Milestones of Obsession

Sometimes I think about what classes as being a success as a game designer, and what classes as being successful for me.  I do harbour an idea at the back of my mind that it would be lovely to actually be able to earn a living designing (and otherwise being involved in the publication of) games, which makes it a rare hobby for me that I would even consider such a thing. But I also recognise that very few game designers do earn a living from the business, and to do so requires a lot of work and dedication, some great skills, and a whole dollop of luck.  I can safely forget about that as anything other than a "wouldn't it be nice..." aspiration and get on with my life otherwise.  More realistic would be the hope that at some point I will be able to earn enough from designing games that I cover my expenses in doing so and maybe even fund my unhealthy game acquisition habit.

A little more concretely, I have come to realise that there have been a number of milestones that I got a bit excited about when they happened, and a load more that I am looking forward to, many of which are achievable, but some are extremely unlikely, to say the least.  So, in the spirit of distracting myself from doing something more productive, I made a list of some of the milestones I could think of...

• Have an entry for a game on BGG. ✔ This was I Know an Old Woman, in 2015.
• Have someone other than me logging a BGG play for my game. ✔ Same game, though this was a personal friend.  It was last year's March Hares that was the first with plays logged by a complete stranger to me.
• Have someone rating my game on BGG. ✔ As with the logging, March Hares was my first game rated by strangers, but IKaOW got a rating first.
• Sign a game for publication. ✔ Nearly a year ago, not one, but two games!
• Have a physical copy of my published game. Still waiting for this, but should be in the next few months.
• Receiving royalties for the first time.  Hopefully before the end of this year.
• Have someone with more logged plays of one of my games on BGG than I do.  It's actually close on March Hares, but not quite there - I think I need a professionally published game (coming really soon...) to achieve this one.
• Have a game with enough BGG ratings to have a ranking.  I believe the threshold is something like 35 ratings, so fingers crossed.
• Have a BGG top 1000 ranked game.  I don't think my first two released games will exactly set the BGG ratings alight (not really the target audience), but I can hope for this if I manage to get something released that works well for the hobby game market.
• Have a "1" rating on BGG from that guy who rates almost everything a "1".  It's a badge of honour!
• Have a BGG top 100 ranked game.  This is one that I doubt I will ever achieve as it is quite an exclusive club, but if it happens I suspect I'll be buying the drinks!
• Have a game published that is a collaboration with another designer. I'm hoping to make progress with collaborations one of these days, so it could happen.
• Be published by more than one publisher.  If the plan to start pitching games in earnest this year, I might be able to tick this off in the next couple of years or so.
• Have someone asking me to sign their copy of one of my games.  ✔ This has actually already happened -- someone who bought one of the preview copies of Giftmas from us at Essen asked for an autograph. A weird feeling.
• Have a game published in a language other than English.  No idea how likely this is, or how soon it might happen, but it's possible if one of my games does reasonably well.
• Have an expansion published for one of my games.  Well, Shooting Party is eminently expandable, and I can think of some expansion options for Invaded, so it could happen.
• Have a game I designed reviewed by Tom Vassal.  Or any video reviewer really, but Tom would be a kinda landmark, I guess.  (Maybe bonus points if he throws the game out the window.)

OK, so that's a bit of time wasted.  Maybe now I have that out of my mind I can get on with something else now... :)

Those objectives...

We're over half way through the year and I figure it's appropriate to look back at those objectives I posted in January, which were basically:

1. Have at least a couple of pitchable games by the end of the year.
2. Submit a game for Wyvern's Lair at UKGE.
3. Work on at least one collaborative design.
4. Help with more other people's rulebooks than I did last year.

So, how am I doing so far?

Well, it's too early to say on the pitchable games, but Invaded is moving along and is getting quite a lot of work done on it, so I think that should be on the pitch list within not-too-many-months, plus there are several other projects ticking along more slowly, so a little more concerted effort on one or two of those should yield some results.

Wyvern's Lair...  OK, I failed on this.  With a couple of weeks until the submission deadline I had been working mostly on Shooting Party, so hadn't managed to get anything else to a state where I was willing to throw it into the ring. As a result I decided to save my sanity a little by abandoning this objective.  Maybe next year...

The collaboration is looking good.  I am in the early stages of collaborations with two other designers at the moment: one is waiting on me to pull my finger out, while the other is currently being worked on by my design partner.  I'm looking forward to seeing how these very different games develop.

Finally the rulebook work.  I make a note of when I read, review or edit a rulebook, and I recorded eight such jobs last year, which wasn't bad, and only three so far this year, so I've fallen behind, but I could still make the target by the end of the year.  Opportunities do come up on a regular basis, so I just need to push myself forward a little more.

Really any objectives I set myself are pretty arbitrary at the moment, but I'm happy with the progress I have been making, and content that abandoning one of the objectives was the right decision.  And all this ignores the fact that I actually have two signed games now (I'll be shouting about those a lot when release dates are firmed up!), which is hugely cool from where I am sitting.  Also, I have managed to attend a decent number of playtest meetups as well as getting fairly regular playtest sessions where I live thanks to some amazingly tolerant local gamer friends.  It's all moving in a great direction; I just need to keep working and keep the morale up.