Author: CjEggett

Post Mortem: Taming of the Slugiraffe

Ada Press Games

I believe we’ve finished our first project as Ada Press, so I think it is time for a look at what actually happened and to be totally honest about how it went.

I think our first project is ‘finished’. This was The Taming of the Slugiraffe, a solo pit-crawl game of mapping and survival. Before anything else, you should know that it’s available to buy digitally or review here, and buy in print here.

Later in this post I talk about looking for reviewers and critics, if you are one, do get in touch.

The initial goal of The Taming of the Slugiraffe was to see what it’s like to make a little game and see whether we could get it to Kickstarter, have it fund, and fulfil it.

For those that don’t know me, I am currently the outgoing editor of Tabletop Gaming magazine (which you should check out, even when I am checked out mid-May). It’s the UK’s biggest magazine about board games and roleplaying games, and during my time there I have dedicated substantial pages, time and resources to covering indie titles.

Part of running this campaign and making the game was to understand how crowdfunding really works, and what better way to discover that than to do it? So we did. Here’s how it started.

My partner and I both booked a day off work to sit down and create the bare bones of what would become The Taming of the Slugiraffe. She does the art, I do the words and design. This worked out pretty well honestly, with us both sitting there sketching quick ideas out and writing snippets to build up the idea of what this game would be. While I had the system already in my head (or rather, in a series of drawers, where I keep all my ideas like a pseudo-Knizia), it was through this afternoon of mucking about that we discovered our main character (a giblet) and what its goal was (catching a big slug thing).

The game was to be a light game of random exploration (a bit like Dark Fort, the MÖRK BORG precusor), brutal combat, and a Mausritter-style inventory system. I thought it would probably be 8 pages, 16 if we went a bit mad with the art.

We then set up the Kickstarter, wrote the page, added some pictures and eventually set it live during Zinequest August 2022 (the fake one that Kickstarter moved, remember that?).

I think I did a great job on the Kickstarter description, go take a look here if you’re interested.

I had looked at the money for this all already. A print run would be about £2 per zine at most. I included shipping and packaging on each item that could absorb pretty much any price hike, for example, it was something like $10 for shipping to the USA.

The general wisdom is to not include your shipping on Kickstarter, and instead charge people for it later when you know what it might cost. The benefits to this is you can charge less for your shipping, and hopefully pick up more backers this way.

For me, this was a negative as it was more admin. I didn’t want to get into the world of BackerKit and otherpledge managers. There wasn’t going to be add-ons or upsells to do, just the game existing, or not.

One thing I’m quite proud of doing is adding a retail tier to the Kickstarter. This meant that a retailer could pick up ten copies of the game really cheaply. It meant that Knave of Cups and Beyond Cataclysm will eventually have my games on their websites, which I think will feel like having ‘made it’.

We had an original funding goal of £100 to meet. I didn’t realise that all money pledged through Kickstarter would count towards this – i.e. my high cost shipping would help us meet this goal almost immediately. This is probably cheating.

I was also surprised that anyone cared, particularly. It’s a slightly dodgy position to be in: to be professionally writing about games and also ‘asking’ people to promote my Kickstarter. By asking, I mean I did some tweets on my personal account, replied to those ‘drop your project here’ threads, did my own and retweeted everyone involved.

I don’t really know how genuine some of the support was, but I assume mostly. Everyone in indie games is very nice (to a fault, I would suggest) and I think people did want to support the campaign. No one really knows who I am or what I do/did for a living after all. Some kind comments included that this was exactly the kind of project that they wanted to back at ZineQuest – a first time creator who didn’t know what they were doing.

We smashed our goals, and, despite what you’re always told about Kickstarters (you make money in the first and last five minutes) I picked up one or two people a day throughout.

In the end we has raised a very pleasing £1111.

We had £984.90 of that deposited into our account. That felt pretty cool.

We worked out we needed art for each token, and a map. We also realised we needed a real graphic designer.

We realised we needed that part when I showed my designer at the magazine what I’d done so far and he offered to help (mate’s rates, he felt sorry for us I think).

The game was also 20 pages in the end, rather than the expected 16. It’s not loads more, but it’s just something you think you’ve already worked out, which you just haven’t.

We worked as fast as we could. But there were delays.

We had a show at work – a huge and terrifying thing to put together.

My grandmother became ill and, eventually died. I’ll write about this another time. It’s important to know she was a very important person and she was the last thing holding some parts of my family together.

We were sick ourselves too, although we forget this.

The thing with trying to make a game in your spare time is that it really cuts down on the ammount of time you have to spending doing the things you need to do when they come up. You have a to make a choice between getting a silly a little game finished or looking after your three year old daughter, who is very sad about Nan dying. It’s an obvious and easy choice, but you still feel a little bit guilty about everyone waiting for the slug game.

Christmas came and went. We’d more or less finished things by the end of Feburary. We worked on revisions with our designer, who is a busy man.

Eventually the game went to print on 21st March this year. It went out to everyone who backed the game a week or so later. I worked out how to do those itch.io keys and emails, it’s cool there’s so much stuff to support your distribution. It’s all so usefully automated, once you know that it’s there.

The cost of printing came to around £180. Design was at a very charitable £100ish.

We pocketed aroud £450 after the costs of the Kickstarter, production and posting were taken into account.

We spent all of that on our first family holiday (four days in Centre Parcs nearby) since my daughter was born.

Was it worth it?

Yes.

We expected nothing and got to go on holiday, in exchange for mucking about with some words, inks and printers.

I think for those looking at this as a way to support themselves beyond helpful pocket money (if we’d had a big bill come in, then I think this would have been swallowed up by that, and we’d not get a holiday at all) should probably look to others for advice. The recent Batts piece on the remastered version of .dungeon might be useful, or just read Daniel Sell’s blog (which is where the most actionable parts of Batts piece can be traced to).

I did help one creator during their Zinequest Kickstarter rewrite their page however (we just got chatting, they asked!)

I’d be happy to offer that advice again, should someone need it. Their game was a quite jolly one with a good concept, clear artwork and direction, a good theme – and then the actual page text was a little confused and meandering. If I would offer any advice at all it would be to make your Kickstarter page:

  1. Really clear and obvious about what the backer is getting from the start. You need to say ‘this is a game which will make you feel like this, remind you of this, and take you on this journey’ before anything else. For example, we used the classic ‘meets’ formula, “It’s dark souls, but you’re a pikachu looking for a snorlax”. You might consider this a bit rubbish in terms of the quality of the writing – but it gives a very clear picture.

  2. Provide a clear description of what the book gives them and how it’s going to achieve the above vision of play. For us, that was explaining the systems used and how they combined (start trying to survive, having to switch into non-lethal equipment)

  3. Don’t explain how the game works in any detail. No one really cares how the game works when they’re reading a Kickstarter page, and anything that reads like rules will turn people off. It’s chill, people are here for a dream, not why your D120 system is great. It might be, but we can work that out later.

That aside, I’d like to talk about this little wasteland beyond that we’re currently experiencing now. The game is out in the world with the people who back it (thank you, people!). We have set up a free website for selling the game for those who missed out (those links at the top).

Both my partner and I have worked in marketing before. It’s really boring and we don’t really want to be out there running adverts or anything for our games. We’re working on the next thing, we don’t want a business.

We wonder if we should take a stand at a convention to shift a few of the copies we have left. But I think that’s something you can only really do when you have a couple of games under your belt (and on your table). I’d like to have a table at Dragonmeet one year.

So, after the hype of the Kickstarter itself, and the relief of fulfilment, we wonder what to do next. It’s a bit weirdly empty, which I think is what people talk about when they publish a novel and the world doesn’t change. It’s changed for us, of course, and that is enough for now.

I have been sending out copies to reviewers who might be interested (and, in fact, if you are one, please let me know, you’re welcome to a PDF or hard copy) and I think that should be the extent of our ‘marketing’ or ‘outreach’.

I used to talk to a friend of mine about writing and how there’s this hierarchy of satisfaction from your writing. There’s the writing itself, and then being published, and then being actually read, and then reviewed, and then being studied and finally being taught and referenced.

A writer called Will Buckingham added to this with his notion that there’s a stage higher than this, which he experienced with one of the children’s books he had written. He was invited to a school because the children had been assigned the book for a project that term. The book is about a dog that goes to space (or something, sorry Will!). Each child was asked to create something around the stories within the book. And so he walked into a school hall filled with papier mache versions of scenes from his stories, models of the dog, or the spaceship, a moon landing or otherwise.

That, he said, was satisfaction from writing.

I think that games can offer something a bit like that. If someone can turn around to me in a couple of years and say “Oh, that silly little slug game, I played it 20 times, loved it. Laminated the pieces and tweaked the rules,” that would be the peak of writing satisfaction. For me, at least.

Thanks then, again, to everyone who backed the game. And thanks to you for reading this. I think it’ll be useful to look back at once we’ve done a few more.

Good Idea #2 – Tunnel Goons

Slow Play

10,000-Year Earworm to Discourage Settlement Near Nuclear Waste Repositories (Don’t Change Color, Kitty) by Emperor X, released 12 May 2014

the audiobook for everyone’s favorite generational worldbuilding game

In matters of sex, Philip Larkin was late getting away. On his 23rd birthday, he wrote defeatedly to Kingsley Amis: ‘I really do not think it likely I shall ever get into the same bed as anyone again because it is so much trouble, almost as much trouble as standing for parliament.’ His 2014 biograph…

Good Idea #1 – No Hexes, No Masters

Slow Play

No measuring tape, no hexes, no masters

I’ve recently had the pleasure of playing the new Adventures of Robin Hood (Kosmos) board game. I covered it back in issue 55 for Tabletop Gaming magazine.

I interviewed Michael Menzel for the piece. You can watch the public version of that interview (which was quite early in the process) below.

The Good Idea here is that instead of using ‘spaces’ for your characters to move through, or asking players to get the measuring tape out to show how far Robin or Little John has moved on their turn, the designers provides five meeples for each character. Of these, there are three with elcongeded bases that reach out right behind them.

To move players place these end to end, and then place a standing meeple at the far end to show their final position. There’s also a ‘sprinting’ meeple for moving even further.

The Good Idea is that there’s no abstraction on the board. No need for a graphical layer over the beautiful art. If we play games (now) in part to avoid the digital world and the deluge of data someone has decided is necessary, then this is an example of leaning in to the physical facts of board games and making the most of them.

The Good Idea here is an extension of the rule: “no plus one swords”.

Flesh & Blood Trading Card Game | The Adventures of Robin Hood | The One Ring

Love, Bring Myself

Etch To Their Own

For the month of April, which is national poetry month somewhere, I am exchanging poems with a friend every day, using a little of the previous poem in the next. This means sometimes using odd automatic or found-text style tricks like using translation tools, or breaking up a line and writing out from each. The thing that these techniques have in common is that there is a creative element in the curation and laying out of lines, rather than a generative effort.

Which is where we come to Love, bring myself by Dominic Leonard (Broken Sleep Books).

Dominic has plucked lines from the Mystery Plays (a series of medieval plays all performed on on day across the city of York in celebration of Corpus Christi) and arranged them into a series of sort-of-sonnets, take a look:

having wandered 4,600 years

Naturally, as whenever we rip apart a text and start gluing it back together, we understand that in the reconstruction there is a new meaning formed. Often we can obsess with this idea of destruction and recreation to mean something else, because it’s a bit punk – like paving over another meaning with this new one.

The poems are smart, fun things to pick at, trying to find the person being addressed. But it is impossible to escape the text that you are working with – here there is a pleading tone, which comes from the prayer aspect, the heat of wanting something lives throughout – and even “our bodies stun me with horror” rings out with biblical shame.

The poetry is staccato of lists where each word pulls away from its neighbours, sometimes leaving something interesting between.  Everything like this is in the translation – the reference to Job 10:21 sent me looking for the line, which can be translated variously for different purposes and I suppose is the point of the work, to find a new way of breaking and seeing the texts with a new found personal intimacy away from the medieval crowds.

Pick up Love, bring myself from Broken Sleep here.

~~~


Love Takes Risks is the wonderfully named symposium on the poetics of contemporary small press fiction. There are recording of the symposium up on the website here.

I really recommend to all of you who have heard or read my endless chatter about Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond to listen to the very articulate Liam Harrison compare the work to Beckett in a way that really cuts through to the bones of what makes it great. ~~~
This is a very jolly poem by Carolyn DeCarlo called The Ultimate Freedom of Space and Time, which includes the lines: “My house traveling to France in 1778 to have sex with Marie Antoinette after meeting her on the internet.
My house sitting at the end of Marie Antoinette’s bed while she sleeps, telling itself the story of their lives together.”  

~~~


I think I have a poem out somewhere, oh, here: Essay on Biophilia published in Peeking Cat.

~~~

I have so many Jiffy bags now from all the lovely people who send me books that I feel like I have no choice but start a small press. Sadly we are closed to submissions at this time. Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own – I think I am going to move the archive to my website and away from Medium at some point soon, as it seems like it might be better to actually use the site I pay for or something? This is a nice object from Guillemot Press. 

Another last day

Etch To Their Own

Another Last Day by Alex Lemon is a kind of self-apocalypse in a way we’re all familiar with — the sense that yes, this is all going to end and there’s not much to do about it, so taking an affirmative stance on the end of the world is the closest thing to satisfying control we can achieve. It’s almost auto-accelerationist in a way, as if the coming end for the self would spur others on to making a better set of choices for the future. If only it would get so bad that I could be immolated martyrly everyone else would really have to take some action — a little like the rising sea levels, we all know that once we have a flurry of eels around our feet in the local Waitrose someone might actually think about doing something.

Here’s a couple of snippets:

Alex uses a tone that isn’t unkind. This isn’t suicide poetry. There is self regard, while saying “I am tumbling king” is an undercutting, there is the acceptance of some kind of grandeur about it — even if distant, unrealised and unearned. The language and that presentation of ideas that run against one another (like kenning, discussed here) to form another meaning, like: “a flowering fist.” This could be a fist (a violent symbol of strength, power, etc) flowing from a clenched bud to an open palm (expressing honesty, openness, friendship). Equally when a plant flowers is it taking part in the most vital part of its existence, it is achieving much of what its life is about — and as such — this could be translated as a fist archiving its purpose, arguably to be thrown. Of course, some of it is just undeniably poking at bits of my brain with a candy cane, like:

“The day ungloving suddenly”

There’s poems later of bodily destruction, and not just the death of the conceptual self — being eaten by fish, being drown and made soft by the water so the flesh will hold any shape. These passages show the tenderness of all Another Last Day, that despite the early sense of accelerationism, the body is still present and our main way of expressing our weakness.

M S Merwin died recently — and if you’re like me you’ve probably only heard the name before in reference to his studies of Ezra Pound in passing. If you’re not like me you may not have been introduced to Merwin’s work until the last couple of weeks where there has been a collective outpouring of his very good words across twitter.

In this interview in the Paris Review we learn about how the deep ecological stance of his work is influenced by his sense of powerlessness in childhood, with the obvious parallels in the world’ paraylsis on inevitable ecological catastrophe.

There is also a nice part on the problems of liking Ezra Pound, explaining the difficulty of trying to enjoy the Cantos as an intellectually coherent piece.

This interview with Mike Corrao about his very weird work from 11:11 Press, Gut Text explores the differences between film and literature in a way that doesn’t just crunch down to the argument of “it’s all art and thinking right”

It also covers the power of skimming, which is an interesting thing for a writer to want from their readers. It could be thought of a lack of engagement, but because of the comparison to film here there is an idea of passively taking something in and letting it process behind the scenes later.

Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own, the written version of taking me to the pub with books in it. The me in the previous sentence? That would be @CJEggett. The best thing about that M S Merwin interview above is that I discovered that he lives in Hawaii in a place called Hai’ku — which is a fun place to live in one of the smallest states — we assume there’s three streets and the one in the middle is a bit longer than the other two. Sammy sent me this, which is in part an incredible poem, part a note on all the times she had to pick up orphaned sentences for me. Speaking of Sam, can you help her find this poem? This is a great title for a poem, and it delivers. I do really like the crossing out in that last one. Possibilities are a set of lies created by destiny — but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try to find the most fun lies to enjoy together.

On Being Grateful, Delayed

Etch To Their Own

I have been feeling particularly full of life this week, and very grateful for it. You can come across some good luck and find yourself being suspicious about enjoying it or acting on it, but I am glad that I have people around me who gently guide me back to more gentle places in my own head where I do the right thing. This, then, is a bit of an exposure of myself. I used to love this poem when I was a teenager. I think I used to tell people it was my favourite. I’m a long way from there now, but for some reason it wandered back into my head. It’s Some People by Charles Bukowski.
 
 Here it is in full:

Some People
 some people never go crazy.
 me, sometimes I’ll lie down behind the couch
 for 3 or 4 days.
 they’ll find me there.
 it’s Cherub, they’ll say, and
 they pour wine down my throat
 rub my chest
 sprinkle me with oils.
 then, I’ll rise with a roar,
 rant, rage –
 curse them and the universe
 as I send them scattering over the
 lawn.
 I’ll feel much better,
 sit down to toast and eggs,
 hum a little tune,
 suddenly become as lovable as a
 pink
 overfed whale.
 some people never go crazy.
 what truly horrible lives
 they must lead.

It’s embarrassing obviously. But Bukowski sometimes had the joy of simple kindness. In the same way his work is filled with the terror of pettiness — his sense of smallness of self which drove those nastier poems is the same thing here which give us the idea of needing the help of others to become the better version of himself.
 
That help is a kindness too, in this poem he’s some kind of misplaced cherub that simply need to be jollied into existence again. The energy of revival here is one where he sends those who revive him scattering across the lawn, which suggests a kind of gnome-strewn lawn after a storm to me. The love he get from those around him hinges, he says, on the fact that he has gone crazy and lies down behind the couch for a few days. He knows that this tenderness is about putting him straight, so he must cultivate his wonkiness. The things that is missing from this poem is gratitude for these people floating around the poet and point him in the right direction — which is why it is something that I could love as a teenager, but feel so alienated from now, while I also reliant on people pushing me towards the better things I should be doing.

It wouldn’t be an ETTO without mentioning Sam has another poem (called Twitch) out somewhere (Thimble), it’s pretty heavy.

This week’s song is All The Wine by The National. Because I am feeling very good about the world.

Thanks for reading etch to their own. I’m really thankful that you’re reading this at all. There’s a lot people around me who make it vaguely possible for me to be better than I currently am. If I was anyone I would be @CJEggett. I have to say it has been a good week. I have a new job that is a little closer, a little better paid, and tickles part of my brain the in way that other jobs might not. It’s sad to have to leave all of the lovely people I work with at the moment of course. I’ve not read much this week because I’ve had too much energy and felt full of too much blood. As a little bonus I was given this by someone and love it very much.

Make Believe

Etch To Their Own

Judson Hamilton’s The New Make Believe from Dostoyevsky Wannabe mixes odd, meaningful places with crunchy names and concepts with a shrugging kind of onlineness that drives his own romantic and spiritual life — Pisa, the first from the collection opens as it intends to continue:


The disdain or wilful ignorance for the monumental happenings around him are a theme — he is missing things because of the webbed narrative in his own head around conquest. A distracting and familiar sense of hyper connection of the psyche to the passing world of the internet.
 
 The poetry is quick, sparse, existing in the moment but for a few flights of fantasy. We are very much in a mode of recording what happened, a kind of “here is the history of a few moments” with little judgement about it. In this way it reminds me a little of Kirill Medvedev’s It’s No Good — although it hasn’t got the element of hiding the critique, it does have the moving around a subject to illustrate it.
 
 Small Talk is a nice example of this, a gentle prodding at something where the subject is talked around rather than directly dealt with — but for the chink of light poetics at the end.


Pick up The New Make Believe from Dostoyevsky Wannabe here.

How about this hybrid flash by K.B. Carle — Vagabond Mannequin — which mixes crosswords and crossword clues with literary flash fiction. I enjoy the idea of it being a game here, we’re always unpicking the meaning of poetry, but we don’t usually do it by solving one down to start.

This week’s song is Open by Rhye — which is mostly about the magically smooth voice that barely wanders about on top of the bassline.


Thank you for reading Etch To Their Own, it was written by @CJEggett with only his 80% knowledge of where keyboard keys are supposed to be, and which part of the body you are supposed to press against them. Still, he managed it. Last time we heard from Judson was for the chapbook No Rainbow. Which was exactly 111 issues ago. Our Sammy has some poems up this week, here. We’ve all been here, when someone asks us something important and fundamental while we have a hangover.

If I am not Mistaken

Etch To Their Own

I found this week’s story through someone looking for an em dash.

Mistaken, by Kaj Tanaka, in pidgeonholes is an odd surrealist piece. Here’s a snippet from the start:

Read the whole thing to explore its shifting sense of person.

In my first reading of it I felt it had a theme of dementia running throughout — in that a person trying to describe the way that they see the world in its confusion before having that removed by the confirmation that the confusion is not reality.

But that doesn’t hold for the entire piece — it works a little like a riddle, with the variations on the refrain of “how could I have forgotten you?” acting as the central question to unpick for the protagonists, but not the reader, who instead looks for the reality of the situation.

It teases at the idea of an unhappy relationship where both parties are seeking some fantastical escape, though their strange vivid dreams — partly because of the infidelity and the forgetting. Instead though, a kinder reading is there in a passage about the dreams — how they try together to have wilder dreams, while also not forgetting one another. This could be their search to avoid the infidelity of forgetting one another while unconscious, which is at worst a sweet thought — what is so bad about wanting to have the best dreams together. It ends with a hint at a cycle too, the man at the office she has been cheating on him with, was him all along — which of course, we already knew.

This week’s song is DJ Koze’s Nices Wölkchen feat. Apparat

XX.

Thanks for reading Etch To Their Own, which really is the Spring of newsletters don’t you think? I like the idea of a stained glass forest. How about it? This is true.