Inkwell Ideas 2018 Year In Review
Just like 2017, 2018 was another year Inkwell Ideas grew by focusing on making tools that help you make your games better!
And as 2017’s biggest achievement was getting Worldographer (Hexographer 2) released, 2018’s biggest achievement was getting the City/Village mapping functionality of Cityographer integrated with Worldographer. One big goal for 2019 will be to integrate the battlemat/dungeon functionality of Dungeonographer into Worldographer in the same way while we shake out bugs in all of that.
Related to that, we restarted our Patreon of new map icons by bringing Keith Curtis on board. He’s been doing a great job putting out new icon sets each month, and we’ve been able to rely on him to do other work for us as well.
We delivered 2017’s 5e Magic Item Card Kickstarter on time in early 2018 and later in the year did a new Kickstarter for more of our best-selling (for us) Sidequest Decks. Those are likewise set to finish and deliver on time early this year.
Our 5e Creature Decks continued to expand with new decks focused on creatures from Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts and new Creature Codex. We’ve got more of those coming as well.
We expanded the number of conventions we exhibit at during 2018. Last year we added GaryCon and PAX Unplugged. Both were very good for us and much less stressful than GenCon. In 2019 we’ll be at both of those conventions, but we won’t be exhibiting at GenCon. The costs there are just getting too high. Plus the cap on exhibit space and limited hotel rooms add to the stress of exhibiting at that convention as well as our ability to make a good impression. We may still attend GenCon and work with another company that stocks our product there.
In last year’s round up I wrote our biggest failing is self-promotion. We got a little better at that thanks to move videos on YouTube, but it is still a weakness. Tied for biggest weaknesses though are probably my response time when people email questions and secondly debugging new releases. I’ve got a few good candidates to help with the latter issue who I need to follow up with. I hope to be more disciplined to email back faster. For self-promotion, I want to do more free articles and tools and previews that relate to our other tools. This blog has been 80% posts about the Patreon it seems, and I’d like to vary that a lot more.
One big failure for us was not doing a new DungeonMorph Kickstarter. Part of the reason for that is wanting to develop it into a game of its own (while still maintaining the utility and original purpose of the dice/cards/designs). The other reason for the delay is simply being busy with all the other projects above. I’m 99% sure we’ll do it in 2019.
