Inkwell Ideas 2016 In Review

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2016 has been a difficult year in a lot of ways, but as for Inkwell Ideas it has been our best year ever! Looking strictly at numbers, we grew by a very healthy rate and our expenses went down.

But how did that success happen?  Word of our easy to use software (Hexographer, Cityographer, Dungeonographer, and the Coat of Arms Design Studio) continued to spread and those sales actually went up, despite none of these being new products.  This is definitely thanks to everyone who blogged about the programs, created a video, those who tried it out and found it worthwhile to buy, etc. Thank you!

In the beginning of the year, soon after the release of the 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons SRD we launched the Kickstarter for the 5th Edition versions of our Creature Decks.  This added a good bit of new art to our collection and we met goals to create a total of seven decks–4 with official SRD creatures and 3 with creatures converted from prior editions.  A few were delivered in March, with the rest by June. They have continued to sell well. (If you’re a retail store, send us an email at support at inkwellideas dot com, or order them through Indy Press Revolution.)
Once that completed, we turned our attention on our Kickstarter for the upcoming Hexographer 2/Worldographer. The Kickstarter was our best ever! We’re deep into developing that and still expect to release it in February.  We’re not likely to start anything big soon after it is released in order to have some more time to make it even better.

However, we do have ideas for new projects!  It is always difficult to decide which to do next.

Resolutions:
  • I’ve always felt behind on some things, so I didn’t post as often as I’d like or reply to messages as quickly as I’d like. So the plan is to make fewer big commitments by making more progress on projects before revealing them.  This should allow more time to be more prompt.
  • Meet up with other game designers more often.  Steve Russell and I had been meeting for lunches bi-weekly for half of the year until he moved back to Ohio (then soon thereafter passed away). These were a great way to talk about some industry trends, best ways to do some things, etc.  I hope to find others in the northern VA/Washington DC area.
  • Game more often. I’m in one almost weekly game session, but I’d like to get going on another.
  • Post about other game products that are using our software.
  • Keep improving our free tools.
  • Keep creating our other fun, useful products.
  • Experiment with a better on-line store technology for the Inkwell Ideas website.
  • Get back to doing our Patreon project.  We put it on Hiatus while we work on Worldographer, but as soon as that’s released, we’ll pick the Patreon back up.
  • Get our PDFs into more on-line stores and get our other products into more stores as well.