Can't sleep...

...so continuing to look over things.

Before moving took over my life, I felt I was pretty close to having A Wilder World ready for playtesting. After the move, doubt begin to creep back in and I toyed with ripping out the combat system (again), ripping out the effect system (again), or even starting over with a simpler project and coming back to AWW.

Well, according to the timestamps, I haven't touched these files since a third of the way through October, and looking at them now, I think my first impression was the right one. Maybe the effect system could use some streamlining/improvement, but it would be a mistake to try to guess how it could be improved without testing.

So, a timeline. I'm going to give myself the month of January to get my ducks in a row: tighten some of the bolts in the rulebook, devise some scenarios, figure out the testing venue (Roll20 looks promising), and basically figure out what I'm doing. In February, I'll start closed testing. "Closed" here has the meaning of "conducted entirely by me", not in the sense of being overly restrictive in who participates.

By March or April, I'll be looking to release a testing packet that anyone can use to conduct their own sessions in order to get more/broader feedback. My ultimate goal will be to publish version 1 of the game this summer. The first edition will be electronic only... I'm sticking by the notion that the game should be played in the wild for a year before it's committed to the expensive and very final process of committing it to paper.

On the subject of expense and publication, I haven't been shy about sharing the draft versions of the rules freely, but as the project closes in on completion and in particular as we get closer to a playable version, I'm going to be a little more reticent about this. I'm not entirely sure what the model I'm going to be using is, but what I'm leaning towards is putting the playtesting materials up on Sellfy as a sort of progressive pre-order on par with buying early access to a game on Steam. The reason I would use Sellfy is that it lets me release updates that are accessible to anyone who's bought the product before. So I could use the same product space to sell the testing material for a discounted price, and then when the game is published, by using the same space for the full game, the people who bought in to the test would be able to receive it without paying again.

Nothing about that is set in stone, though. I'm still very much kicking around ideas there.

Tuesday, December 31st

The Daily Report

Well, it's the end of the month and the year.

Tomorrow begins 2014, the first year in a long time that I won't be traveling all the time and where I will have the same stable environment for working and sleeping in. So much of the past years have been alternating treading water with furious bursts of activity that didn't always pay off before everything changed again.

This is going to be a year for building: building habits, building momentum, building bridges.

This was my biggest month yet for my Sellfy store. Surprisingly, only a small amount of that is directly attributable to my decision to reduce the price of the first Tales of MU e-book for half of the month. My decision to replace the "pick your format" with "here's a bundle of formats" might have made people a little more confident about buying from it. I made about the same from Amazon Kindle US sales in the same time frame, which is about half what I tend to make when I have a major new release there.

My Amazon sales had been fairly flat at around $10 basically the whole time I've been on Amazon, up until this year when I resolved to change that. Ever since this summer, they've been basically around $40-100. Progress! Not where it needs to be, but progress.

The State of the Me

My sleep cycle is quite a bit off from my holiday travel. The past two days, I've basically been sleeping during the day and then sleeping in fits and starts at night. Today I ended up waking up at around 5 in the morning and staying that way until after 7, at which point I went back to bed and slept until just before noon. I'm hoping that by staying awake through the day (and probably until after midnight, it being New Year's Eve), I'll be able to sleep soundly tonight and wake up tomorrow more-or-less normal. Tomorrow being New Year's Day, I've left it off my work schedule, so if I end up dragging myself through it like a zombie it won't throw things off much.

Plans For Today

Today's day 3, the major writing day for the chapter that's due on Thursday. I think I might be looking at an abbreviated work day (I'm not sure when our plans begin this evening), but I should be able to do that without a problem.