Hello, dear customers who ordered over the weekend! I was very busy marrying my BFF and business partner, Shreyas. I’ve sent the PDFs along with an apology and a little gift. Please forgive me, and let me know if you do not receive yours.
By popular demand, you can now purchase just the PDF of Blowback for $10.
So let’s look at the costs for Blowback, broken down by the initial list I posted in October:
Game Text and Editing: $0
I wrote the game myself. Ryan Macklin provided some excellent structural advice, but due to poor communication on my end, our schedules got all fucked up and I wasn’t able to fully avail myself of his editing prowess. More’s the pity, but the advice he gave me radically changed the structure of the text for the better. Additional editing was farmed out to my heroes Vincent Baker, Graham Walmsley, and Jonathan Walton out of the kindness of their hearts. I sent out the PDF with preorder, with a note that asked readers to be on the lookout for typos and inconsistencies, and they responded with unimagined vigor and usefulness. Smartest thing I’ve done with this project.
Printing: $27.50 (as of this date)
This is just simply the costs to print prep materials for conventions and playtests. Since the actual print run money is not coming out of the $1000 (more on this later, including the stupidest thing I’ve done with this project!), I’m not counting it here.
Art: $211
This is the most money I’ve ever spent on art. Hell, just the font family I used for the text cost as much as the art. If there’s one thing people are saying right now about Blowback, it’s that it looks great. I’m really proud of the gorgeous full-color interiors, and the only thing that made them possible was the amazing photography collection at iStockphoto. Now, I’m probably a bit biased because I’m a contributor to iStock and the site has been a significant source of income for me over the last six years, but they beat every other stock photography site I’ve looked at for cutting-edge, outside-the-norm, artistic photography. I was showing the layout to my friend Eppy, who exclaimed at one point, “You found a HOSTAGE SITUATION in stock photos?!” Oh, I did. I did indeed.
Layout and design: $0
Something else I’m proud of: as with all 2SP games, the gorgeous layout and ornamentation is all in-house. Shreyas and I worked hard, sketched stuff, I told him what I wanted and he figured out the templates to make it work. Then I actually massaged the text, figured out what went where, etc. Shreyas made all of the fantastic hexagonal/halftone ornaments you see throughout the text.
Playtesting: $160
This includes the admission to two cons and gas to and from Dreamation. I’m including it because this is where a lot of the initial playtesting got done, and it was instrumental in the development of the game. (I’m not including lodging for Dreamation because we’ve got a place to stay in Morristown.)
Promotion: $486
This is $446 for a booth buy-in with Design Matters for GenCon and two exhibitor passes, and $40 for media for a trailer I didn’t have the time or energy to put together. This was a mistake, of course.
Total: $884.50
The other approximate $120 went into unforeseen expenses with It’s Complicated temporarily, and will probably be paid back into online connectivity and iPhone support in the fall.
So what went wrong?
I said I’d talk about printing more, and let me tell you: I really fucked up. I’d decided a while ago to price Blowback at $24, since the per-copy cost to me was about $6. Well. I got the proof for It’s Complicated back, and it looked great— but the paper I’d chosen, while perfect for IC and its relatively sparse use of color, really would not have worked for Blowback and its really intense layout. Since the quote I had was based on using the same paper as It’s Complicated, I contacted Kim at 360 about upgrading my paper to the next heaviest weight. Well, turns out I was already using their best standard paper: the next rung up is 80# matte coated. Gorgeous paper, but it ups my per-unit cost from $6 to $10.
But I look at the prices of comparable books coming out (mistake #1), get cold feet about Blowback, (mistake #2), and decide to keep the price at $24 despite a nearly-doubling per-unit cost (mistake #3) out of concerns that people wouldn’t buy the book if the price were closer to $30.
Which has lead to an ulcer-inducing nightmare of frustrating math. I’ve gotten a ton of preorders, but the more preorders I get, the more it takes up the print run I was planning to do. But if I increase the size of the print run, the preorders I have won’t cover the cost of the print run. And normally I might be able to move some money around, but new expenses are cropping up literally daily, since I’m getting married in nine days. Oh, and I have to have the final PDF with the final order in by Monday.
Is the game profitable?
On top of my giant pricing mistake, when I signed up for Design Matters I was completely scatterbrained and forgot that they do 100% profit sharing at GenCon instead of direct sales— despite the fact that I had a long talk with them about it two years ago at GenCon ‘08. That’s completely my fuckup. Unfortunately the difference between what I could potentially make back on direct sales and what (if growth patterns bear out for DM2010) I could make back through 100% profit sharing is approximately $1200. That’s a ton of money. Since this whole experiment is one in transparency and “Hey! What does it look like when you make a game on this budget, and what does the profit look like?” it screws things up a bit. That said, I think Design Matters is fantastic and their model is great for ensuring that edgier games which might normally be risky to bring to a big con get the eyeballs and promotion they richly deserve. It’s just easier to say that when you’re not looking at your own bottom line, which makes me feel like a money-grubbing jerkface.
Long story short: in a hypothetical world, could Blowback made a profit? In its sleep. In this specific world, can Blowback make a profit? God only knows.
Since PDFs started going out yesterday for the preorder, I figured it was time to post some play aids:
Character sheets: Professional and Civilian
Operation plan (for use by the team and The Agency)
The Agency’s Job worksheet
When you’re a spy, your job is your life— literally. You have no friends who aren’t expendable, no ID that’s not fake, no possessions except those that can be stuffed in a suitcase or left behind without a thought. But when you’ve been blacklisted, with your assets frozen and passports flagged, you lose everything, and everything changes. Your training tells you a couple things: find a place to lay low, figure out who you can rely on or exploit, and do whatever it takes to get back in.
But you don’t have a wealth of developed assets any more: you don’t have a network of co-workers and false identities and owed favors. All you have, all you are, is you. So you make nice with the few people who’ll have you, and rely on them more than you should— but if you’re too cold or uncaring, they’ll turn on you. And if you care too much, the people who are after you will exploit them to hurt you. And if you cared about them at all, you wouldn’t care about them even a little.
When you love a spy, whether it’s your boyfriend or daughter or army buddy or brother, it’s like being a member of a religion you didn’t sign up for. You’re just supposed to trust them: when you don’t know what’s going on, when you’re being lied to, when you see the person you care about act like a monster— you’re supposed to believe. And you have to believe, because a crisis of faith could mean damnation for both of you. You have to assume the best intentions, because if you blow his cover or undo her handiwork, you could both die.
But as much as your boyfriend or daughter or army buddy or brother might play God, it’s your job to bring them back to humanity. It’s been a long time since they’ve felt truly loved, and without someone to care about you, right and wrong becomes awfully blurry. When you’re paid to play a monster, sometimes the role catches up with you— so they need you. You need to believe in your loved one so that no one dies, and you need to be vigilant so that they keep their soul. And just hope to God you don’t get broken in the process.
Blowback is a game where you play spies blacklisted after a job goes awry, and the people who care about them. You can play this game with 3-5 people, and while playing it as a single game session is fun, it’s designed for long term play. It’s heavily inspired by the American television show Burn Notice and movies like the Bourne trilogy. As much as Blowback is about pyrotechnics and car chases, it’s a fish-out-of-water premise: spies stranded without their agency, normal people swept up in intrigue. And, like all multiplayer games, it’s about relationships— how much can you ask of someone, how much can you disappoint them before they turn their back on you?
The production of the game was funded with a generous grant from Lester “Wordman” Ward, as the first DivNull Lark. Final costs will go up on the Blowback blog later this week. Spoilers: with GenCon booth costs I believe I’ve gone a bit over, but it’s amazing what can be done with $1000. Preorders will hopefully pay for the initial print run, and following sales will fund the iPhone/iPad play tools planned for later this year.
The specs:
9×7″ perfect-bound softcover, 78 pages, full-color throughout. $24 (plus $5 shipping) gets you the book, plus PDF.
But enough about that, you probably want pictures:
