April: Leave, Layout, Launch
about 3 years ago – Mon, Apr 12, 2021 at 12:37:29 AM

Hey everyone, how are you doing? Locking is finally starting to ease here, and even though the weather has turned into a sort of grey, indistinct mizzle we're looking forward to the sunshine 🌞

I can't claim that I've had a particularly relaxing March—life locked in a house with two young children is often fraught 😬 But we're muddling through, and there are plenty of bright spots. Anyway, on with the show!

Layout

Over the past couple of weeks I've been working on the layout for the two beak zines. It's been a fun challenge adapting the content to this new format, and I'm happy so far that I've managed to strike a good balance between usability (font sizes, white space, text flow), aesthetics (art, colour) and content (getting as much stuff in there as possible!).

I decided to start with the Artefact re-layout, as I've already got the content so it's a more straightforward task. As mentioned in previous updates, there's no way to include all nine playbooks in the beak zine but I'm hoping to make enough space to comfortably fit one of them in there. That way, if you find yourself in a dark cabin with nothing but a pencil, some paper and my zine you can still have a good time! The rest of the playbooks will be available in the printable playkit, of course—and in the Collector's Edition packets as separate sheets.

Once the layout is done, the accommodating folks at Dizzy Ink will send over some test prints so I can do some field testing. This is very much a physical-first design, with the way the zine opens and unfolds being core to the layout, so I'm keen to play around without before moving forward.

Alongside the joys of InDesign, I've been teasing away at the writing for Bucket of Bolts. After a lot of iteration I think I'm settled on a trajectory for the three acts, and I have 'Captains' (the equivalent of Artefact's Keepers) loosely written. Once I've got a working draft, I'll share it with you all for feedback & playtesting. So far, it's all been a pretty enjoyable experience for me and has flowed pretty easily (when I get the chance to sit down and write...). I'm looking forward to getting it out there!

Orbital

I mentioned last update that I'd set up a little stretch goal for a second print run of Orbital. Well, you smashed it! More than 800 of you have signed up for a copy — thanks so much! I actually have some copies left over from the first print run if you're interested in getting one sooner, but I understand that most of you will want to wait & combine postage. Anyway, I'm excited to be making more of these beautiful books, they turned out really well.

The digital edition also launched last month, which you can check out here if you're interested.

Next Steps

We've got quite a tumultuous month ahead of us for our family, but I'm hoping it'll all line up and I'll get a good amount of time to get some things wrapped up. The plan is to have a draft of both Artefact and Bucket ready for next month, but it all depends on how we adjust to our new normal. 

In the meantime, I hope you're all keeping safe and keeping going.

Jack

March: Surveys, Cover, Break
about 3 years ago – Wed, Mar 03, 2021 at 02:20:29 AM

Hey everyone, how are you doing? We’ve had a run of bright, mild days here in England and it’s been glorious. Even if we, inevitably, return to dismal grey skies soon we’ve really appreciated the chance to enjoy our garden without five layers of clothing.

It’s been two weeks now since Bucket of Bolts closed out, so Kickstarter will soon be releasing the funds to me. That means that in the next few days you’ll get BackerKit survey invites. This gives you a few things to do:

• Make sure your email is set to the one you’ll want to receive communication & the game files.
• If you’ve got physical rewards coming, enter your address and check it twice!
• You’ll also have the option to add tracking to your shipping for a flat rate of £3 on top of your pledge.
• You can also select add-ons: extra copies for yourself, additional community copies or something a little special. 

Yes, after being inundated with requests for Orbital copies, I’ve set up a ‘stretch goal’ in BackerKit. I didn’t know this was a thing until recently! Basically, with Riso especially, it doesn’t make sense to do small print runs as the cost of setup makes the unit cost so high. So I’ve made the game book available to add on to your order, but it’ll only go ahead if 250 copies are sold. Otherwise it’ll be removed from your order & you won’t be charged. Hopefully we’ve got sufficient interest!

Once you’ve completed your survey, I’ll send out digital copies of Artefact to those who ordered them so you can get playing as soon as possible.

That’s it for now! I’m taking March off from working on games, as Orbital launches and I prepare to go back to work next month at the end of my parental leave. I’ll still be checking messages periodically, but you won’t see a lot of progress on BoB until later in April.

I hope you’ve had a good start to March, and we’ll speak again in April.

J

We're coming in hot!
about 3 years ago – Wed, Feb 17, 2021 at 01:01:16 AM

£72742! Holy heck everyone, that's an astonishing amount for my little zine.

A year ago we were taking a family holiday in Scotland. We did some touristy stuff, we ate lots of delicious food, we stayed with friends in a nice apartment. We rode trains. Life was normal and pretty fun—even if our toddler never, ever slept. I got to celebrate the conclusion of the Artefact campaign with friends in another country—nothing wild, but very lovely.

This time around it’s a little different—we’re in our third national lockdown here in the UK and the only time we can see friends is if we're walking outside, doing our best to ignore the cold and rain. So tonight we'll be celebrating with a nice dinner here at home. Later this evening, we've got our regularly-scheduled RPG group (over video chat, obviously). We're going to play Orbital next week and try out my new digital play aids, but this week we're going to chill out and with something light-hearted to mark the end of mine and Jason's campaigns—and all the fun new music Chris is going to get to make!

Anyway, whatever you're doing today, I want to thank you once more for giving your support to my campaign and helping me bring this project to life. I'm hoping to move fairly quickly on getting things fulfilled, as we all could really do with another fun solo activity at the moment, right?

In a couple of weeks you'll get your BackerKit survey invite, and we'll go from there.

All the best,

Jack

UNLIMITED POWER!
about 3 years ago – Tue, Feb 16, 2021 at 06:20:54 PM

And by power, I mean Collector’s Editions. Let’s talk about it.*

What actually are the Collector’s Editions?

I’ve got a firmer answer to that question now, so let’s get specific. I might add stuff to this list depending on final costs and cool ideas, but here's the minimum you should expect:

Bucket of Bolts Collector’s Edition

• Bucket of Bolts A6 beak zine.
• Eight double-sided Risograph printed A6 sheets, including: an art print, a captain generator, a name generator and a bunch of other fun play aids and weird stuff.
• An A6 sticker sheet.
• An A6 custom notepad of Captain sheets, to record their stories.
• A nice little envelope to keep it all in.
• All the digital files.

Artefact Collector’s Edition

• Artefact A6 beak zine.
• Eight double-sided Risograph printed A6 sheets, with each of the nine playbooks and the bonus content.
• An A6 sticker sheet.
• An A6 custom notepad of Keeper sheets, to record their stories.
• A nice little envelope to keep it all in.
• All the digital files.

Why limit them in the first place?

The original plan was to assemble all 500 Bucket of Bolts Collector’s Editions ourselves (me & my wife) and pack them up for postage. This is because we’re both very specific about how we want the finished product to look, and with this many inserts a fulfilment company would either be too expensive or not up to our standard (or both). We took a deep breath when we added the 500 Artefact Collector’s Editions and 200 for both CEs, because we knew that meant even more work!

What’s changed?

The plan was always to have a fulfilment partner for the regular beak zines, as they’re fairly straightforward and as parents of young children with day jobs during a pandemic we don’t exactly have ample free time to spend putting things in envelopes…

What we realised this week, though, is that we could roughly half our workload if we assembled the Collector’s Editions ourselves but then boxed them up and sent them to the warehouse to be picked & packed by our fulfilment team. With that confidence, plus some conversations around ‘what do we even do all evening anyway?’, led us to this conclusion.

What’s the deal now?

• If you want either Collector’s Edition, upgrade your pledge before the campaign ends.
• If you want both Collector’s Editions, upgrade your pledge before the campaign ends.
• I don’t intend to offer any additional Collector’s Editions after the Kickstarter ends, even in BackerKit.
• If you want extra of either regular zine, you’ll be able to add them in BackerKit. You can add £8/zine now to your pledge if you like. You might pay a little more postage depending on how many you add and what else you have in your order.
• It’s also worth mentioning here that the shipping fees included are for untracked shipping. If you want tracked, you’ll be able to add that to your order in BackerKit (it should cost £2-3). With Orbital I made everyone do tracked and some people got mad because it’s more expensive. Now it’s your choice!

The support that you’ve all shown during this campaign has been incredible and, frankly, could mean I can think about making game design a bigger part of how we pay our bills. So yeah, thank you so much for making that a reality.

Cheers,

Jack

* look, I know we were gonna talk about paper today but I ran out of daylight to get a nice flat lay of all my fancy paper. maybe tomorrow?

paper
about 3 years ago – Tue, Feb 16, 2021 at 06:17:09 PM

We've passed 3,000 backers (!), and we've got two days left of the campaign. I thought it might finally be time to talk a little about... paper.

Getting Physical

I'm a print enthusiast. For me, there's something magical about holding something you've created in your hands as a real, tangible thing. I also find myself far more likely to bring games or supplements to the table if I've got a printed copy, rather than a file on my computer (big love to all of my Digital Edition backers though! 😅).

I also believe pretty strongly that if I'm gonna go to the trouble of making something material, I should make it:

• beautiful to look at,
• practical to use, and
• low impact on the environment.

That's why I'm so drawn to Risograph. Riso is an extremely environmentally friendly form of printing. It uses soy-based inks pushed through natural fibre stencils. The ink is wet and only dries when absorbed into the paper’s surface thus not requiring much energy to fix toner like a laser printer (thanks for the copy, Dizzy Ink!). It also looks sick as shit.

Of course, what you're printing on is also important. Riso can look wonderful on simple white paper, but it's really fun to play around with the way the inks blend on different shades of paper. I've also used metallic inks for my previous two projects, which sit really nicely on super-dark coloured paper and are stunning to look at in person. Paper can also have a big environmental cost. Artefact and Orbital were made with 90% recycled paper (the cover is virgin), thus limiting the number of trees we need to cut down to make them. Bucket of Bolts and the new beak format of Artefact will both be printed on G.F Smith Extract. To make Extract, they take 90% of the waste from coffee cups and convert it back into FSC certified paper fibre (the rest is plastic). Then they balance that with virgin fibres to make sure the paper is actually, y'know, nice.

Rainy Day Games

2020 was a big year for staying inside, often on your own or apart from your regular gaming group. There was a big buzz about solo RPGs and four of us, Anna, Chris, Matt and I, found ourselves in the same articles several times over the year. We started chatting, and Anna encouraged us to plan some projects as a collective.

The weather is rainy and cold today in England, perfect for cosying up with a nice cup of tea, a notebook and a game. It rains a lot in the UK, so we felt the most fitting name for our little collective was Rainy Day Games. 

We don't have much to announce at the moment, but you can follow our budding little Twitter account if you want to be the first to know what we've got planned 😉

If you want to learn a bit more about the four of us, we all have ZineQuest projects running at the moment. Why not check them out!

• Anna is funding Apothecaria, a solo RPG about being a village witch in a Ghibli-inspired fantasy world. This is extremely my bag! As if that wasn't enough, Christopher (of Artefact, Orbital and Bucket of Bolts soundtrack fame) is going to be writing original music for Anna's game too! Plus all the Rainy Day crew (including me) are writing stretch goal content. 

• Chris is funding D36, a quarterly zine of RPG content and mini-games to make the games you're already playing better and weirder. Think something like the Gauntlet's Codex magazine, filtered through the lens of a 16th-century monk who also dabbles in monster hunting. You should check out some of the sample spreads in the campaign updates, they're wild.

• Matt is funding Have You Heard About The Beast? & We Sail Beyond, two collaborative worldbuilding zines. Both of them have you use rumours & hearsay to cobble together fiction for your game—in the former it's a mythical beast, and in the latter you're making a hex map to explore.

-

Anyway, cheers everyone! I'll probably have time for one more update before the campaign is over. If there's anything you'd like me to cover, let me know!

Jack