Long Over Due Updates

Hey Friends,

Many of you may remember me from a few months back when I would post on this site like a crazy person, talking about my newest game Zodiak Legends and the rest of the Zodiak Universe tabletop games. I wanted to just take a moment and give you an update on where I am currently with my game and my progress.

I launched the Kickstarter on November 17th and got an excellent response from it! Donations came in like crazy and we hit $500 in just 3 days! I was really excited about the growth but then I began to notice small details that I gravely overlooked when forming a Kickstarter and I hope this will help many of you for future releases.

1. You need to pay taxes on what you collect unless you establish yourself as a business and take 0 profits from the donations.
This is really important to know because due to the timing of my KS I would end up having to claim and pay taxes on these collect funds before I even got to use them.

2. Rewards and budgeting. Rewards are fantastic and they work well to get people to donate but you need to make sure that you're not breaking even on donation amounts and rewards given. I found that I was actually bringing in less money with the higher rewards then the lower ones.

3. Think long term! My original goal I believe was low due to the holiday season; I wanted to have a reasonable KS. What I ended up overlooking is my long term goals. After I printed ordered copies of the game how would I continue to grow? I was looking at having only enough eactra to print maybe 15 copies after taxes, cost or rewards, POD, and shipping, plus the % that Amazon and KS take!

4. This was something so foolish and embarrassing...Use the proper terms to describe your game!!!!!!!!! Your credibility could be completely destroyed if you describe your game poorly. I noticed that on the site I wrote "Deck Building Game" when Zodiak Legends completely isn't! Yes you can build your own deck to play the game with but that term refers to particular type of game where the deck is built as the game goes on.

I then decided to cancel the KS until I'm able to do it right and show off my product in a more well thought out fashion.

I built a website for my game(s) called Zodiak Universe
www.ZodiakUniverse.com

I also reworked the game's overall design to make things a little easier to visually understand and I cut down on the number of required dice. The game use to use 18 dice which got cut down to 12 which now resides at 10!

When I Relaunch my KS this summer I'll also have all new rewards such as art books and T-shirts!

The only reason why this is taking so much time now is because game design can financially take a toll on you as well as eat up a lot of your time. I also got involved in working on a gaming website www.HashtagGaming.net as well as doing a weekly podcast called DMC Podcast (now on iTunes YAY! under #Gaming.net).

However I did get the chance to demo my game at PAX East at the Tabletop Arena booth! People seemed to really like it and they gave me some great feedback as well!

All in all I'm still working on this game and it is still very much my passion! I hope you guys will check out the Zodiak site and continue being supportive as you have been in the past.

Thanks Everyone!

Sincerely,
Daniel Lanza