Not Writing Games now on DriveThruRPG

Hey folks!

I am now selling my games on DriveThruRPG. It's... a very different process than hosting games on itch.io so I won't be bringing everything over. Right now I'm just diversifying to see if I can get some more sales. If my titles do well there I may start to bring over more products. I'll probably release future products there as well.

But honestly it's a lot more work to put stuff on DriveThruRPG than it is on itch.io, so much so that I'm not sure if it will be worth it. It's a much older storefront, so it's going to be harder to be noticed, and they have some pretty archaic design tech and submission practices so I'm less inclined to spend the time if I don't see any engagement.

Also the print-on-demand process I've mentioned before is pretty time consuming. It's clear that I'm going to have to layout each game all over again. The dimensions and margins of the print templates are all different, and a lot of the creative commons art I have in A Torch in the Dark and Nasty, Brutish, & Long is too low resolution to be used in a printed book. I'm going to have to level up my skills as a designer and also think more carefully about my process if I want POD to be an option going forward (and I do). This means it will be a while before I have printed versions of my games.

All this to say that it's been more of a challenge than I realized. Which is fine, it just means I'll have to work at it some more.

Tonight I'm being interviewed on a podcast about an upcoming game. I'll talk more about this later when I have something a bit more concrete to point you all to. 

I've signed up to do a couple of game jams that complete at the end of this month, so I'll be working on those. 

Prisoners of Light & Matter isn't wear my head is at these days. I like the art I've made so far, so I'll probably play around with some of that. See if that inspires me.

I'm thinking a lot more about Neon Black and other projects right now. I think my plan for Neon Black will be to make some revisions this year and maybe do a Kickstarter toward the end of the year? I'm not sure. I'm waiting to see what this ECB Kickstarter is like before I'm willing to commit to running my own. Doing a print run would be the most obvious way to generate money, but I've already poured a lot of work into it and I find it's difficult to justify more. Don't get me wrong it's one of my best sellers, but $1,500 isn't much when you stretch it out over a few years. It feels like that should be a lot, but alas.

I've been thinking a lot about the sustainability of all this. Now that the end of the pandemic is in sight (in Canada, at least) I'm going to start to need to find at least part-time work again and we know how much time and resources that saps away from me. It's not sustainable, not for my mental health anyway, and doing stories and RPGs freelance doesn't bring in enough income at the moment to pay my bills.

Anyway, thank you all once more for your support. Every month you keep a writer from not writing and it really means the world to me.