Monday, August 25, 2008

GenCon 2008 Wrap-Up

A couple things, and then I'll stop posting about GenCon and start posting about current projects and concerns.

1) FINAL NUMBERS: Thou Art But A Warrior sold 24 solo copies and 7 copies as part of the package with Polaris for an astounding THIRTY ONE copies. I had suspicions that I could sell that many, but the fact that I actually accomplished it despite overall booth numbers being low makes me really, really happy.

2) OTHER COOL THINGS. There are a couple things that deserve mention here, but since I've already discussed them elsewhere I'll just post links to the relevant threads.

Danielle's amazing game of Kagematsu was fantastic, and is one of the things that I'm excited to see next year. Ron started a thread in the Playtesting forum on the Forge, which you can find over here.

Tony LB is posting actual plays of all seven (SEVEN!) of the games of Misery Bubblegum that he ran at GenCon. I'm even more excited about Misery Bubblegum than I am about Kagematsu. Hopefully some time within the next little while, he'll have gotten to posting AP of the game that I played in. That thread is also in the Playtesting forum, and can be found here.

A lot of people talked about their GenCon experience in this thread over on Story Games.

Steve Segedy started a GenCon post-mortem discussion in the Conventions forum on the Forge, and there's been some good conversation already.

3) FUTURE PROJECTS. One of the reasons I went to GenCon, besides engaging in dirty dirty capitalism and hanging out with new friends, is to do some networking and get my name out there for future projects. This aspect of GenCon was much more successful than last year, as I have a few definite things lined up. As of yet, it's too early to talk about any of them. But I'm confident that I'll be able to talk about them more in the future.

The art in Thou Art But A Warrior was really well received, and I have hopes that it will generate interest in future illustration work.

4) BLACK OPS ANGEL GAME. I saw a lot of neat games that handled character creation in rather unorthodox ways, which helped to shake loose a lot of ideas for how to deal with this problem in the game that I'm working on now. I have every hope that by the end of the year I'll have an alpha version of the game finished and ready to start mutilating playtesting.

I've thought a lot about how I want to plan things, and I decided that taking two years to develop Thou Art But A Warrior was a sensible move on my part, considering that I have so many other projects on the go. I might shoot for having an ashcan available for next GenCon, but for now I'll just concentrate on trying to finish an alpha version of the game.

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