Setting up Pricing
The hardest part of the whole kickstarter process has been finding what I need to charge for the kickstarter. I have gotten many prices from quotes and I’m still looking at more. Then I have contacted some fulfillment companies to look at freight costs. Then comes the prices for the stretch goals and the shipping for them to get the full structure down.
Next is looking at taxes and from what I have learned is that if I would make an LLC and never draw money to myself for the profits they won’t tax to me. Money the LLC makes I can use just to fund future projects and never draw money from it. I’m not in this to make money I just want to make the games I’ve created to become a reality that anyone can get.
Otherwise 3.5% goes to Sales Tax on every sale in your state. A 11.2% Personal Income Tax would be applied to all the funds you got, and a further 15.3% self-employment tax is applied to all the funds. So if you don’t make an LLC or Corporation you have an additional 26.5% taxes from that money. If you pull money out as profit from an LLC you will apply all the taxes to that money you pull out.
As it stands now I need to dig through the shipping companies still but Game Land Manufacturing is the best price to quality I have seen and they have a benefit that I can do a 500 print run rather than a minimum of 2,000 print run minimum. This allows me to set a smaller kickstarter goal and will help me in getting more stretch goals set up along the way to make the game even greater.
So shipping looks to be around $3,000 for the freight then I’m not worrying about the customer shipping since customers will pay that part of it. Then for the game it will be around $17,000. So I’m planning on setting my goal around 19,400 eating a little of the shipping cost myself unless I more than 340 backers. If I price the game at early bird $50 and then $60 kickstarter price with a $80 MSRP I will break even at 341 backers due to some of the costs lowering slightly for the shipping the remainder of the 500 games to me. The more backers we get over that will help structure the other parts.
Again this is using Game Land and shipping cost from Funagain. These numbers can change and most likely will depending on quotes I get in.
The Wait for Kickstarter
Maybe it is the whole COVID-19 thing or maybe it is just how the industry moves, but every step of the way is waiting right now to get my game onto kickstarter. I’ve had a few back and forth’s with Panda Manufacturing and I’m awaiting a new quote now. We are trying to get the price down from the initial price that was quoted. The first price had a better card stock and the punch boards weren’t as tetrised as they are now. However, that would of been an MSRP of $100 where I could put it on Kickstarter for $90 a copy. I would really like to reduce that down. I know it’s a big game but prices like that people are expecting a box of miniatures where this is just a crap load of cards, and tiles.
Depending on the price I may even have to pull a faction out of the base game to pull the price down then just add it back in a stretch goal when we reach that point. So if the game doesn’t get there that faction just won’t be there until a reprint is needed.
The base game is 5 factions right now and the game does only play 1-4. Why 5? I didn’t want every 4 player game to just be the same bugs over and over. In my home we have 21 different factions we play with and change who we play often. It would cost way too much to release all 21 factions right now and not all of them are finished. Currently there are only 12 factions that are fully done and balanced. The other 9 are still being tweaked.
The main game I went with
Ants - the faction that is strong at first and slowly gets out classed by other factions. (Difficulty to play: 1)
Arthropods - a very mobile faction with shields and sharp turning. (Difficulty to play: 2)
Beetles - an all around faction that has a more middling ground with a little of everything. (Difficulty to play: 1)
Cockroaches - they deal with the discard and archive a lot in play. (Difficulty to play: 2)
Spiders - a unique trapping mechanic with webs that forces other factions to reroute their strategies while they can walk right over their own blockades. (Difficulty to play: 1)
You will notice that the difficulty to play these bugs is all relatively low. The hardest being a 2 out of 5. Where factions like the butterflies have a difficulty of 5. As an idea how they play the butterflies use manipulation and subterfuge to trick opponents into attacking the viceroy over the monarch. When an opponent kills a viceroy it gives them a hunger card. The butterfly tile is always showing just the name butterfly and the range of values when attacked it flips to show what it is. Once revealed it will stay revealed until you find a way to flip it back over. You have to constantly be thinking who is where and what you can do to entice an attack or trick someone into not attacking your more useful unit for some of your missions.
It would be amazing if we do well enough that I can get all 21 factions in the game this kickstarter but my plan is that we will hit 2-3 extra factions. I’ll probably take votes on what factions people want then when I feel the game needs a reprint I’ll offer a 2nd base game with 5 new factions in it with the old factions as add ons that can be purchased as smaller packs.
This is the plan right now. If you all spread the word once we are on kickstarter maybe we can just get all 21 in the game right from the start. If that’s the case I’ll need to get a bigger box.
Open World RPGs
Been digging back into Breath of the Wild. Just exploring around without any real rhyme or reason is nice but I realize why I’ve put it down the rain is aggravating every time I want to climb something. Maybe I have bad luck but every time I’m mid climb a few drops of rain knocks me off. But coming back to the point I’m trying to make. Open world rpgs have good and bad points when trying to do this in a board game you are much more limited since you need some form of end goal and these types of games either fall into a sandbox style of play with an almost fake rpg or they are more of an explore to gain power then fight a big bad or do something
This is games like runebound, world of warcraft, warhammer quest, shadows of brimstone, and the like.
I may be criticized for this but I never liked runebound. I felt it was just a roll and move game at heart. If playing an open worldish game with exploration as a role and move I’d just play talisman. Now Warhammer Quest and Shadows Over Brimstone I do really like. They are the no end really in sight just see how long you can survive. I’m talking about the original Warhammer Quest not the remake.
The way the board games handle it is through random rolls and trying to keep things going ramping up the difficulty by sending higher level mobs at you where in a game you could wander into the wrong spot and be killed fast. That isn’t as fun in a board game as you don’t have save states to return to and it isn’t as easy to just reset up different areas as a video game does it. So that trade off of gradual gain over true exploration is acceptable.
While I thought I would be more negative on the game side my love for warhammer quest and nostalgia keeps me on a more positive note.
Oh and World of Warcraft the board game is 1/2 fun. The coop is fun but you never really interact with the other team you might as well not even have them except that is the race to the end of the game who can get there first. It’s a lot of downtime with no interaction. So best avoid.
Preparing a Prototype
Making a prototype has been an experience. Normally I design to sizes that Game Crafter has as a default but with Vermin Vendetta the game board to make them round and able to use the normal sizes of hex tiles Game Crafter has I needed a board larger than they could use. I couldn’t find a cheap enough tile to print for it with a single print run. So I went for a print shop with posters and I’ve ordered the tiles in poster print that I’ll cut out the tiles manually.
The other parts had to be shifted slightly in size to get proto parts cut. The prototype without the board maps costs $110 for a single print. The poster print of maps costs another $40, then with shipping every demo costs me almost $200.
These changes are to show it off to influencers and for conventions. The base prototype I have and been playing is lacking in lots of the art. I don’t need the flashy updated art for my own plays just yet. I’ll wait until it’s released for that copy on my shelf.
The biggest thing has been building up the rule book to make it flow well and get it looking nice. I think I got it now. The strange problem I ran into is the book size. Panda Manufacturers and Game Crafter have different size books offered. So I had to recreate the rule book for both. I’ve put most the time in the professional version and just downsized the pages for the prototype but I think it worked well. For the final look at the rules check out the Vermin Vendetta page.
Video Games
The switch has been my go to console as of late. As with the rest of the world animal crossing caught me too. I was sucked in and put over 500+ hours into the game when I feel I should of used that time doing productive things but hey it was fun while I played. Now the game has been put down and I’ve been revisiting some of the older Indy games I bought.
I’ve played quite a few runs of Binding of Issac, Beholder (which the switch controls aggravate me sometimes but that’s just from lack of instructions on how they work.), Rogue Legacy, Streets of Rogue, and Enter the Gungeon.
All this video game playing has made me think if any of these were to be changed into a board game how would it be? Now Binding of Issac does have a board game, or card game I should say. It is….ok. I’m not a giant fan but love the theme. I feel it should be cooperative instead of competitive and wish it was less just hoping for a die roll than it was. What would I change? I have no idea. I’d probably just rebuild it from the ground up.
However, Beholder I think has promise as a card game. Something similar to this I’m thinking of actually making. I won’t have any story to it. It would be just you get random residents and need to keep them happy and make money through blackmailing and completing tasks. I have some ideas on how to do this but nothing concrete. Just some design ideas.
Now I have so many games on the back burner this won’t happen any time soon unless I come up with a way to make this work and can get a demo made up quickly.
As of right now my main focus is on Vermin Vendetta, and Gloop.
What is this about?
Well this blog is just dealing with whatever is on my mind at the time. So sometimes it may focus on my games other times it will just be random things going on in my head.
Today I’m looking at the journey of Vermin Vendetta to kickstarter. Originally looking to get the game to kickstarter this summer, now it’s looking like it will be next summer. I’m still waiting on the quote though panda did tell me next week I should see it. Now I’m looking at advertisement budgets that are a little more costly than I expected needing around $2,000 to even start thinking about getting it to kickstarter.
Being my first kickstarter I wasn’t anticipating a lot of that but I want to do this right and make sure I know the cost to produce, the cost of shipping, how much kickstarter takes from the project, the cost of using backerkit, how much to expect needing to pay on taxes, etc… This is all the information I have been working on as well as building up my facebook, instagram, and twitter.
I’ve even contacted Rahdo Runs Through about getting Vermin Vendetta on his show. They mentioned the price to me and the time scale when to get them things. So I’m looking to go with it. It would be Shea that would review the game but would be on Rahdo’s channel. I want to wait until about a month before the kickstarter goes live to have it show up so I will wait until I know more about costs and figure out how to get everything together.
Here is my findings that may help you if you are interested in making a kickstarter
Cost of Games from Manufacturer - (use this to figure out the /game cost it is from you. I’m shooting for a 2,000 game run from Panda. So I will take what they give me and divide by 2,000. From the research I read you want to consider this cost as 42% of the MSRP for your game.
Kickstarter takes 10% of your pledge in the end. (5% payment processing & 5% kickstarter fee)
Art Cost - (if worried about losing money on the art you can add this on. I’m going to ignore what I paid for the art that already came out of my pocket but if interested - $1,900 in base game & $4,350 I’ve already spent on expansion art.)
Backerkit - $199 or $99 if set up before campaign ends. (upfront cost)
Backerkit - 2% of your pledge
Sales Tax - 3.5%
Personal Income Tax - 11.2%
Self-Employment Tax - 15.3%
Shipping Cost US - waiting on weight estimate
Shipping Cost World - waiting on weight estimate
Shipping fee from Manufacturer to Shipping company - need to pick company still
Cost of using Shipping company - thinking of fufillrite. If you know of a good one I’m all ears. I’ve contacted a few but without weights they couldn’t help me. And I heard bad things about ship naked.
Kickstarter can have shipping added to the pledge up front but I’m wanting to go with Backerkit so I can add shipping later to the project there. This will let me be more certain on what I need for shipping depending where it is shipping to. As well as knowing the exact weight of the product after it is developed.
If I choose not to use Backerkit I’d need to add shipping to the pledge levels and then I could just use kickstarters pledge manager. This would also save me another 2%.
Next thing I need to do is figure out what amount I need to hit to add stretch goals. This may be different than how most people would do a kickstarter, but I’m not trying to get rich from this I want to just break even and will put more things into the kickstarter making the game more complete with all the expansions I have planned.
That’s it for today. This has been the last four months of my research thus far… COVID-19 has slowed down the estimates and emails are running slower than normal but all in all I’m moving towards what I feel will be a successful project.