May (huh!?)
over 1 year ago – Fri, Jun 02, 2023 at 10:29:39 PM

Hey everyone!

Apologies for missing the May update by a few days. I was really hoping to time it with the digital launch of Koriko, but we've still got a little more of the final stage (proofreading) to get through before I can put it out into the world for you all—and I didn't want to delay any further. Shouldn't be long now though!

Here are some spreads from the near-final version of the book:

I'll save my proper update for then, hopefully in a week or so. In the meantime I'll be continuing to work on the boxed edition assets (cards, box inlay, etc) so we can go to print! ☺️ There's still time to upgrade at the Kickstarter price if you'd like—thanks so much to the almost 2000 (!!) of you who've already done so.

All the best for now,

Jack

April
over 1 year ago – Tue, Apr 25, 2023 at 07:46:16 AM

Hey all! 

It's getting warmer, which means we've been digging out our garden from underneath a winter's worth of crap and mud. It also, sadly, means I've been suffering the arboreal torment of my tree pollen allergies. Still, at least it's a little brighter most days...

Writing

I have about four pages left to write before Koriko is fully-drafted! This book is huge, for me at least—it's more than four times the word count of anything else I've done.

Luckily I've got Will and Luke ensuring that it's as good as everything else I've done too. Will's done some stellar work reviewing the rules, and Luke continues to provide section-by-section, line-by-line critiques which are incisive and inspired.

Writing a book like this is weird, for me at least, because I've spent so much time with these words, alone, that I sometimes worry whether they're actually any good or not. Luckily for my eggshell ego, everyone who's looked at the book so far has been really lovely about it. I hope you all enjoy it too when it's in your hands :)

Manufacturing

With the first draft nearing completion, my focus is starting to shift to fulfilment. That makes it the perfect time to make my Big Announcement, which is that I'll now be printing the book with Panda Game Manufacturing.

The success of this project has been incredible, and it's meant I've had to rethink certain aspects of its delivery. For example, I had initially planned to ship the books myself from home, and now there's no way that me, my family or my house would survive that! It's also meant that certain options which were impossible at my base funding goal are now viable.

As soon as I realised the project was going so big, I started looking at what else I could offer you all. I had stretch goals planned, but I didn't want to commit to anything beyond those before I had done proper research and planning.

Well, that long process has now concluded, and I can announce (with GREAT EXCITEMENT!) that I'm offering a boxed edition of Koriko—with a deck of cards and bag of dice.

Firstly, if this isn't of interest then nothing changes for you. We're still making the book, and it'll be exactly the same book as the one going in the boxes. It's designed to work with any tarot deck, and any (regular-sized) dice. You don't need to do anything—you can skip to the next section!

Otherwise, here's the scoop on the boxed edition:

• A deck of cards. These are a mini-tarot size, 100x65mm. They'll have all of the regular prompts from the book and all the confidants, so you'll often be able to read straight off the cards rather than looking up stuff in the book.
• A bag of dice. There are 21 wooden dice, silk-screened with a custom design. These stack really nicely, and have also been designed for use with our alternative mechanic to stacking for those that need an accessible option. They come in a nice printed cotton bag.
• A box. A two-piece box to keep everything together. It'll likely be around 200x200x50mm, which will be quite a bit slimmer than the mockup above (it's hard to find the exact mockup you want sometimes!)

I'm charging £5 to upgrade to this boxed edition. This covers the increase in costs due to all the extra stuff. It's not going to be a huge box, but please consider that it'll bump shipping from a small package to a medium package in most territories which is likely to increase shipping costs by an additional £3-4 when fees are charged. Also, the additional layout/design time might push our reward delivery back by a month or so—though we're still on track to deliver to schedule at this time (it just eats some of our contingency).

The retail price of the boxed edition, which will be the only version available going forward, will be £40.

To upgrade, head back into your BackerKit survey and you'll see a new add-on available—"Koriko Boxed Edition Upgrade". Add that to your order and make sure to confirm (click the big green button!).

If you can't find your survey link, you can recover it here: http://koriko.backerkit.com

If you're a retailer, I'll be upgrading your copies to boxed editions for free.

Why Panda Games?

Working with Panda means that everything is produced in one place, then shipped over by boat to a hub for final delivery to you. This approach results in a ~90% reduction in freight/delivery-related CO2 versus the old approach (I did the maths!). It also results in a ~90% reduction in fulfilment headaches for me 😉

Panda come recommended to me by several other game designers, who have praised their commitment to quality, communication and (BSCI-backed) employee welfare. If you've backed a Kickstarter game before you've probably seen their name, and they have a proven track record of quality delivery.

Unfortunately, we were unable to source premium, FSC-certified recycled paper in sufficient quantities for this project. Instead, we're using a premium paper that has been certified as FSC Mix, which means it's a combination of recycled and FSC-certified/controlled wood.

I was happy to learn that Panda use exclusively environmentally-friendly glues, inks and varnishes—and their cardboard is minimum 30% recycled. A cool thing we've arranged, too, is wrap the rewards (e.g. bookmark, stickers, postcard) together in craft paper rather than shrink plastic. This is going to make fulfilment significantly smoother without putting a load of plastic into landfill.

Overall, I think that working with Panda is a net gain for the environmental impact of this project, the rewards I can provide for you, and the smooth delivery of this project.

Art

Phew! That was a lot. Here's the final chapter piece from Deb to soothe your brain.

-----

That's it for April! See you next month everyone.

Jack

March
over 1 year ago – Mon, Mar 27, 2023 at 03:51:53 AM

Hey everyone, hope you're all doing well! The clocks changed for us this weekend and I'm enjoying the brighter evenings and (artificially) later wake-ups from our kids (we may even reach 7am with our eyes closed one day...).

On with the update.

Playtest feedback

Firstly, a massive thanks to everyone who played and provided feedback on the playtest version of the game. We had over 50 responses and each of them will make the game a little better.

There were lots of common themes, predominantly around when & where the rules get introduced, which is great (always helpful to have consistent feedback!). Everyone reported having a good time with the game, and from reading your journal entries it feels like we're really hitting that 'teen witch drama' vibe.

If anyone is still working through their feedback, I'll need it by the end of the week (31st March) to have time to action it properly.

Again, I really appreciate all of you who took the time to help out :)

Writing progress

Alongside the feedback process I've been continuing to write the game, working through the various content sections and fleshing them out. I've got all the card prompts written now, and all 23 confidants have their first pages done—where you introduce and create them. It's super fun to look through them all and imagine the possibilities for your stories.

I'm currently working through the first drop of feedback from Luke Jordan, who is reviewing the book for me section-by-section. It's always wonderful working with Luke—their critiques and suggestions make the game so much stronger, like a whetstone sharpening all of my prompts and suggestions.

Next up I'll be finishing writing all of the hangouts you can choose from when spending time with confidants, which is the final significant writing task (!). Exciting stuff!

Manufacturing

I have some big, fun news about manufacturing to share with you, but it's not quite confirmed yet and I didn't want to miss the March update. Looking forward to sharing more with you soon.

Art

You can see another rad chapter illustration from Deb at the top of the page, who continues to astound me with their work. I thought I'd also share some of the confidant icons that Rachel's been doing—these will replace those yellow boxes you can see on the spreads in the gif above.

These are going to make each confidant feel really special, and I also plan to make them part of the sticker sheet so you can stick them into your journal when you introduce a confidant.

~

That's it for March, I'll hopefully be back soon with some Fun News!

Jack

p.s. if you're wondering why I haven't sent anything from my newsletter recently, it's because I haven't had much else to say! These updates cover most of what's going on with MHP at the moment—I've been deep into writing and editing Koriko, and I don't have any other stock available to shout about. I think it's a waste of everyone's time to send a newsletter out every month if I haven't got much to say, so when you do hear from me you'll know it's something cool and new. Hope that's ok!

February
over 1 year ago – Mon, Feb 20, 2023 at 04:32:13 AM

Hey everyone! I hope you’re all doing well as we settle into 2023. We've all been pretty ill and tired this month, so apologies if I've missed anything obvious in this update! 😴

Anyway, I’ve got a lot to share with you this month!

I. Surveys

Just a quick note on surveys—thanks to the 90% of you who have already filled yours out!  

You should all have your survey now, if you haven’t got it please drop me a message here on Kickstarter and I’ll sort it out for you.

If you don’t fill out your survey I can’t send you your rewards, and if you’re really late then it might mess with shipping and cause delays/additional expenses.

If you’re holding out on completing your survey until shipping prices are confirmed, that’s absolutely fine and you don’t need to worry :)

II. Playtest

I’ve got a playtest ready to go for you! If you’d like to download it, you can do so from here. I'll be making changes to the files as I get feedback, and I'll update the log as I go so you know what's changed. 

This is intended to be a representative 'slice' of the game, that you can play to test the systems. There’s lots missing from it, which is all detailed in the playtest documentation.

I’d really, really appreciate your time if you wanted to take a look and have a go at playing through it. All the info about what I'm looking to test and how to send me feedback is in the doc.

However, I also completely understand if you’d rather wait for the final, polished product. I’m a designer, so I really enjoy seeing the process of change and iteration on a game, but that’s not your job. Even I sometimes choose to wait until I'm holding a game in my hands before I really dig into it!

I talk about what this playtest is not in the docs too, but just to reiterate—this is a version of the game that hasn’t been edited by any of my collaborators, with no art and a draft layout—it’s going to be a little rougher than the final product! Still, I’m very happy with it and had a fun time testing it myself (the joy of solo games).

Again, that link is here if you’re keen to help playtest.

III. Dice

Thanks to all of you who already chose to help me with a little testing! More than 2,000 of you submitted results, which is incredible—undoubtedly the biggest dice stacking research ever conducted (completely unverified claim lol).

There were two questions about dice stacking. The first was about when the stacking process started to feel ‘risky’, like your tower might collapse. Here’s the results for that one:

As you can see, the results for small (8-12mm) and medium (12-18mm) dice are very similar. This is encouraging from a design perspective, as it suggests that these sizes (which are the most common and cheapest to obtain) are pretty interchangeable. You seemed to find the larger dice (18mm+) seem more stable, which is probably to be expected.

The second question was about the maximum number of dice you could stack after three attempts. Here, we get a fairly even distribution of results for medium dice around 11-14 dice. Small dice are similar, with more results at the lower end. Larger dice have more results towards 20+ dice.

This tells me that folks using small or medium dice are fairly unlikely to be able to stack 20+ dice reliably, which has informed where I place a certain special event in the game. Even with the variation in these results, though, you can see that the most common result across all three size groups is the same.

So, I think my guidance for the game on dice will be:

“Ideally they will all be the same size and between 12-16mm, otherwise you might find them a little harder or easier to stack than those used in testing. Stacking ten up should feel challenging but achievable.

If you’re using really big dice (18mm+) I thought about saying something like ‘stack an extra die every time you’re asked to stack’, but this creates a fair amount of rules bloat across the book. Instead, you can think of dice size as a kind of ‘difficulty mode’ selector—small is harder, big is easier.

Also, finally, I apologise for creating overlapping buckets for my dice size questions. E.g., does a 12mm die count as small or medium? Very embarrassing for the data scientist in me (which is my day job…)!

IV. Art

We’re almost done with the chapter illustrations now! 

Here’s another one to share with you—possibly my favourite of all of them. I love the colours and all the little details!

That's it for the February update, folks. See you next month.

J

January
over 1 year ago – Mon, Jan 09, 2023 at 07:13:04 AM

Happy new year, everyone! I hope you had a nice end to 2022—I'm feeling pretty positive about this year, even though we've been experiencing a perpetual grey mizzle since January 1st...

I. Surveys

If you've not used BackerKit before, it's a third-party service that most creators use to help manage the delivery of their campaigns. It collects and verifies your addresses, and lets you add-on items to your order if you wish. I'm also using it to collect shipping fees. You handle all of this through a survey, sent to the email you used with Kickstarter.

These surveys are ready to go, and I've sent out a 'smoke test' this morning. This means I've sent out a few hundred surveys early, with the hope that we'll catch any issues before it's too late (!). I've already found one (!!)—I had forgotten to hit the 'place add-ons in backer's carts' button, which meant that if you'd bought an add-on in Kickstarter it wouldn't be there in your order. 

That should be fixed now—if you're affected by this, back out of your survey and try going through it again. You should be asked to confirm your add-ons. If you're part of this early cohort and you notice anything else strange, please let me know!

Something that might seem strange, but is actually intentional, is that there are currently no shipping fees to be charged for your order. This is because I'm using a new (beta!) feature from BackerKit, which allows you to complete your survey without shipping fees being finalised.

Why is this good? Well, mostly because it means that I can send out digital downloads ASAP, without having to wait until later in the year when I can confirm final shipping costs. It also lets you add additional items into your cart so I can order enough stock. I've given the same estimates for shipping as I had in my campaign, and I don't expect those to change. BackerKit will then notify you when shipping costs are added, before cards are charged, and I'll update you here too.

If you would rather wait until they're confirmed, that's fine too! Unfortunately there's no way for me to turn off those annoying chaser emails from BackerKit though.

The rest of your surveys will go out over the next week or so, once I've confirmed that we've ironed out any other issues :)

If you use a 'private relay' email with Apple (to keep your real address hidden), then your survey will be bounced. Please drop me a message on Kickstarter or to [email protected] and I'll update your email for the survey.

II. Art

That was pretty heavy stuff, so here's some pretty artwork to ease your mind:

As you can see, Deb is continuing to smash it out of the park with these chapter illustrations. We're working on Chapter 3 now :)

III. Writing

Writing and design work continues to tick along nicely. I'm still working on the setup process, with lots of editing and adjustment to give you the best introduction possible to the game.

These adjustments are almost all to do with how my prompts are written, and how much support they provide. If you want a player to decide something like 'what does this neighbourhood look like?', there are countless ways you could ask them. Your approach will be somewhere on the scale of open vs closed—for example, you could:

• Simply ask the question, openly. This offers boundless freedom to the player, but might be a little intimidating and create friction as they struggle to decide.
• Ask for some keywords, with examples provided. This is still fairly open, but you give more support and structure. However, you might make it 'too easy' to pick from your suggestions rather than engaging someone's creativity more deeply.
• Provide a series of short descriptions, and ask them to choose a few. This is much easier for the player, and gives you as the designer more control over the tone. However, it can be a lot to read (and write!), and will limit the player's creativity compared to more open approaches.

As I go through the process of helping you create your witch, their hometown, the journey and Koriko itself, I'm thinking about where the approaches that I offer sit on that scale. Making the game approachable, but also replayable and creatively engaging, is a fun challenge. I'm hoping I can share the opening parts of the game with you soon, so you can let me know how I'm doing.

~

That's it for the January update, folks. See you next month.

Jack