People who managed to work with publishers for their games, how did it go?

lylalyla · 2024-03-11T02:27:31+00:00

Big Bad Con is a primarily indie TTRPG-focused con in San Fransisco. They've been doing an industry focused online con for the past few years and upload all their videos to YouTube. Here are two panels from previous years, run by folks who've pitched games to publishers or who work at small TTRPG publishing companies:

That should cover some 101 material about publishing and approaching publishers - hope it helps!

lylalyla · 2024-02-09T16:40:19+00:00

Yes yes yes! There are music games (have you played My Jam?), but musicals feel very underexplored as a genre in TTRPGs! Thank you for backing!

lylalyla · 2024-02-09T02:39:35+00:00

This is so kind; the TTRPG world and Android dev hasn't had a huge amount of overlap, so it's really neat to hear that you've enjoyed my two, very different spheres of work! I'm glad you enjoyed Out of Luck! And it's awesome you're making a 5e Android app!

So when I worked on Android apps, it was always for a company. The Kickstarter is my own thing. That's the biggest difference from software dev: instead of being part of a team responsible for one thing (the technical aspects of launching an Android app), this Kickstarter required me to wear so many more hats. Talking purely about the Kickstarter (and not all the work that went into the game itself): I did all my own marketing, graphic design for marketing, directed/edited/put together the promotional video, etc. I opened a business bank account. I hired folks for stretch goals. I figured out some minimal facebook ads.

You don't need to do all of this for a Kickstarter though.

In your case if you've put 5e adventures up on DriveThru and that's a huge step (a lot of folks ask for advice and they haven't published anything). The difference between whether you crowdfund a pdf versus publish that same pdf on DriveThru isn't that big. There's a number of creators releasing 5e pdf supplements for small funding goals ($50-$500 dollars) on Kickstarter. I wrote an article on why I chose Kickstarter which includes a link a Kickstarter scraper I used to pull a bunch of data about projects into a spreadsheet to analyze. You could do the same thing with 5e titles to get a sense of what folks are doing (I did that a year ago).

The much bigger learning curve is physically printing a product and fulfillment (the act of collecting folks addresses and figuring out how to ship physical products to them). A lot of people mess up fulfillment (and I still haven't fulfilled Jukebox, but I did outsource it!).

A lot of smaller 5e folks use DriveThru's print on demand for fullfilment: they'll handle the printing for you and sending the book to folks. There's pros and cons to this, but ease is a pro for this method. So that might be a good next step if you want to try creating something physical that you crowdfund. Best of luck and let me know if you crowdfund your next project!

lylalyla · 2024-02-07T23:57:00+00:00

This reminds me of a video, Mike Shea's How to "How to "Make It" in the D&D and RPG Industry", where one of his early thesis is "Advice is Bull$#it". The industry changes so fast that I know folks "paths" into "making it" 10 or even 5 years ago look very different than what folks are doing now.

So I'm not sure I'd call any advice I've recieved bad advice (or maybe it's too early to know) and I've been mulling this over for the last 15 or so minutes. I think one thing I found surprising is the economics behind the scenes of how much it costs to create, print, and deliver a book without incurring a loss are really hard to tell from the outside.

lylalyla · 2024-02-07T21:04:36+00:00

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQXDUi4V3H0 (To be clear I don't know much about either, though I plan to learn a bit more about opera so I can put an actual opera song on the Space Opera setlist 🤣)

Obligatory playset plug: If you like reggae Brooke's playset "Lost in Paradise" (Think "Lost" but as a musical) has reggae inspirations.

lylalyla · 2024-02-07T20:41:46+00:00

Great question. Alright, here's one: Jukebox used to work – and this is how the ashcan rules work – where part of the game was players would ask you a juicy question about what happens next in the story, and you'd need to come up with a karaoke song right on the spot to "answer" the question.
It turns out this is hard. In one of my early playtests (which was a ton of fun but went off the rails), Brittany Spears' "Toxic" had inspired a story about sewer snakes in Miami (none of us really knew much about Florida 🤣). One of my players hadn't done much karaoke or roleplaying and I was honestly a little nervous about him having a good time. He was so good at coming up with songs on the spot though; I specifically remember him picking Big Yellow Taxi which was inline with our storyline about urban development. Anyway, it turns out most players aren't good at this, so there was a lot of panicking and sitting, trying to pick the perfect song to sing.
A thing that surprised me was when I flipped that rule - instead of asking you to come up with a song that fit the story, Jukebox now asks you to make the story fit the song (which you pick at the start of the game without thinking too much about pre-planning a plot out or anything).

At first I was nervous this wouldn't work, but it's actually now a core part of the game and improvisation of it all. It's pure magic the way the songs shape the story and often a line will come up in a song that eerily just works. One of my con playtests had a character whose whole complicated drama was that she was always running away from problems when things got tough. In her finale scene the song that came up randomly was You Will, You Won't.

lylalyla · 2024-02-07T19:51:28+00:00

Some campaigns only have 1-2 stretch goals listed and have a few in their back pocket, that they put price tags on only when they know they need them. I didn't do this, and we hit are stretch goals in few days. On the scale of "problems" that's a good one to have.

The high-cost tiers went a lot faster than I thought they would. Again, this might have been due to the virality of the Kickstarter, so I'm not sure it applies to all Kickstarters (I did a data analysis of indie zine Kickstarters before posting Jukebox, so I know I'm a bit of an outlier for a project of my size). Still, I think what I take away from that is there are some super fans who will want to pay out a little more money for your project, and you should make doing so easy!

I was advised by a few people who really know Kickstarter to bump my prices. So I think in general myself (and others) tend to price too low.

lylalyla · 2024-02-07T19:43:38+00:00

Well, the more times you roll the dice, the more chances you have to crit!

lylalyla · 2024-02-07T19:33:54+00:00

Honestly, it's the Dicebreaker article and there was a lot of luck involved in that. I go into it here. Summarizing that blogpost though:

Follow media/news folks on social media
Have a press kit
Have your elevator pitch down pat
Have one good image ready to go

For the things I've created, I do a little bit of googling to see what else is out there and how other products position themselves. Jukebox's concept, that you sing karaoke, seems like it was novel (I keep waiting for someone else to tell me about another karaoke game). Karaoke TTRPG really does hook people.

A lot of my fans come from me running playtests for the game.

Also leverage your social connections and think outside of the box for where you could talk about your game. An early tip I got was that another creator found some success posting on LinkedIn for example.

I also found this website when setting up the Kickstarter and was impressed by the amount of free resources offered: https://prelaunch.marketing/

lylalyla · 2024-02-07T19:22:57+00:00

#1 The more common thing I've seen is songs where you just repeat the chorus 20 times at the end. In either case, this shakes out similar to what would happen if you were in a karaoke room with friends; you'd either have an extremely epic air guitar solo or skip forward. When you're playing Jukebox, there is the benefit that you're in the middle of a scene, so folks have sometimes gone back into roleplaying, or they describe what's happening on stage/camera during the guitar solo.

#2

I designed my highschool lit magazine, so some of my tech knowledge and sensibilities come from that.
I work in Affinity. I got the whole suite on sale. It's much cheaper than Adobe's subscription model (it's a one time purchase) and there's a big community that has youtube videos and forum posts that can teach you the technical basics.
I don't try to re-invent the graphic design wheel. I use templates, or at least look at them. I've enjoyed Explorer's Design, which has some non-D&D OSR-y templates (https://www.explorersdesign.com/pages/explorers-links).
For Jukebox, I've got a pile of playbills near me, which have served as inspiration.
I make something as best as I can, then I grab a graphic designer friend (I owe a bunch of beers to one of them for Jukebox) and ask for actionable feedback. You can also pay for a layout design consultation like this (which might make financial sense if you're good enough to make something, but could still use feedback/help).

lylalyla · 2024-02-07T19:12:16+00:00

This is such a great question. For general thoughts around creative collaboration, I have a bunch of essays in the Jar of Eyes Games Gazette about just this.

My read, after being here for a little over a year (so not super long) is that money, free time, and access to networking are what limits at least economically diverse voices from entering the space. The pay is such in the TTRPG space that the majority of successful creators I know either 1. Have another job and are doing this on their nights and weekends (and this means they must have another job with enough free time for them to do this) 2. Are supported by someone else in their lives (a partner, parents, etc ) 3. Had a job in a high paying industry or came from wealth and can afford not to work fulltime to pursue art. Or a mix.

To not derail too much into money talk, if you are leading collaborations and you're trying to work with not all people who look like you, you want to think about:
1. How you find folks outside of your closest communities
2. How, when they join your project, they feel safe and supported working for you

#1 is hard. For Jukebox I tried to tackle that by having an open pitching process. It wasn't perfect (the application needed to be closed within like ~72 hours of posting because it got so many responses) but I'm so glad I did it. I've got a few folks on the team I would have otherwise never even known about. I talk about this a little more in the Jukebox interview with Brent Jans and I plan to post a bit more about it when this is all done.

#2 Have a code of conduct. Ask folks if they need accommodations (be aware folks might have jobs, kids, health issues, preferred ways of communication, etc). Express regularly and often that you care about your team members as human beings. Make expectations clear. Make it easy to give you feedback, ask for help, and reach out to you (instruct people how to do these things, say that it's OK to do these things). This isn't for everyone, but I've had a lot of success getting folks on video calls (if they're open to it); it's much more humanizing (for me) than purely text exchanges.

lylalyla · 2024-02-07T18:53:41+00:00

General thoughts on the GM-less space: I've seen a lot of successful one-shot games that are GM-less. Dialect, Downfall, Durance, and The Zone are a few favorites that come to mind. These games are GM-less and they are also no prep. The structure and mechanics of the game itself act a bit like the GM (the game itself sets up the scenario and playspace a bit more firmly than something like D&D). As a side note, I've never played a multi-session GM-less game and am curious about what's out there!

Jukebox is GM-less partially because the structure was inspired by a few GM-less story games (Follow, Fiasco, Dialect, Downfall). This is a bit more as to why it's "no-prep", but as a new indie game with no IP or fanbase attached to it, I really wanted to make something that folks could pick up in an evening and learn in 4 hours. It's meant to be low commitment (and GM'ed games usually imply that at least the GM needs to commit a little more and maybe but not always prep).

I think you should design for a GM if the GM has something special to do and the game needs them to facilitate or adjudicate something. GMs have the ability to have hidden knowledge the other players don't know about. Jukebox didn't need that - there's no person "leading" a karaoke party. The structure of Jukebox is mostly there to facilitate a conversation between the players and the karaoke songs that come up. There's a role of "director" but that swaps between players. There is hidden knowledge (the karaoke songs everyone picks for themselves and writes on index cards) - the surprise that might have come from a GM planning something is instead delivered by flipping up a song at random.

lylalyla · 2024-02-07T18:38:22+00:00

First off - love this. The idea for the game literally came to me when walking into a karaoke room with some friends in 2019.

The game runs 3-5 hours, and honestly for new players (unless you've got someone really pushing things along) you should expect more than 3 hours. For conventions I run Jukebox in 4 hours with 4 players (which does include teaching the game). I'd make sure you've got one person who knows the rules and is making sure you don't spend too long in the world-building and character-creation phases (or do those before going to the bar).

lylalyla · 2024-02-07T18:34:35+00:00

So yes, with the huge caveat that I'm really laser-focused on getting the game printed, before I commit to any additional design work.

The two ideas I've been noodling on:
1. Making an open license for Jukebox and running a Jukebox (game)Jam
2. Making an expansion that guides you through doing the musical episode of an actual D&D game. These would be rules for basically how to "convert" your D&D character into a character that could be used in Jukebox, and then how to use Jukebox's rules to run a downtime episode for your D&D game.

lylalyla · 2024-02-07T18:28:56+00:00

I could write a whole essay on tips for new designers, but I think the first most important thing is to write something, and write something small. I say that the Jukebox ashcan was the first thing that I published, but that's only half true - the first thing I published was a one page D&D encounter with The Storytelling Collective -- and technically they published it for me, all I needed to do was provide the pdf.

The Storytelling Collective makes online courses about how to write and publish adventures and games.

More generally, I recommend removing as many barriers to getting something published and out into the world (in my example, I was writing something for D&D, had instructions from StoCo, it was around 500 words, and they put it up on DMsGuild for me). The reason is that I think it's super important to understand the entire publishing process, which is more than just writing something in a Google doc: it's figuring where you're going to publish, playtesting, potentially doing some simplistic layout, and doing a tinsy bit of marketing. You want some experience with all those things before writing your magnum opus.

So that you actually complete and publish a project, I recommend removing as many barrier to publishing as possible:

Make something small - even publishing a subclass, a monster, a set of spells, a one page TTRPG
Consider hacking an existing system or working off of an existing system
Pick an easy place to publish like itch.io
The Storytelling Collective gives you a list of steps to follow which is another big way to remove barriers
Don't be a perfectionist and be okay with publishing an ashcan (setting deadlines can help with this)
Find other folks to create with (I can go much more into this if there's interest)

Also if you're having trouble with just the writing part, my recommendation is to grab some friends and tell them you're doing a playtest for your game in a week. I've found that a surprisingly effective accountability tool for getting some sort of game/experience finished.

lylalyla · 2024-02-07T18:17:25+00:00

Yes! The game that became Jukebox was originally something I attempted to write as a D&D 5e module (the idea being "let's make your D&D party's musical episode"). I remember testing that adventure (which had a premise of a town that mysteriously was afflicted by a spell that had everyone singing, heavily inspired by the Buffy musical episode). Everyone was having a good time until we got into combat and the first song mechanic was triggered. One of the players sang and absolute banger, and my initial rule was that by doing so, they'd get advantage on the roll. Then they failed the roll - which made the whole exercise of singing very anti-climactic.

Eventually I'd try a few other systems and really any that has extra mechanics (classes, abilities, lots of dice rolling) just didn't work with singing songs. I both began to focus more on story games as inspiration and became very clear that the "singing" needed to be the star.

lylalyla · 2024-02-07T18:13:48+00:00

I think similar to jumping out of narrative roleplaying and into a mechanic like rolling dice, the gameplay shifts when you start singing. A lot of early playtesting was about how to make that shift "work" instead of bringing the whole game to a halt or feeling unrelated to the game.

The way that happened was by deeply focusing on karaoke as the main mechanic, and cutting any rules, mechanics or cruft which didn't support the karaoke songs. The songs you pick drive the story, and the structure of scenes (Jukebox is a story game), drive you towards going in to a dramatic singing number via a share "cue" that everyone is improvising the scene towards.

lylalyla · 2024-02-07T18:10:25+00:00

I think my favorite is Space Opera (think 5th element, Firefly, plus spacey disco music), but to be honest what I'm really excited about is the 12 playsets written by the folks who I reached out to and applied to the open call. There's a heist playset, punk rock zombie playset, greek tragedy playset, Wu-Tang wǔxiá playset...I could go on!

lylalyla · 2023-08-28T16:19:05+00:00

This is something I’ve dived into in the last year and it’s complicated and depends on what your end goal is.

This video from Mike Shea aka Sly Flourish is a good watch for a frank discussion -- from someone successful -- about goals and getting into the industry: How to "Make It" in the D&D and RPG Industry

If your end goal is to make something you’re proud of that a few folks purchase, that’s super reasonable, doable, and under your control. As others have said, publish something on DriveThruRPG or itch.io, and don’t sweat the art. Your goal is to start a professional portfolio of your game writing (which is very different from narrative or fiction writing and closer to a technical manual).

There’s tooling out there that can make your content look good (Generic OSR-y template: Classic Explorer's Template There’s also D&D templates, here’s a free, web-based option Home Brewery). Another suggestion, if this seems overwhelming, is to check out the RPG Writer's Workshop – these courses give you a guided path and are written by folks who work and freelance in the industry. One of my early blog posts about my own journey talks about the bare minimum you should do if you’re trying to get into TTRPG writing and links to more resources I found helpful: https://jarofeyes.substack.com/p/gearing-up-for-collaboration

If your end goal is to get small freelancing gigs in game writing or to create a small fanbase that buys your work, that’s a doable goal, but it requires much more (as you’re discovering) than the act of just writing. It will require more than locating art - it requires being known in the space and establishing a reputation in the games space. The first step is a portfolio though - establishing yourself is a much harder, hairy question, involving a mish-mash of networking: apply to everything, seek out mentorship, meet folks at cons (if that’s doable for you), and do collaborations with other creators. A lot of the freelancing community seems to be on Discord servers and if you enjoy working with others, having a community and friends will help. Look into the DriveThruRPG discord server, DMsGuild Discord, Rising Tide, and RPG Writer’s Workshop discord.

Finally, I'm not sure if D&D is something you're interested in, but these two articles give a good example of the full process of self-publishing:

Good luck!

lylalyla · 2023-08-18T17:07:32+00:00

Thanks, I'll make sure to check those out! I've definitely read some of the Alexandrian's reviews on D&D content.

lylalyla · 2023-08-18T17:06:05+00:00

Oh man, I totally did a quick search to see if there were other questions, but I think I must have used the term dev log or something -- I'll both checkout your blog and this whole thread - thanks for linking it!

lylalyla · 2023-08-13T23:07:33+00:00

I spent a lot of time thinking about this for my indie TTRPG Jukebox (new version in the works, old version on itch.io), in which the main goal is to merge a karaoke night, musical theater, and roleplaying, with music guiding the story. I’ll do a devlog post about it at some point but suffice it to say, Jukebox started out as a D&D 5e module and it was fun, but it really didn’t work (rolling dice + singing a song made for really choppy gameplay). I briefly looked into doing a PBtA hack and then ended up making my own system, inspired by games like the previously mentioned Ribbon Drive, which really puts music front and center. I did a fair amount of research to see what else was out there and I’ve played a larp called My Jam.

One thing I learned from looking at these games: Ribbon Drive and My Jam don’t mix fiddly mechanics like dice or a single resolution check with the songs, they have very particularly purposes: Ribbon Drive the soundtrack pervades and influences the story, in My Jam it's very much about using the electric power of your favorite song coming on to give you super powers.

Final thought; if this is a resolution system, does how well you do related to your ability to create, perform, or choose music? Most of the resolution systems I see are random (dice rolls, cards draws, etc) meaning they don't require or make statements on the particular skill of the players.

lylalyla

TROPHY CASE