State of Inkwell Ideas

It seems that doing a “State of the Company” address is getting popular. Mongoose Publishing has done it for a while, Evil Hat has also (along with quarterly updates), and I saw Adamant Entertainment and Rite Publishing did one within the past couple of days as well. (I’m not sure when they started.)

I think it is important to be clear about a point for this “State of the Company” message. I think all of them have a desire to be transparent, to one degree or another. In our case, we also want feedback:

What went well and what didn’t in your eyes?
What do you think of the products we’re planning?
If you’re in the industry (whether you’re big or small) and see a way to work with us, please drop me a message. support@inkwellideas.com is the email I prefer to post publicly. While sometimes the timing can prevent something from working out, we very much try to think win/win on projects.
If you see something we can do better (a different way to use a product, some business strategy we should adopt) please let us/me know!

I’d like to start with one of the latest things we’re working on: our new/current Kickstarter “Creature and Encounter Cards.” I’m really excited about this because I think it is rare for there to be a deck of great fantasy art trading cards with game stats on the backs. And now technology (a custom program I’ve written and print-on-demand cards that *are* high quality) makes it relatively easy to do the cards in multiple varieties with multiple game system’s stats on the backs of each. We’ll have them with blank backs, backs with system neutral info, 1E Fantasy/Labyrinth Lord, 3.75 or 3.5 Fantasy, Dungeon World, and likely more. (Maybe FATE and/or RuneQuestII/Legend.) The encounter cards are a great sister product to make random encounters faster & better or to stock a hex crawl. You can see some on the linked Kickstarter page and I expect to have more samples soon.

Sticking with Kickstarter, we’ve had a couple of failures and in more ways than one. Early in 2012 we launched a product to put cardstock minis on credit card plastic. It also offered the art as stock art for other publishers. Unfortunately a few days after it launched another much larger company announced a similar product, albeit on chip board. I’m not sure if that was the primary issue or if it was the natural Kickstarter pledging cycle, but interest fell off. Then the manufacturer I planned to use stopped being responsive. Due to those two factors I cancelled the project, but relaunched a revised version.

The revised project was to do the minis as a PDF & offer them printed on cardstock and laminated. It was funded and hit a couple of stretch goals. The finished product went out on time for most people (stock art and those not requesting organizer boxes.) Backers who asked for the boxes had to wait a couple of extra weeks for that manufacturer to send them to me.

I was reasonably happy with that project and because I love fantasy art and had another use for the art later, Inkwell Ideas did a similar project with new creatures. Unfortunately, it failed to fund. A couple of backers from the prior project were very kind to candidly tell me that the laminated cardstock was too thin. Plus, the mix of monsters in the new project was less desirable. So I moved on to the other use I had for the fantasy art: the new Creature & Encounter Cards project mentioned above.

I’d like to share three Kickstarter mistakes with everyone:

With the successful cardstock minis Kickstarter art and an upcoming trip to exhibit at GenCon, I thought it would be worthwhile to get the cardstock minis printed on 4″x3″ cards. The minimum print run was 500 decks… At GenCon I’d be shocked if we sold 50. (And I’d be shocked if we’ve sold more than 50 in the 6 months since then.) That’s partly a Kickstarter lesson and partly a lesson in what you can expect to sell on your own if you’re not plugged into game distribution. For the record, another more established game software publisher I spoke with said he has never sold more than 200 copies of anything at GenCon. I’m sure the bigger game publishers do sell more of a new title, but Inkwell Ideas isn’t in that boat yet.
Another Kickstarter was to make an isometric dungeon map poster from a chart of tabletop role-playing games. (There was also a planned computer RPG version as well.) It failed to fund. But because I had paid for half the art to preview it and loved the idea finished the art and had 500 printed in time for GenCon. (Thanks Keith Curtis for scrambling to finish it!) While many, many people who passed our booth at GenCon stopped to have a look we probably sold only 15 copies. We have sold more than that since, but it has been slow going. However, this is a project I want to get in stores. My local game shop was nice enough to try it out recently, and it has sold out there twice already. I think it can do well overall once more people see it.
Another mistake that I think we’ve been able to avoid is the idea of piling on rewards. If you see a project struggling as a project creator you want to try to sweeten the pot to gain more interest. However, because you likely picked a minimum project goal it is hard to find incentives that still fit the budget. Don’t give in to the pull to add another thing that will likely cause you to lose money on the project. That doesn’t really help anyone and unless you *know* you have other ways to sell the product you can’t count on making up the loss. As mentioned above it has been my experience that sales after the Kickstarter are an order of magnitude smaller. (If you’re already set up with a game distributor this may be different.)

Cityographer was our other very successful Kickstarter. It is mapping software tailored for making cities and villages. It also includes data generation so you can click on a store and see its inventory/prices or see the owners/staff, see the residents of every house, etc. It is late, but it has been my experience that as long as you keep everyone updated, people will be patient and kind. If it goes for another 6 months that patience may be tested, but I do expect to provide the alpha in the next couple of weeks! 🙂 This patience also may be different because it is software. A large part of the delay has been due to refactoring the overall architecture more than originally planned. However, this results in a program that I’ll be able to maintain for a longer period of time without a significant rewrite.

Our flagship products, Hexographer and Dungeonographer have continued to sell as well as they ever have. I keep waiting to see interest fall off as everyone who may want a copy has one, but it seems more people see them for the first time every day. That said, the architecture rewrite that was done for Cityographer will likely get ported to Hexographer and Dungeonographer in the not too distant future. This will allow for some long delayed features such as undo, copy/paste, and saving/loading to an easier to work with XML format. I have great plans for ways to expand the functionality as well.

Our other flagship product the Coat of Arms Design Studio has likewise continued to maintain interest. However, we’re evaluating ways to revamp it and make it faster, easier to use and access.

I want to wrap up by thanking everyone who has supported us, but I should highlight several people:

The reliable and high quality artists I’ve used over the past year: