One of the takeaways from our first Gen Con was – finish the thing. But with that very powerful order they added the advice that our first thing should be an easier and more simple thing to manufacture. We’re doing that. We’re starting with Fight Card! (which has only cards, a box and rules – which may be printed on cards). It’s a simple to manufacture game, but there are lots of parts to finishing the thing. One part of finishing the thing is building an audience.
This is the hard part for us. The hard part of self-promotion. The hard part of building an audience. The game idea and the prototype came easy (reality it was bouncing around my head for over a year and then months in development and way to much playtesting but we’ll call it easy). The hours and hours of playtesting and developing other decks to flesh out the game where also fairly easy. Easy in the sense that we could do it in isolation all on our own. The hard part is the part that requires promoting ourselves to other people. It requires that we convince and sell other people on ourselves and our game – make them interested in the game we’re making and in us as people. That’s a much harder thing.
For the first thing (probably many things) that we finish; we’re trying to keep everything simple. Simple to manufacture and simple to explain to gamers and non-gamers. We’re going to try to do the promotion with a level of simplicity as well. We’re not sure how that will work or how long we’ll be able to stick with it but we’ll try. So how are we hoping to pull this off? No idea. For me – I’d like to sit down and play the game with everyone. Have a conversation. How long will it take us to travel to enough conventions to build an audience big enough to get the game made? If you could only do one thing – what simple thing would you do to promote yourself that doesn’t fall too far into the sales pitch? Or should I just ask – when can we meet for a game?
PS – we’ll be at Gen Con this year and would love to meet and sit down for a game or two.
PJ