[Blowback] The thousand-dollar RPG
So Les Ward of DivNull.com ran a very generous contest over on Story Games:
This post started with the following hypothetical:
Posted By: Valamir Imagine said benefactor announced “Pitch me your game ideas and the designer whose idea I like best will get $1000 to bring it to fruition”
Other popular game design forums maintain, however, that debate about hypothetical situations are useless and only “actual play” matters. So, let’s play…
As of now, there actually is a benefactor (i.e. me) saying “Pitch me your ideas for how you would use $1000 to either make a new game or improve an existing one that hasn’t been released, and I’ll donate $1000 to the idea I like best to help make it happen”.
Conditions:
- Only pitches made on this thread, publicly, will be considered.
- No pitch made after 15 October 2009 will be considered.
- Donation will be made on or before 31 October 2009.
- If your pitch is selected, you have until the last minute of 31 October 2010 to make good on the idea. At that point, the world will know if you are person of your word, or a failure.
- This donation in no way affects any rights you have to your work. Nor does the donation create any liabilities from your work for the donator. Succeed or fail, you’re on your own.
As you might imagine, it garnered a lot of interest and 11 great pitches were offered up. In the end, I was surprised to be awarded the $1000 prize for my pitch for Blowback:
Here’s my pitch for Blowback, my Burn Notice-inspired spy game.
Blowback is a labor of love and the project I’ve most enjoyed working on in all of my forays into indie game design. It’s got all of the human, falliable relationship stuff that’s important to my enjoyment of characterization, as well as the enjoyment of spy stories like the afore-mentioned television show as well as things like the Jason Bourne movies and Spy Games. I’m pretty proud of the Momentum mechanic, which works in a way I kind of always wished Exalted successes worked (when you win, you win gloriously, when you fail, you fail gloriously). It’s important to me that the book be a wonderful thing to hold in your hands, and that the book is a strong source of reference for more than just the game’s mechanics: I want to include a bunch of “spy” information, as well as a full glossary of important vocab (for instance, the names of all the major analogues to the CIA in the world, as well as other organizations, and the lingo used within them) so that people can feel like they’re badass spies right out of the box.
The $1000 would go to a few different things. First of all, art: I’m doing a full-color book with gorgeous photography. My goal is for the photography to be mostly, if not all, produced by women, and for the art to skew subtly towards sexy, badass depictions of men in danger and non-slutty, sexy-because-they’re-badass girls saving the day. (Some people are doing similar things with fantasy, but the spy genre continues to be male-dominated, both with authors and depictions of successful spy characters. The closest I can think of are slutty, badass archaeologists, which isn’t quite the same thing.) Having more money would give me the flexibility to be choosier about my art, and commission pieces from female photographers I admire instead of relying completely on already-existing stock.
Furthermore, I’m fascinated and excited by the idea of utilizing technology in ways to make my games more accessible and to enhance the play experience, both face to face and for online play. I’d use a portion of the money on an iPhone developer kit, to allow me to create play aids for the iPhone– I enjoy games with boardgamey and other chart-type elements, and so there’s a good chance that Blowback will utilize something along those lines. If not, access to the diagrams, character dossiers you can fill in, save, and transfer to other phones alone would make gaming on the go easier.
Finally, I’d be remiss in taking that much money from the community without giving back. I’d be willing to distribute iPhone applications for other designers through the SDK I would purchase with the money, and also start a new blog which would outline all of the successes and failures of designing a game with the $1000 budget, as well as something that’s been really hard to find out in public lately: hard numbers. I will talk about deals I find, money I blow, things that paid for themselves and mistakes I never should have made. We can see if Jonathan’s right that someone with a bunch of money to blow on a game would just waste the money, and what can be done with $1000 no strings attached. I will be no-holds-barred honest, keep a running total, and a countdown to my deadline. My hope would be that other people would learn from my experiences, and good discussions could arise about some of the choices I make that would help us all. And even if the game turns out to be no fun, the information gathered would be worth the cash.
…
Except the game will be fun. Because I’ve played it and it’s fun already. So really, win win.
And true to my word, I’m going to be blogging about the hard numbers and financial information here. In the next few days, my webmaster’s going to set up separate pages (and feeds) for both the game information I post and the nuts-and-bolts financial information I post: when that happens, I’ll make a post with links to both feeds (and a link to a feed with both). Future posts will go over my quest to find a reasonably-priced printer, how I’ve found inexpensive art, and the way I tend to make budgets. I don’t present this information as a mandate: if anything, it’s the opposite. This is how I do things on a $50 budget, and it’s also the way I’ve decided to do things on a $1,000 budget. I’m certain I will make mistakes. It’s my hope that what is an invaluable learning experience for me can also be a learning experience for you as well.
So again, big thanks to Wordman: his investment in my game is quite an honor, and I’m looking forward to making it worth his while. Yours too, if you read along.