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Jay103's blog

Scribus and making booklets for print

Mon, 07/23/2018 - 23:12 — Jay103
Heroes & Treasure Rule Book Cover

I bought Photoshop and I'm getting reasonably good at doing basic "game" stuff with it (not shopping photos). I got Inkscape and used it to lay out my tokens and cut paths.

But I might be most excited about learning Scribus. This is an open-source "equivalent" of Adobe InDesign, i.e. a layout tool.

Took a few hours a day for a week to get my 24-page campaign doc laid out, most of which was the learning curve. So then I decided to tackle a more complex document, namely my rule book.

Monster descriptions on cards

Thu, 06/28/2018 - 16:29 — Jay103
Heroes & Treasure Troll card

Instead of putting them in the rule book, I have my monsters (and players) described on tarot-sized cards (120x70mm). This provides easy reference during play, plus it's very clean to extend the set of monsters (or players) in expansion packs -- the deck just gets bigger.

I know I've said nice things about GIMP, but I actually bought Photoshop this week and it's indispensable for final layouts before things go to the printer.. (among other things, GIMP only works in RGB, not CMYK). Plus I can trade files easily back and forth with the artist.

Costs of Manufacturing and Fulfilling

Mon, 06/11/2018 - 16:10 — Jay103

I was doing the rough numbers, and I believe that if my Kickstarter ends at $25k, I will have just about exactly enough money to pay for the costs to finish readying the game for manufacturing, manufacturing, freight and customs, and fulfillment for the copies I need to deliver.

Doesn't include the money I spent before the KS, and of course my own time is valued at $0 both before and after.

I think shipping will be around $4500-5000. We'll see if I'm right.

Kickstarter gotchas

Fri, 06/08/2018 - 11:36 — Jay103

I spent quite a lot of time thinking about my rewards and stretch goals and manufacturing and shipping and how everything would work together. I'm confident that even if I'd sold 5000 copies, I wasn't going to add anything that would hurt me.

But it's very easy to hurt yourself with too much success, particularly with stretch goals. I was a backer of this Kickstarter campaign:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/599092525/the-order-of-the-stick-re...

Heroes & Treasure Kickstarter is LIVE

Tue, 05/08/2018 - 11:15 — Jay103

Very exciting.

If you'd like to see, it's at:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/727578181/heroes-and-treasure-rpg-b...

If you'd like to see it on BGG (and I could use your clicks..) it's at:

https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/251253/heroes-treasure

Thanks for any support, moral or otherwise!

Kickstarter is live in 24 hours!

Mon, 05/07/2018 - 10:28 — Jay103

I'm putting the KS preview link here, in case anyone would like to read it over for clarity and correctness, or to tell me that one of the graphics is messed up or something. Or if you're just curious after seeing all the other stuff I've been posting in this blog.

Comments are appreciated, but things like the pledge price and total goal are not going to change now.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/727578181/1579426585?ref=486511&tok...

Shipping

Thu, 05/03/2018 - 21:39 — Jay103

Oy, this is tough to get your head around. I'm using Quartermaster for my fulfillment, and they have a nice shipping cost chart that makes some unstated assumptions, so I needed to keep bugging them for clarification. Fortunately they're very responsive.

So I can ship to some places (Canada, EU, Australia) "customs friendly" by shipping to a warehouse there, paying the VAT, and then reshipping. What it costs to get a big crate of games to those warehouses is unspecified, but the rest is known.

Domain name redirects

Sat, 04/28/2018 - 19:11 — Jay103

So I think I got all this right.. I have my domain name registered through GoDaddy, and my landing page is at KickoffLabs.

I can create CNAM entries at GoDaddy for custom subdomains, like

foo.heroesandtreasure.com

to push it over to KickoffLabs, the same way the regular www.heroesandtreasure.com is sent over there (i.e. using a CNAM entry). There's no apparently limit to how many of these I can make.

Heroes & Treasure Component List

Mon, 04/23/2018 - 15:50 — Jay103
everything in Heroes and Treasure_0.jpg

This was asked in response to an earlier post.. This is from my KS page:

The game system consists of:

8-page color Quest Master's Rule Book
24-page Campaign booklet, with 10 dungeon levels.
11 Custom six-sided attack dice (in 7 designer colors)
12 Double-sided large map tiles for rooms and corridors
A deck of reference cards describing all the character classes and all the monsters in the campaign
Characters in 4 classes (male and female)
13 types of monster (with three difficulty levels each)

My Rulebook

Tue, 04/17/2018 - 16:41 — Jay103

Okay, I'm putting this here first, in case anyone would like to make any suggestions. I'm open to any constructive criticism from "I hate your art" to "What kind of stupid layout is that?" to "This probably isn't much fun"...

I'm probably going to pull out the Table of Contents.. wasted space, and I want it to fit in 8 pages total as well.

The graphic design is what's known in the industry as "me typing in MS Word", so don't expect too much :) I will have it done more professionally before it ships.

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