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 Last week I said I'd tell you about
the new game I've been hinting about for the past 3 months, so
without further ado, it's called Chrononauts, and it's
the card game of Time Travel.
In Chrononauts, each player becomes a time traveler, with
a unique identity and a secret mission. During the game, players
travel backwards and forwards through history, doing all those
things people have always dreamed of using a time machine to
do: Visiting the great moments of the past, peeking into the
future, collecting up impossible artifacts and priceless works
of art (at the moment just before history records their destruction),
coming to grips with the paradoxes of time travel, and of course,
changing pivotal events and altering the course of history itself.
How would the timeline be different if Lincoln and JFK had not
been assassinated? And is that the version of reality that you
came from originally... the one you must return to in order to
win? It's all packed into a fast and easy Fluxx-style card game
that will take you to the beginning of time and back again.
Sounds cool, eh? Lemme tell you, it is! The gameplay of the
current prototype has all the fun and excitement I'd hoped it
would last
January, when I first set out to create a time travel card
game. There's still a metric ton of work to be done before it'll
be ready to publish, but I feel the design has reached the stage
of completion necessary for me to begin telling people about
it.
Up until now, I haven't wanted to reveal very much about the
game, partly because I wanted to shield myself from outside ideas
until I had a chance to fully develop my own ideas myself, and
partly because I didn't want to make a bunch of statements that
would probably turn out to be untrue, which is definitely what
would have happened, given how much the game design changed as
it evolved over the past 3 months. (As it is, what little I have
said includes at least one rendered falsehood...)
However, one of the things people tell us they like most about
our website is our openness about what we're doing. Our readers
are enjoying watching our story unfold, as we seek to build a
successful game company, and the process of taking a new game
from Pre-Production to Published Product is a story I want to
cover in detail on this website over the course of this next
year. Being secretive about my cool new game was running totally
against the grain of my journal-style corporate reporting, which
is why I haven't been able to resist talking about it at least
vaguely, and why I just couldn't wait anymore to tell you what
it is.
Moreover, keeping it secret makes it difficult to conduct
proper playtesting. Even though we have no idea how we're going
to pay for it, we're hoping to publish Chrononauts this fall,
i.e. in time for the next HSS (Holiday Shopping Season), and
production schedule-wise, that doesn't actually leave a lot of
time to finalize the design and produce the finished artwork.
Right now, all that exists is my master prototype (if you're
going to Balticon
this weekend, drop by the Pop-Tart
Cafe and ask me to show it to you) but the next step will
be to produce a small run of playtest decks and make them available
to the Mad Lab Rabbits
for testing. To this end, we're planning a Limited Edition Cheapass-style
Beta-Test release, which we're hoping to have out in time for
Origins. So, given all this, it seemed like the time was ripe
to tell you what we've got up our sleeve next.
...and now for the Bad News. Last
week I described our funding woes, and announced we'd decided
to consider going after Venture Capital. I tried to put a positive
spin on this -- we need the money for growth -- but it's also
rather frightening. We've been operating in the red for awhile
now, and our debt is mounting. Kristin
has been doing an absolutely incredible job of building our
company for us, but even with Herculean efforts like hers,
it takes years to build a profitable business, and our situation
is getting somewhat critical. If we don't bring up our sales
volume and/or find some deep-pocketed backing soon, I might even
need to put this website on hiatus and go back to the working
world as a highly paid computer programmer (which would obviously
be like a total bummer). To forestall that fate, we need to "close
the deal" as they say, on some of the great sales prospects
we got at Toy
Fair and GAMA.
As Kristin and Leslie
keep telling me, we need to stay focused on the projects with
larger returns. And we've got plenty of inventory taking up space
in our house... we just need to get busy and sell a bunch of
it.
Unfortunately, while there's no shortage of things I could
be doing to help Kristin generate more sales, I've instead been
spending the last couple of months obsessively designing a new
game. Even though we lack the greenbacks necessary to reprint
all the games we currently have for sale, I've been busily adding
another expensive line item to our out-of-control budget. So,
now it's time to pay the piper... in order to spend more time
helping her build the business, I've decided to cut back on some
of my weekly web publishing deadlines for a while. Therefore,
this week marks the end of the current season, if you will, of
the Iceland comic and my
Nanofiction writings.
Sketchbook Harvest
will continue unabated, since it really is very easy to keep
up with; but Daddy-O's
Reviews may also go dark now and then in the coming weeks,
as I seek to spend less time on this site and more time helping
to increase sales.
It's really just as well... last week I promised a tour of
the sights of Planet Zorn (followed by a banquet and a coronation!)
with no real idea of what any of that stuff is going to look
like, much less how to draw it, so a short hiatus will give me
a chance to do some much needed planning ahead. As for the Nanofics,
when I first started publishing them here, I had a nice little
reserve of them to pick from when I didn't have something fresh
on hand; but having whittled that away, I like the idea of stopping
for awhile and building that reserve back up. Besides, I need
to try to figure out how to write about something other than
time travel... in case you haven't figured it out yet, many of
my recent Nanofics were actually written for use in Chrononauts.
Each "Identity" card will feature a character sketch,
in the form of a nanofic. This week's entry is one of ten such
stories I'm currently planning on using in the game. (The other
nine are already featured on the Nanofiction archive... can you
guess which ones they are?) Anyway, it may not seem like these
two featurettes really consume that much of my time, but they
do, and rather than putting the entire site on hiatus, I'm just
gonna try to reduce my workload for awhile. How long? Good question...
a few weeks at the least, a few months at the most. We shall
see.
As for the Search for Funding, we've gotten lots of great
feedback, and although no Business Angels (that's the term for
what we really want, we're told) have descended from Heaven yet,
we did get a number of folks expressing interest in helping to
provide funding on a smaller scale, suggesting we offer stock
warrants or perhaps bonds backed by the inventory of game products;
but these ideas would require legal wrangling that we don't really
want to get into if we don't have to. Another idea we've heard
is to try to make the website pay for itself, by renting out
paid banner ads or charging our readers a subscription fee. We
dislike both of these ideas and are not considering them; but
at the same time, we're hitting our disk space ceiling again
(3000+ pages takes up a lot of meg), and the last thing we need
right now is for our website hosting fees to go up. But while
we have no wish to deny readers access to our site unless they
pay a fee, we figure it would be OK to accept donations from
any readers who might volunteer to make them. So, this week we're
contemplating the idea of setting up a patron program, not unlike
the one used in the performing arts industry, where they list
your name in the back of the program book if you give the theater
some money: if you donate $10, we put your name in fine print
on the bottom of this page, for 6 months or a year, under a big
banner listing all of our beloved patrons. Put up more money,
and we'll use a bigger font. Links and graphics would cost extra.
Of course, there are problems with this idea, too (for example,
does anyone know the legal issues involved with accepting donations
in this way?) but we're serious enough about it that we'd like
to know how our actual readers would react to it. So, please
send us email with your opinions!
 Don't
forget to play!
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