Welcome to the first of our Dev Diaries!
This is still an experimental thing for us so the timing might change, the frequency might change. Sometimes when we are at conventions or other issues of life get in the way we may need to skip issues. We will also welcome feedback on what people want to hear about, how and when they want to hear it So bear with us as we do our best to be a transparent and communicative game studio! So what's been happening behind the scenes this week? There are three main things going on behind the scenes at Friends of the Table and I'll run through them all.
Preparing for Conquest
With Conquest convention on this weekend there was plenty to get ready.
Tom and I each wrote/rewrote scenarios for Conquest that we will be playing all weekend. Mine follows the events that inspired Moby Dick, the tale of The Essex, a whaling ship that was sunk by a vengeful sperm whale. This reimagining of the original tale focuses instead on the historic doubt of whether the ship was sunk by a whale and the impacts of the voyage on the crew.
Tom has updated his scenario Escape from Constantinople; a fast paced adventure set in the final days of Byzantine Constantinople, before the invading Ottomans conquered the city. Adventurers must evade conscription, banditry and invading forces as they do their best to find a way out of this doomed city.
Conquest is a 3 day convention so it's a lot of work running scenarios all day for 3 days, and it's a lot of work getting ready for a convention too.
Nothing Left (But To Cry) Survey We've had a lot of responses to our survey (thank you!) and have started to sift through the information. We are preparing to send off the V2 of the game to our manufacturer for prototyping (which we hope to do next week!). This updated version has a much better card design thanks to your responses, and we are shortlisting card suggestions to try in the prototype to help us decide which to include in the final game. Seriously there are so many great suggestions it's hard to choose!
Marketing
Many may not realise, but finding customers is the biggest challenge for indie game devs like us. We can design a game, test it, get it manufactured, but at the end of the day we are introvert gamers at heart and just aren't used to selling our work. April has been a really intense time for us as we have hired a marketing expert for this month to give us a crash course on what we need to know, and help us build a strategy. We still have a lot more to learn, and we really appreciate those of you who found your way here from our survey. But it feels like we are making progress toward being able to grow beyond just a couple of gamers with some fun ideas. This year the biggest challenge we will likely face is to grow our audience, but we've made a really great start and we must go on the journey before we reach the destination
Bonus Round: Trade War
We will likely do another update on this soon as it dominates the news cycles and is threatening a lot of tabletop game studios like ours. Our first game, Those Who Dare, was manufactured in China and while it's not too late to change, we had already decided on a Chinese manufacturer for Nothing Left. We have scheduled a deep dive strategy session for next week to go over the information that has been put out by other studios, manufacturers, and experts to plan our next steps. I have a few ideas for how we will chart a course to not be crushed by this situation so more updates will follow.
See you Friends,
Lukanis.
