The plan moving forward

Hey everyone, it's been a while.

Lots to talk about in this one: Current status of Mars, What went wrong with Directive, What i'm going to do to fix it, and how i'm going to make sure that doesn't happen with Horrors.


As always, click Read More to get into it.

The Robotic Age: Mars

After so many delays, Mars is currently being put together and should be ready, in PDF form, in just a few days. Printing will take a few weeks more after that.

Directive: Invasion!

Wow, that kickstarter failed fast. You can attribute my absence the last couple of weeks to trying to mentally recover from that.
So what went wrong? After talking to a few people I've figured out some issues that hindered me, as well as some suggestions for the relaunch.

#1:  Timing

Launching directly after GenCon, without having a GenCon presence, was probably a terrible idea. Most board game news sites were still talking about GenCon, and everyone who went to the event didn't have a lot of money left over in their board game budgets. 

#2: Advertising

There wasn't enough of it. I mean, I talked about the game here and I took it to a bunch of local cons, and I even got a youtube review (which lead to other problems i'll talk about later), but it wasn't enough. I tried contacting other reviewers and news sites when the game was up, but I should have been doing that weeks (if not months) before hand.
Plus I have a really bad habit of announcing the game's launch date only a week ahead of time.

#3: Flashiness of components
Although everyone who played the game loved it, if you only saw pictures it didn't look that exciting. My poor quality (phone) camera made the game board look dull and the basic tokens didn't stand out at all.
This will be the easiest to fix, as I already have plans to make the game just pop at first glance,

#4: Annoying Miscellaneous Problems
 So many you guys. There are several "this week in kickstarter" style blogs that put together the new projects that launched that week. They all somehow managed to miss me, or just flat out ignored me.
So did my contact that works for a "local indie game creator" blog.  Maybe he just doesn't work there any more.
Then we move on to my problems with my 1 youtube reviewer. He loved the game (as have everyone else who's played it) but it took him a month to get my video made. For context, everyone else I talked to said it took him a week. On top of that, he still hasn't mailed back my only prototype (which he knew I needed him to do). So I couldn't send it to other outlets, or even post my own pictures of the game. It's been two months now, no sign of my prototype and he isn't responding to my emails.

Plans for next time

I'll try to relaunch the board game some time early next year, and you will definetly know it's coming. I will post it everywhere and anywhere that will listen. New troop and outpost components will make the game look better. And there will be several prototypes made.
But I'm not going to worry about it until the end of the year.

Horrors: The Scary Story RPG

So that brings us to Horrors, my second rpg and next project up on the docket. This is your first announcement that all of September will be Horrors advertising month. 
I'll be sending out notices for the game early. I'm going to have the kickstarter page up half way through the month so people can have a direct link. I'm going to post art and sample characters here and on the facebook page.
The news for Horrors will be everywhere I can get it. People will know when it will launch. And when is that launch date?

Horrors will launch on October 1st and run until the day after Halloween

Here's hoping I can fix some of my problems and make the next game work even better.