Publishing, Cross Tiles, and Squirrels.

Publishing

Those of you who know me well probably could have told me this, but I recently realized myself: I don't want to self publish.

Self-publish pros

1. No barrier to entry (you can publish anything you want, no one is stopping you)
2. Complete creative control.
3. If the game is a massive success you get all the sweet sweet cheddar.

Self-publish cons

1. It's a very crowded marketplace.
2. It's a very non-deterministic process.  Like how do you get your game to sell in mass numbers?  There are best practices but it's not an engineering problem with a single provable answer, it's some combo of strategy, hustle, and dumb luck.
3. You spend a lot of your time just running a business.  Like worrying about trucks delivering your stuff or some factory in China that made your pieces wrong.

That last one is the deal-breaker for me.  I got into engineering because I enjoy the creativity of building things using math-y skills, and I looked up 30 years later and realized I spend like 10 percent of my time doing that and 90% if my time doing other stuff I really hate.  

No point in putting myself back in that situation.

And all the other stuff just doesn't seem to matter as much:

• Even if a I go through a publisher, if the game is "successful" there's decent upside, both financially and (more important to me) creating opportunities to publish again.
• Creative control is nice but I'm realizing I actively want help.  If I come up with a fun game idea and someone with experience wants to tweak it to make it better, provide professional art, make the rules clear and readable, etc., God bless them.

Since I made that decision I feel like a giant weight has been lifted.  Like this whole plan sounds more fun and less stressful.

There will be the moment where I need to hustle and pitch to game companies.  The hard part there will  be dealing with rejection, and just being patient (neither of those are my strong suit, at all).  But I figure it's the same deal with self-publishing.  Either path takes some hustle and self-promotion, and either way requires dealing with rejection, whether it's thousands of micro-rejections as I try to market it myself, or dozens of rejections from publishers.

More Playtest Results

Tried the cooperative version again with my wife (a gamer) and her friend (game-for-games but not a hardcore gamer).

We played 3 rounds with the branching Challenge model: short 5 min games (with timer), and on success we try a new harder Challenge.

Outcome

Generally speaking we had a good time: rules were quick and easy, the Challenge progression is nice and compelling for wanting to try again and introducing new rules slowly (there's not a glut of rules at the top, you pick up more and more as you complete Challenges).

We succeeded at all the Challenges (so maybe the latter ones should be harder) but never a total cakewalk, like we'd end with a few seconds on the clock.

Some things that we noted after: 

• Squirrel is less relevant.  The fun of the Squirrel is: 
• Random movement.  Like you are getting the factory all the way you like and boom he jumps in and wrecks things.
• Pooping.  More nuts in tummy -> more likely to poop -> kinda fun.
• Cross-tiles are less relevant.  If it's easy to move dispensers, orders, roasters, and salters, then you don't really need Cross Tiles at all.

That last one particularly bothers me as, in my mind, Cross Tiles are the whole point: the whole Ghost Leg mapping thing is a cool problem I want to game-ify.

So what do we do?

Some ideas: 

• Some notion of "cost".  Cross tiles are "cheap" and other elements are "expensive" and you have some budget.  Problem: just makes it more complicated. like now we're doing math on top of everything else.  I'd rather just focus mental energy on the board itself, not some meta-side thing.
• Just have fewer cards for moving elements.  I like this a little better but people could get around it by just using doubles as wilds.  I could eliminate that too but then maybe the game becomes too hard/impossible (all playtests so far we make heavy use of doubles as wild).
• Limited (or no) movement of Dispensers and Orders.  This is really the thing that forces cross tiles: if I have a peanut dispenser at the top and a peanut order at the bottom, I have to use cross tiles to connect them.  
• Maybe when you move Dispensers or Orders you can only move them to an adjacent empty space.
• Maybe when you move Dispensers or Orders you can slide a connected series over one space (like they are on rollers and you push them all).
• Maybe you just can't move them at all.
• Still need to add or remove Dispensers: you might have more Peanut Orders then there are Dispensers and then you're just SOL unless you can add, remove, or swap one or the other.

I am gonna test out that last bullet point.  Maybe start with moving to adjacent empty space as that's easiest to explain/visualize,

For the Squirrel: 
This is where I start to spiral.

On the top row he's kind of irrelevant: a minor irritant but once you're past him that's it.  And with the timer-then-factory-runs model, he'll eat at most one nut -> minor chance of pooping.

Change the poop rules to make even one nut a bigger chance of pooping?

Put the Squirrel in the middle somehow?  Maybe he can be on any square, not just the top row.

Maybe even for very basic challenges there's a series of days.  Like you get N turns to configure the factory, then it runs.  And you get M of those rounds.

Hard to do that with a timer (I guess you could time the N turns?).  But then you could have the squirrel hop around at the end of each day and things get more interesting.

Hmmm...