Ante up

I have spent a lot of time building games.  I also talk about them a lot, and thus everyone who knows me knows how much they mean to me.  This has lead to me getting an awful lot of questions about "When are you going to actually publish?"  Generally my answer is that since the self publishing game industry is pretty much a money pit for overzealous designers I don't necessarily feel obligated to publish.  I can make a thing of beauty without selling it and be happy with that, since selling it seems unlikely to generate money.

But money isn't the only thing.  I don't want to pour my dollars down a hole, but having a properly produced game that has nice art and looks beautiful would bring me great satisfaction, not to mention the smiles I would get from knowing others had it to play with.  This week I met with an artist friend who is interested in producing the art for Camp Nightmare.  He is eager to do it, but now the question of how the money gets handled comes up.  I could Kickstart the game and then publish it and send out copies to all the people who pay in... but that does involve me doing an awful lot of packaging and shipping and I know Kickstarters sometimes sink people on those costs if they aren't careful.  I could also just put it up on TheGameCrafter and get them to produce it while I take a cut.  Problem is that to do that I have to front all the money for the art first so if there isn't any interest then the outlay is all on me.

This means I suddenly have to be familiar with shipping costs, intellectual property rights for art, Kickstarter design, and a ton of other things.  It is a lot of work, and that kind of bureaucracy is a big part of why I hesitated to take the plunge before.  But this is a golden opportunity, to have someone with personal interest in the project and plenty of talent to get it done well.  If I just sit and don't do anything about it I am pretty much admitting that I won't ever do anything about it.

It is time to shove those chips in or walk away... no more checking and waiting.