How I Successfully Released My Board Game

today's episode is brought to you by squarespace over three years ago i created a roguelike board game while i was in college at first it just was a fun project that i was doing for my friends but then i was surprised to quickly see that people were interested in this game that's when i recruited one of my close friends brad to help with the project now it took us a couple years to develop but when we did release it we end up selling a couple hundred copies unfortunately like most things the initial hype started to die out for the game and eventually we kind of drifted away from the project now if this story sounds a little bit familiar that's because i'm talking about the keep roguelike board game and i did a whole video on it earlier this year and if that's the case why am i doing another video on it now well i wanted to talk about everything that's happened since that video and believe me there's a lot and i also want to talk about the future of the keep for those who are still interested so without further ado let's get started i mentioned that i created a video talking about the keep and its story now the funny thing about that video is that was supposed to be kind of the farewell to the game at that point no one was really buying copies are interested in it so i thought hey i'm going to tell the story because i'm proud of this game and we'll put it out there if people want to buy the copies that's fine but after that the keep is dead boy was i wrong within the first three hours of the video being live we sold the rest of the keep copies i was shocked people were sending me angry messages asking where they could buy the game and you know what i had no idea what to do so he made a petition my thought is that would be a way that we could find how many people were interested in buying the game so we could do a kickstarter in a week or two and i don't know if it was the petition or just the video itself but the video blew up and is one of my most popular videos on this channel and that's when i knew that we needed to revive the keep and this time we'd put it on kickstarter now if you don't know what the keep is for some reason it's a roguelike board game where you actually have to build out the map each turn your goal is to search and find a key before you find the key everyone's friendly and you have a fun time collecting items but after the key everyone turns on each other and your goal is to do one thing and that's to get to the gate as fast as humanly possible and one thing i love about it is that no two games are quite the same okay so now that you know a little bit about the game and the setting up for the kickstarter you're probably wondering how it all turned out in the end so once we finally released the kickstarter we were funded within 24 hours not only that but we ended up raising a total of 36 000 which is phenomenal it allowed us to add custom dice and new keep links to the game which really adds so much okay so we had a successful kickstarter but that would make for a boring video if we only talked about that so i want to share one of the mistakes that i made during this kickstarter so maybe you can avoid it if you do one in the future but before we do that a word from today's sponsor squarespace making your own website or online store can be a huge pain in the butt from scratch believe me i've done it many times before and the best way to cut the hassle is to use squarespace from selling your products online making a portfolio or gallery of your work or even something as tedious as image scaling is so much easier and saves you so much time with squarespace as the internet expands i truly believe that everyone should have internet real estate but creating your own website doesn't mean you have to be disconnected from social media with squarespace you can connect your social profiles so that way you can instantly post on different platforms making it fantastic and easy to post your new product or game make sure to go check out squarespace.com for a free trial and when you're ready you're all set to launch go to squarespace.com goodguess to save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain one of the biggest issues we had during all of this was trying to figure out fulfillment if you've ever done shipping before it could be a huge pain in the butt so when we first thought about doing this we thought hey let's have our printers actually do all the fulfillment for us so we can just do the kickstarter and not have to do all the grunt work that's all fine and dandy for people in the u.s but when it came to shipping stuff out of the country our printers wanted to charge 65 for shipping per game which is insane so we thought how about we only make this in the us well that also was a huge mistake too because there's a lot of people overseas that watch these videos and that would want a copy so we quickly got a lot of comments of people saying hey at least give us the option so sure enough when the kickstarter launched we had a ton of complaints from people that were just so mad about the price and like i said i don't blame you whatsoever don't mind me i'm just hiding from the angry mob outside so instead we found out that if we shipped out the copies ourselves we could cut the price tag in half which in my mind was a lot better but it also meant a ton of work for us one of the most important things for me is that you guys can play and enjoy the games and that means if i have to do some extra work in order for you guys to play it then that's what i'm gonna do let's ship out some games so instead of the printers shipping out the copies we actually got the mail to our house and boy i didn't realize how many 600 plus copies would be and we literally filled an entire room just full of kickstarter stuff also have you ever tried to mail out over 600 packages how do you do it do you take it at the post office do you just walk in and hand it to him there's so many little details that you don't even think about until you actually have to do it so i get the fair team together and we literally spent eight hours straight one day just packaging games and loading them up so we could go to the post office and then we had to go into a loading bay to drop off all these copies which i've never done before in my life and it was a very surreal experience and i actually got a tour of the post office which was sweet so i guess what i'm trying to say by all this is a lot of times when you do a kickstarter you don't realize how much work things are going to be copies are going to be more expensive than you think they are mailing is going to be more pricey or strange or harder to do than you think it's gonna be so if you're looking to do your own kickstarter make sure to keep those things in mind as they can be scary when you have a lot of money and you're in the middle of it now if you don't have your copy of the keep yet and you didn't fill out the survey on kickstarter please make sure to do it otherwise we can't send you your copy okay so i kind of told you the story about the success we had with the keep but what's next what if you missed the kickstarter what if you still want the game well we're doing everything we possibly can to make the game available we made a print and play version that you can buy on our hio page we also would love to release more physical copies but our printer just isn't reliable and is really expensive so if you know anyone who can print well let me know and the third and final way we want to release the keep is through tabletop simulator now here's the thing we've actually been in contact with tabletop simulator and they actually want to work with us or at least that's what they said to us about six months ago but we haven't heard from them since so what i figured is that we should do another petition a petition to get the keep on tabletop simulator so if you'd like to see the keep on tabletop simulator as official dlc make sure to go in the description below and to sign the change.org petition for it it helps so much and it's completely free to do the keep has a bright future because of all of you guys and all of your support i have six expansion ideas already in my head new keeplings booster packs maybe eventually we can even host tournaments with prizes i have so many ideas but i just want to thank everyone for making the keep possible if it wasn't for you guys i wouldn't be able to make this video today and the keep would still be sitting on my shelf sad and lonely so i want to ask you guys have you played the keep do you like it what's your thoughts on it would you like to see it come back what sort of expansions do you think would be cool let me know in the comments down below i love reading your guys's comments i reply to every single one of them so thank you so much also just a huge shout out to rye bread james albert heath sargent and skye's and the rest of the fantastic patreon supporters that really make these videos possible you guys are fantastic and i appreciate you so much anyway that's it for me today i hope you guys have a wonderful rest of your week and i'll see you next time for another game dev adventure [Music] you

Channel: Goodgis

Views: 173,766

Keywords: goodgis, ohio, devlog, game dev, indie dev, game programming, game process, how to make, firith, firith studio, Godot Game Engine, gamedev, board game, kickstarter, roguelike

Id: nVk8Ov-ZYmA

Length: 8min 33sec (513 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 05 2022