have been a nightmare and the end result would be far inferior to what's in place now. Not the least of which is the game's mechanics.

When I was putting the finishing touches on the assorted Killshot PDFs, I recognized how much influence D&D had on design and presentation. Casually flipping through, it looks very much like a traditional purchase option game where your character's abilities are measured only in your choices made during character creation. That's very D&D and I guess it's no surprise to see it there.

Yet as an independent game, I could break away from some of the taboos originally holding me back and create a game where character options are a strength, not a definition.

So we're all in agreement then? Without the previous work with Emerald Press, none of this would have come to pass. You just have to starve to appreciate a good meal.

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!!