Highmoon's Ponderings

Things are starting to move after a busy summer travel season. Today I went to Miami Dade College Medical Campus to get advised on the Accelerated Nursing Program.

I have all the pre-requisite classes I need (actually, better than what they ask for, as I took them at FIU and there the classes are more challenging) and the pre-requisite degree needed for the Accelerated program. I have been reactivated in the MDC system as a student (I graduated MDC in 1999!) and have ordered my official FIU transcript to be sent to MDC. All that is left is taking the TEAS (Test of Essential Academic Skills – yes, it sounds dumb that I have to take this after having taken the HESI, which is far more difficult and specialized for Nursing, but that’s what they want), which I am doing next Friday the 26th.

I am still sending in my application to both Nova and Barry Universities as well, just in case. The ideal outcome here is that one of them will accept me and I can start next Spring!

I’ll update as things fall into place.

Last week at Gen Con, I had a chance to both run and play Lady Blackbird once more, which was just great. I played this little game extensively a couple of years ago and it never ceases to amaze me how much a few pages can deliver. After running it, I was talking to some friends at the lobby of the Embassy Suites about the game, comparing notes on how we ran the game, and I made the observation that for me, Lady Blackbird really sings when you have all the characters in one location, with their agendas out in the open where they can see how much at cross-purposes they are. After that it’s just a matter of seating back and enjoying the ensuing show.

Later, as I went back to thinking about Princess, Jock & Nerd, it occurred to me that the Lady Blackbird format would be a really amazing and simple way of doing this The Breakfast Club game since that is exactly what the movie is about: putting these characters in one location and letting them interact with each other. This was confirmed in my mind as I played the game on the last day of the con and then spoke about it some more with more people, including some of my players from the weekend.

I mentioned this on Twitter and immediately the idea was both liked and supported. It makes sense; Lady Blackbird is an experiment on character interaction at its core and fits well the theme and format of the movie.

So that’s what I’m doing now, turning The Breakfast Club into a Lady Blackbird hack that can be played quickly and in a short period of time, which fits my design goals to a T. In addition, Sean Nittner of the Narrative Control podcast issued me a challenge to have this done by the end of September so he can run it at Big Bad Con in Oakland, CA, which works for me as it lights a fire under my butt to get this done quickly. To that end, I’m just gonna go straight into writing, as opposed to blogging the process as I go along.

I’m starting it all by cheating, though.

Read more…

Yesterday, August 8th, was the second anniversary of my mother’s death. I spent it flying, mostly, and getting ready for the fast of Tisha B’Av. To be honest, it almost slipped by me.

Much like last year, the anniversary came during Gen Con, arguably my happiest geekiest time of the year. Last year, however, I was in a very bad place emotionally and personally. Gen Con was an escape, literally, from everything except from myself. It also being the first anniversary, it hit me really hard. I remember being piss drunk at 3AM, the time when she died, and wandering the streets looking for ways to further my descent.^[1]

That wasn’t the case this year. I am a very different person one year later. I went through almost a year of therapy and some crucibles that changed me and made me the healthier person I am now. So when Sunday night rolled around and I was just packing and thinking about the transportation in the early morning to the airport, it suddenly felt like a cold splash/slap when I looked at the clock and saw that it was just past 2AM. I almost, almost, had let it pass unnoticed, unmarked. I kept packing and 3AM rolled around. I did a small prayer and thought about her at that precise moment.

I felt somewhat guilty that I almost forgot about it. The alternative of being like I was last year was not appealing, either. Had I been there at that dark spot, it would’ve meant wasting a lot of therapy and blood, sweat and tears. Not to mention that I know my mom wouldn’t like it a bit. But then again, almost having that moment slip by because I was concerned with frivolities was maybe too much. And I realize I am beating myself too hard here.

The truth is this: it is now two years since my mom died, and I still miss her terribly so. The last two Gen Cons I find it bizarre that I’m not taking a moment each night to call her and tell her about my day at the con. The week before heading out to Indy, as I returned home from work, I had that urge to call her in the afternoon after work, something I hadn’t experienced in months. Though I now go through life normally, there are times when this hits me again, and I just need to power through it and move along. I am ok, I really am, but I also have a hole within me since the day she died that won’t be filled in ever again. I’ve learned to live with it, but sometimes, just sometimes, it hurts.

To my mom, whom I loved and still love like only a son can love his mother. I miss you.

1. ^[1] Strangely enough, it was precisely at this time that I met with Ryan Macklin and he offered me This Just In… From Gen Con for 2011. ↩

I’m off to Gen Con in a couple hours. If you want to know what I’m up to there and my schedule, just head over to This Just In… From Gen Con and check the show schedule, because that is the one place where I will be for sure each day of the con. Other than that, I will be roaming and having a great time.

If you have my phone number, feel free to text me to get in touch with me. If not, use Twitter or email.

Gotta run!

On July 17 the IndieGoGo crowdfunding campaign for This Just In… From Gen Con closed and we successfully managed to reach our goal, which made both Rich (my co-host) and I extremely happy.

There has been a lot of attention this year on crowdfunding gaming projects, with Kickstarter being the overwhelming choice of crowdfunding swervice provider. For TJI we decided to go with a different service, IndieGoGo, and given there hasn’t been that much talk about this website I wanted to talk about my experience using it.

Both Kickstarter and IndieGoGo are crowdfunding sites giving project managers the tools to hold such campaigns. The biggest difference between them is in the manner in which they handle funds contributed: Kickstarter is a pledge-driven site where unless the set goal is met no funds are disbursed to the project creator, while IndieGoGo is a donation-driven site where funds are disbursed immediately to the creator, with a small bonus if the goal is met before the deadline.

Why IndieGoGo?

The first question I get asked is, why did we go with IndieGoGo? Kickstarter has a lot of brand recognition in gaming circles due to some high profile projects having reach record-setting funds.^[1] This decision was one Rich and I discussed at length, trust me. In the end we chose IndieGoGo for one big reason: every gaming-related crowdfunding campaign so far has been for a book, ours would be for a media project.

In short, I wasn’t 100% sure that we would be able to meet our funding goal. With Kickstarter, if we hadn’t, we wouldn’t get any of the pledged funds, meaning our entire strategy of going for fan support instead of corporate backing would’ve backfired and quite likely TJI would not have happened. With IndieGoGo, even if we didn’t meet our goal, whatever was donated was immediately given to us, so we could count with some funds at least.

Did using IndieGoGo hurt us? Hard to say. I know I had to do a lot more explaining about what IndieGoGo was than had we used Kickstarter (and usually I defaulted to, “It’s another website like Kickstarter.”), though the fact that Graham Walmsley had recently completed successfully a campaign on IndieGoGo for his book, Stealing Cthulhu, meant there was some name recognition out there already. I also don’t know to what extend the way funds are handled by IndieGoGo affected our campaign. I have heard/read comments that people prefer the pledge model to the instant donation, but I have no concrete evidence to support that and no comment was ever said to me to that effect (though I’d love to know if that is the case).

Goal Met!

In the end we met our goal and even passed it by 33%. I was pleased as punch, honestly, and humbled that people did believe in us enough to give us their money for a product that is topical and of limited duration (unlike, say, a game book). We set a number of reward levels so there would be something for everyone (a lesson I have learned from seeing other crowdfunding projects), and even so on the first day we had a suggestion to modify one of our levels (Sponsor) to make it more affordable and in the end better for us.

The pattern learned from other campaigns, a lot of action at the beginning and the end with a slow-but-steady stream in the middle, held true. We got our first backer in less than an hour after launching and our first Sponsor on the first day. We picked up our Patron before the first week was over. Along the way we had a good number of backers in the default $10 level and the “deluxe” $50, and right at the end, with two days to go, we picked up three Sponsors, including a local Indy business! We even had one backer upgrade to Sponsor level (see below about upgrading) and then cede that slot to a favorite company.

We also sweetened the rewards by reaching out to friends in the game design community. I first reached out to Jeremy Keller, whose Technoir RPG was just about to close when we launched, and asked if he would be interested in helping us out. Jeremy agreed and we added an exclusive Indianapolis Transmission for Technoir^[2] to our $10 reward level. I then reached out to David A. Hill, Jr, whose Guestbook RPG provided the perfect opportunity for a neat exclusive reward given its single-page-character all-you-need format. Rich’s co-host on The Voice of the Revolution, Brennan Taylor, then jumped in with a new adventure for his new sci-fi RPG, Bulldogs!, and a new campaign frame for Mortal Coil. These were all added to the $10 reward level in order to make that level enticing. Lastly, Chris Perrin offered a full PDF copy of his MECHA RPG to all $50 reward level backers, as well as a custom-made setting supplement to the Patron level.

We ended up with 48 backers, broken down by levels as follows:

• Fan of the Show ($5): 4 [one upgraded to Friend]
• Friend of the Show ($10): 26
• Supporter of the Show ($50): 9 [one upgraded to Sponsor]
• Sponsor of the Show ($125): 6/7
• Patron of the Show ($500):  1/1

The Tools

I have not used Kickstarter so my comparison here is based on what I have seen as a backer of other campaigns.

Overall IndieGoGo was very easy to use and provided good tools to manage the campaign. Setting up the campaign was a matter of filling out a series of blanks over a number of tabs/categories, ensuring I hit all the necessary information. The hardest part was coming up with all the reward levels but that’s gonna be an issue for any campaign regardless of site used, I think. Financial info setup was extremely easy as I was using PayPal as my account; I had also the option of using a bank account but PayPal just made things a lot easier, especially as final funds for the campaign would be divided among three people. This is one of the biggest differences with Kickstarter, which uses only Amazon Payments.^[3]

Once the campaign launched, I had tools to promote it right from the campaign page, including sending out notices to social media, embedding widgets (see the image above), and sending emails. I could also create Updates that would post on the site and go out via email to all backers, as well as a section for Comments, which allowed us a way to interact with our backers more publicly. The dashboard has a little To-Do link that keeps you updated on things to do to promote your campaign when it launches and as it progresses, which I found handy. We also received some help from IndieGoGo via their Twitter account, which both re-tweeted one of our tweets and then featured us as the Twitter Campaign of the Day on July 7th.

The dashboard let me track all funds by backer/reward level and also kept track of all the backer’s info which I could then export to a CSV spreadsheet. Since funds donated are immediately disbursed, I could keep track of all backings as they happened via email. The funds would go into my PayPal account,^[4] the fees to IndieGoGo would be automatically paid via PayPal as well, freeing me from having to calculate and remember to pay them. IndieGoGo’s fee is 9% of any funds donated; if you meet your goal before deadline, they give you back 5%, effectively making their fee only 4%. PayPal charges its own fees on all payments as well, which would vary whether the payment was made via PayPal balance or credit card. In general, we got about 90% of the funds donated, the other 10% being fees.

There were two drawbacks that I found dealing with IndieGoGo:

1. No Way to Upgrade: Because IndieGoGo deals with actual money disbursed and not pledges, upgrading between reward levels isn’t as easy as with Kickstarter. I offered the option to upgrade by telling people to donate the difference between their current level and the one they wanted to upgrade to, and making a comment about their intent. I had to keep track of that info myself, as the comments were not a field included in the info gathered by the dashboard. Thankfully there were only two upgrades so it was easy. I would like to see IndieGoGo address this. The system can track what you already funded, so it would be a matter of adding the option to add the difference to a higher reward level.^[5] A lot of potential money is left on the table because this option cannot be exploited, and I have seen firsthand how effective it can be in some Kickstarter campaigns.
2. No Way to Contact Backers Post-Campaign: Updates do indeed go out via email to all backers, but post-campaign you sometimes need to get in touch with them for info like their shirt sizes, mailing address, etc, which you ideally want to do in private. As a Kickstarter backer, I know that website offers the option of sending out an email with a questionnaire where all this info can be requested. IndieGoGo had no tool for this; actually, it had no tool to email all my backers, period. I had to download the CSV spreadsheet and gather the emails myself, then send out batches of BCC emails to my different groups of backers asking for their info. This was tedious, especially because I know it can be done by the service provider. This is another feature I truly hope they implement as soon as possible.

Overall I was very happy with IndieGoGo when all was said and done, and would probably run another campaign using their service if their particular set of features were the best match for my project.

Observations

There were two holes in our reward levels we did not exploit: between the $10 Friend and $50 Supporter levels, and between the $50 Supporter and the $125 Sponsor level. That’s something to keep in mind for the future: don’t leave gaping holes like that open, offer something there as an option.

I was actually very surprised that we did not have more backers at the $10 Friend level. I set that one as default and piled on as many as the rewards as I could on that level because I wanted to make it an affordable and attractive option. In terms of net profit, the $5 was better for us, since with fees and rewards costs taken out the $10 was really netting us about $6-ish, but I also wanted to give something back to the backers. Yes, we did get 26 backers at that level, but I thought we would get a lot more.

We did end up with one Sponsor slot “unsold” which surprised us, given the relatively low price to promote your product to a fairly good number of listeners in a target market.

I would’ve loved to have seen our campaign soar over the set goal like many other ones have, but I wasn’t really expecting it as it goes back to the reason why we went with IndieGoGo in the first place. Rich and I also thought that we would get totally funded within the first week–two weeks tops–but it wasn’t until the end of the third week that we met our goal. Again, this goes back to the reason why we chose IndieGoGo at all.

It will be interesting to see how other non-book gaming-related crowdfunding projects do in the future. I don’t think we set any records or broke new ground here, but we did prove that it is possible to do with the right project.

Breakdown

Final Funding: $2025
IndieGoGo Fees: -$182.25
PayPal Fees:  -$78.03
IndieGoGo 5% Bonus: +$101.25
Rewards Expenses: -$683.90^[6]
Net Total: $1182.07

The Net Total is to be divided between Rich, Ryan and myself (I will keep the percentages private as I’ve not cleared with the other two). I don’t think we would have gotten this kind of funding had we gone with seeking traditional corporate sponsors, even though the work involved in making the show does deserve that kind of backing, if not more. Once funds are divided, both Rich and I are getting more than what Ryan did in previous years^[7], which, while it doesn’t cover our entire Gen Con travel & rooming expense, does help significantly.^[8]

Thanks to all our backers, from our hearts. I hope that you will all enjoy this season of This Just In… From Gen Con because I am very much looking forward to bringing it to you.

If there’s any other question you have about our IndieGoGo campaign, please just ask in the comments and I’ll answer it as honestly as I can.

1. ^[1] Daniel Solis’ Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple and Happy Birthday, Robot; Jeremy Keller’s Technoir. ↩
2. ^[2] Though this Transmission is indeed exclusive to our campaign, all Technoir Transmissions are released under Creative Commons licensing, so there will be ways to get it even if you did not participate in our campaign. ↩
3. ^[3] For non-US residents, IndieGoGo is the only option, as Kickstarter also requires a US-based bank account. ↩
4. ^[4] E-checks, of which we got one, take a couple days to clear, but that’s a PayPal end-of-things issue, not an IndieGoGo one. ↩
5. ^[5] I say this not knowing a fig about what it would take to code this feature, but I am sure it can be done. ↩
6. ^[6] Shirts, stickers, artwork, shipping. ↩
7. ^[7] Funny enough, even though Ryan is getting a smaller percentage than Rich and I–I consider it a Licensing Fee for the TJI brand–he’s making almost as much as he made last year with a miniscule fraction of the work involved. That should give you a ballpark idea of how little was being charged for sponsoring TJI. ↩
8. ^[8] At least in my case, it accounts for about half of my expenses. ↩

Between the end of June and beginning of July I spent a week in Seattle with my wife and our great friend Lari and it was a blast. It had been almost 3 years since the last time I was up there and it honestly felt like going back home.

This time around, since this was Lari’s first time in the Emerald City, we did a few touristy things we hadn’t the last two times we visited, starting with going all the way up to the Space Needle. It had been overcast when we arrived but what do you know, a couple hours in, the sun started to shine and we got some wonderful views of Seattle and Puget Sound from 605 feet in the air.

Of course we also hit some places we had visited already, like Pike Place Market and Pioneer Square, where we did the Underground Tour once more and enjoyed it greatly again. We also hit our favorite bar, the Pike Brewery, as well as have that great Ovaltine Latte at Top Pot Doughnuts. We also found new favorites, like the Nutella Mocha at Bedlam Coffee in Belltown, where we were staying at the Seattle City Hostel. We visited Bamboo Garden quite a bit, given it is the only kosher place to eat in Downtown Seattle, but also made it out to Noah’s Bagels in U District and to Pabla Indian Cuisine in Issaquah. We even went to the Seattle International Beer Festival, my first, where we tried fantastic brews I would normally not get in the east coast!

July 4th we spent with our local friends John and Patricia (of CookLocal.com) and had amazing fried pizza and BBQ burgers cooked on their Big Green Egg, then watched the fireworks from a nearby I-5 overpass. We visited other great coffee houses like A Muddy Cup (their Red, White and Blue coffee was a-ma-zing!) and Bottleworks, a beer store with a small bar inside that I wanted to put in my pocket and take with me.

We also took a day-trip on the ferry (yay!) and visited Bainbridge Island, which was just so beautiful!

I missed seeing a lot of people in Seattle. A lot. It dawned on me as I kept getting queries over Twitter and Facebook how many people I know up there. I even ran into a fellow gamer at Bainbridge’s Fort Ward State Park who lives a couple streets away and came down to say hi when he saw my check-in on Foursquare (I love it when social media works as intended). In truth I would have needed at least another week just to be able to see all my friends up there.

It was a great trip, and it reminded me why is it that I wanna move up there. It is a beautiful city, with personality, chilled out yet modern, firmly places between urbanity and nature. It renewed my desire to move in the next few years for sure.

You can check out the pics on my Seattle 2011 Flickr set.