#33: Itchfunding & the Apocalypse
I. Dear Reader
This week, I’m excited about “itchfunding”. Apart from the joy of a terrible new word, it’s nice to see alternatives to Kickstarter being actively explored. The crowdfunding platform seems to be slowly becoming mandatory for those who want their games to do well. And while Kickstarter is a wonderful service in many ways, let’s just say that monopolies don’t have the best track records.
So itchfunding is just a way to use itch.io, the storefront that designers already utilize, to run a crowdfunding campaign. Just like with a Kickstarter campaign, the aim is to raise money so that they can commission art, fund print runs, etc. Or even just get a sense of whether there is interest in their game being made!
And there is a site that now tracks all the games being crowdfunded on itch.io (including my own), which is really neat.
Yours scratchily,
Thomas
(PS. I realize this newsletter is coming out on a Monday. Busyness on my part and some technical glitches with Substack are to blame. It’ll still be going out on Sundays.)
II. Listen of the Week
I stumbled onto Trials of the Apocalypse this week - a slick, well-produced Actual Play podcast that features PbtA games. If you’re new to PbtA games or just want to experience fun one shots of different genres, this seems like an excellent choice. They’ve done Apocalypse World 2e and Undying so far!
III. Links of the Week
Reviews and Articles
A preview of ARC, a game about doomsday clocks and stopping them, which was designed by momatoes and soon to be kickstarted by Exalted Funeral.
Pod of Blunders with a lovely capsule review of ECH0: “ECH0 is a simple game built to tell one type of story and it achieves that goal wonderfully. It explores the themes of war and innocence, life and death, and how the world recovers (or doesn’t) after catastrophe.”
An article about The First Knight by WH Arthur, a game about making your own Superhero Cinematic Universe.
Indie Game Reading Club dives deep into Shattered City and comes out battered but triumphant.
A fun blogpost about the mindset of solo play where you are both “a player and as a GM” titled “Dancing with myself, or, The timing of the Oracles”.
For Dicebreaker, Chase Carter writes about how fans of videogame Warframe harassed an RPG designer into cancelling a kickstarter for his game.
Discussions
Designer Dan Maruschak hosts a roundtable of the organizers of three collaborative game jams - the Threeforged Design Challenge, ThreeForged2019, and the Refraction Jam. A nice retrospective on some of the challenges of fostering collaboration between designers in online spaces.
An interesting conversation between Darren Watts, former co-owner of Hero Games and Indie Press Revolution, and Joe DeSimone about the RPG business over the last 20 years.
Resources
Two new lovely game tools to use for your online games:
First, rollwithme.xyz is a very nice-looking dice-roller where you and your friends can be in the same room and see your rolls. It’s also got an X-Card.
Second, Clocks and Dice is a (still rough around the edges) dice room for Forged in the Dark games. It has clocks that you can tick and Position/Effect.
Someone designed google spreadsheet versions of Band of Blades playbooks.
IV. Small Ads
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Hello, dear readers. This newsletter is written by me, Thomas Manuel. I’m half-man, half-beast, half-journalist, half-game designer.
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