Happy Father's Day to those game designer daddy's out there! Since it's your special day, I think you get to break out any game you like and demand the family play it. (Twilight Imperium, anyone?)
New Art
We have all sorts of news on the GWG front. First, fantastic new art from Ahren Paulson is trickling in. I'm especially fond of our new "Goblin Gamer":
Other pieces are finished as well, but we'll leak them over time. We also locked down the format of our Certified Fun seal:
GWG will have a process designers can go through to earn the Certified Fun seal on their game. Along with the seal comes increased consumer confident, better placement in our storefront, and inclusion within our marketing. More info to come on this soon!
Development Continues
While we are getting all of our print equipment and parts, development on our website continues. We're taking it kind of slow because we want to do each page right. (I've worked in software architecture long enough to know how expensive bugs are.) Our latest pretty page is below:
We're also building the entire site powered by RESTful APIs. The goal here is actually pretty mind-blowing: What we aim to do is allow game designers to program their own storefronts and use us as the back-end. A remote website will be able to feed us the artwork, print instructions, etc, and we will fulfill it from there. Basically our services can power whatever you imagine. Here's an example: Imagine you have a family game where parents can upload pictures of their children to have their kids as part of the game. You can have your website post all of the finished artwork to our site via API, along with print instructions, and we will fulfill it for you. Create an infomercial for that around the holidays and you're swimming in a vault of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck.
So now let's get crazier. What if you make a Facebook App that lets a customer take all of their friend's photos and put them into a deck of CCG-style cards. Super Friend Fighter II, let's call it. Your Facebook App generates the images, we print them, and the customer gets a 100% personalized game.
Starting to see what we're getting at and what our mission is? :) And we haven't even pulled out the big guns yet..
Full Color Box News
In regard to production, we have some news you may like. First, we will be offering full color skinned boxes! You can always save cost by having your game packed within the postal shipper, but you'll also have two extra options:
Rigid Semi-Gloss 8.5x11" Setup Box (Top is 0.32 thick. The bottom is around .12)
Rigid Semi-Gloss 3.5x7" Setup Box (Top is 0.32 thick. The bottom is around .12)
The box tops are very sturdy and are comparable to mass production board game boxes. The bottoms are more similar to clothing boxes. Later down the line we may order some custom boxes with rigid tops and bottoms, but these work great for now.
In regard to skinning, we will be offering templates that can be used to skin the entire box. On the 8.5"x11" box, the top can be skinned using three sheets of 8.5"x11" full color adhesive prints. One print is cut in half and covers the short sides. One print is cut in half and covers the long sides. The last print goes on the top.
Using three sheets won't be the only skinning option. You can use two sheets to label the top and the sides, or just one sheet to label the top. Likewise on the bottoms, you can use a single sheet (which will leave some white showing), or use an extra sheet cut into 4 strips to cover the white.
On all of these options, you can choose to have us do the mounting, or we can just include the sheets in the boxes. As soon as I finish a sample I'll take a picture.
Pricing News
I spent the night calculating our pricing. I don't want to release all of the actual numbers until we have the final materials in hand, but I think it's pretty safe to say that we will be a bit cheaper across the board than our competitors. Using a 60 card game with 4 pages of rules as an example, I calculate the cost to be $11.00. This includes a rigid 3.5x7" box fully skinned by us. Without the box/skin, the game would be $7.00.
The biggest thing we are offering is flexibility. Out of the gate we plan to offer a wide variety of cuts and finishing options:
Sheet of 9 Standard Cards (2.5x3.5)
Sheet of 15 Standard Cards (2.5x1.75)
Sheet of 80 1" Squares (Single Sided, Mounted to Chipboard)
Sheet of 80 1" Squares (Double Sided, Mounted to Chipboard)
Sheet of four 4" Squares (Single Sided, Cover Stock)
Sheet of four 4" Squares (Single Sided, Mounted to Chipboard)
Sheet of four 4" Squares (Double Sided, Cover Stock)
Sheet of four 4" Squares (Double Sided, Mounted to Chipboard)
Sheet of 40 7/8" Circles (Single Sided, Mounted to Chipboard)
Sheet of 40 7/8" Circles (Double Sided, Mounted to Chipboard)
One 8x10" Rectangle (Single Sided, Cover Stock)
One 8x10" Rectangle (Single Sided, Mounted to Chipboard)
One 8x10" Rectangle (Double Sided, Cover Stock)
One 8x10" Rectangle (Double Sided, Mounted to Chipboard)
Two 4x10" Rectangles (Single Sided, Cover Stock)
Two 4x10" Rectangles (Single Sided, Mounted to Chipboard)
Two 4x10" Rectangles (Double Sided, Cover Stock)
Two 4x10" Rectangles (Double Sided, Mounted to Chipboard)
Sheet of twelve 63mm Hexagons (Single Sided, Mounted to Chipboard)
Sheet of twelve 63mm Hexagons (Double Sided, Mounted to Chipboard)
Sheet of nine 90mm Hexagons (Single Sided, Mounted to Chipboard)
Sheet of nine 90mm Hexagons (Double Sided, Mounted to Chipboard)
As a general rule, our double sided mounted stuff is currently estimated at $1.50, and our double sided prints (cards, etc) are around $0.70 per sheet.
We also plan to offer some "premium" finishing options that you probably wouldn't want to do for your normal games for cost reasons, but you may want to do if you are sending a copy to a publisher. Other services will include mounting hinges to 8x10" chipboard prints so you can have folding boards. We of course cannot match the quality that a mass production run will have, but we are trying to offer as many hand-crafted services as possible to support our designers! The whole goal is to get you beyond the prototype phase and into a full print run. We plan to offer you a clear path to get there, and while you're in the print on-demand world, we want your game to feel as close to a manufactured game as possible.
That's all the news for now! If you have any questions or feedback, just shoot me a quick e-mail at anthony@goblinworkshopgames.com.
P.S. We're looking for additional programmers! Check out our jobs page if you're skilled with PHP or mobile development.
Happy Designing!
- Anthony
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