Board Game Progress for October 2022

We have two games in the works at Radian-Helix besides Project Morningstar, this time on physical media. 

The first is "PROPAGANDA!", our Authoritarian Apocalypse Simulator, and he second is STAVE, a competitive Magical Poker type game. 

The biggest hurdle in testing a board game is just pen & paper prototyping. 

All the printing and manufacturing is usually reserved for the final steps. My games tend to get a minimalist pass first that I have printed on demand at Kinkos, and then cut by hand. This means our first drafts are in this early period for 2/3rds of their development time, which is a bummer, and doesn't help sell the idea of the game to test players. 

Often times, the theme of a game and look & feel, impact judgments of the audience long before they give even a remote care about how the game plays. The look sets a first impression, and can deeply cloud whether someone is having fun or not.

 I'm an artist by trade and very serious about getting a high quality look and feel right out of the gate. So having to waste in this early mockup phase while I'm doing gameplay tests, but only I can see the final print in my head -- that's not going to fly.

To print a copy of PROPAGANDA! at TheGameCrafter.com, will cost us 65$ per game.

Attached to this is the itinerary so you can see the breakdown in xml.

Pretty brutal, given that we have to print these several times in development and ship to at least 4 people across the US every time.

These boards, for now, will just be flat, laminated chipboard, with nothing to hold the pegs. And we're using the cheaper cubes, which are popular in games like Lords of Waterdeep and Terraforming Mars, but I find super inconvenient because they slide all over the place. 

So this is where our new Cameo 4 comes in! :D

STAVE has these handy dandy player cards that require custom hand manufacturing on every card. 

This has been a huge PITA since 2019 when I first designed this game, and then a pandemic made playing it a nonstarter. 

Finally, I have the solution, and this machine can, albeit slowly and requiring lots of manual effort, cut out every one of these boys and get them ready for my fiancee to hand assemble and glue the dials. 

Since this was such a PITA, I've decided to reuse this for future games I have in mind where cooperative player fight monsters in a post-apocalyptic zombie survival bard game, and another kinda Phantasy Star IV inspired coop game based on the same mechanics where the STAVE system forms the basis of its magic & weapons. 

In the meantime we can print and cut to our heart's content. 

I got the Silhouette Cameo 4 on craigslist here in Tucson, used, for 260$, just 10 less than amazon, but it was only used once and had all the parts. I need to also get a new cutting mat and a new blade for a further 28$. 

There's definitely a learning curve.

The printing process is step 1 -- you need to fit your images to an outline, like so:

And using something like Inkscape, or the in house Silhouette Design Studio (I'm using the free vesrion which is full of Baitware decisions, like not having a marquee tool or not allowing vector graphics like SVG import unless you pay up, which is just -- ahh,) and make you cut template.

The  actual cutting job require VERY GOOD LIGHTING. A spotlight right on the machine pretty much.

The cutter finds a black registration mark, which it must see with a little camera on the page, to find its position. It doesn't have its own light source to do so either, thus the lighting.

You also need a cutting mat to support this device, and that has to feed in perfectly flat, with no warping. The tray itself is flimsy, and you almost need to prop it up -- terrible plastic bullshit all over the machine.

But, it works! I'll upload a video later. 

I'm also looking at a permanent in house solution for printing, instead of relying on Kinkos. 

There is an Epson EcoTank ET-3710, which is cartridge free and filled via ink bottles, for 350$ by the same guy who sold me that Silhouette.  I'm thinkin' that one is our best bet, as we have to print in bulk for these cards and it's the most affordable option. Print quality is pretty good. Not stellar, but still good. And easy to maintain with the tanks. 

With that printer, we can hand manufacture all the critical parts of STAVE and PROPAGANDA, and the results will be good enough to show the public, playtesters, and possibly publishers at cons. It will also cut down on all the hurdles to producing on our own if we go that route via kickstarter. 

We'll still have to order the nice UV Coated playing cards from a big manufacturer in bulk to cut down on costs, but the parts that cost so damn much, we can do them ourselves at home and just add them to the box! 

We can also start looking at Patreon rewards for our patrons, like stickers and post cards and little stuff like that. Affordable small things that make being here more rewarding. 

Hope this helps elucidate the mysterious process of manufacturing a physical game for everyone. :)