02: Record Highs
over 3 years ago
– Fri, Oct 07, 2022 at 01:06:42 PM
Good morning everyone!
I woke up today to discover that Koriko has now become my most-funded project to date, and we're not even one day in. We're also a Kickstarter 'Project We Love', which is a real compliment.
Thanks so much to all of you, especially those leaving lovely comments—it's really nice reading through them all :)
Right, stickers & chapter illustrations are in—let's talk about what's next!
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Stretch Goal #4: Audiobook Rules & Soundtrack
The next stretch goal, at £70,000 (well, we actually hit this one already overnight! ), is all to do with audio.
Something I've done with my previous solo games is get the rules professionally read by a voice actor. Audiobook rules are great for a few reasons—they're fun, preferable for a lot of people over reading the book, and they makes the game more accessible.
I'll also be recording original ambient music for the game, to act as a companion as you play through each season. I really enjoyed dipping a toe into musical waters again when I made the track for the video at the top of the page, and I'm looking forward to doing some more. My long-time musical collaborator Christopher Michael Roberts will be helping produce the tracks, making sure they sound their best and helping me navigate the (overwhelming) world of DAWs.
The digital files (that everyone gets) will now include both of these audio offerings. Just a heads-up, they usually trail the main release of the game by a few months as we get things recorded and produced.
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Stretch Goal #5: More artwork!
At £90,000 (!), I can commission Deb to do a series of smaller, single-colour illustrations to fill the margins of the book and (ahem) fix awkward layout problems. I leave these illustrations until I've got the text finalised and laid out, but I am envisioning ten small pieces as part of this stretch goal. As before, I'm excited to be able to commission more of their beautiful work—thanks to all of you for making it a possibility!
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Stretch Goal #6: Printed endpapers
Since we're going at quite a pace, I thought I'd reveal a third goal here too. At £110,000 (!!), I'll upgrade the specification of the physical book to include printed endpapers. If you're a normal person, you might rightly ask 'what the heck are those?'. Well, they're the thicker bits of paper that adhere between the case (cover) of a hardback and the interior pages at the front and back of the book.
In our stock specification, they will be plain white paper which is perfectly serviceable. But if we hit this goal, they'll instead be printed with a beautiful, colourful design. This work will be done by Rachel, my partner, who has done the patch designs and some other cool bits we've yet to reveal. Let's hope we make it that far!
Okay, so that's stretch goals dealt with for a while!
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What do you need to play?
A few of you have asked about what you need to play Koriko. Whether you're using the PDF, printing out your own copy or getting the book, the requirements are mostly the same. In addition to the book, you'll need two things:
1. A tarot deck.
The game uses both the Major and Minor arcana during play to introduce a random element to your story. If you don't already have a deck, they're one of those things that you can get very cheaply or spend a lot on.
I've got a classic Rider-Waite deck which I picked up a few years ago from a local game store for £5, and I've also got a few nicer ones. I've been using the Pacific Northwest and Tarot of the Divine decks during development of the game, and I also really like the look of this Modern Witch deck. Watch out for fakes if you're looking for these, Etsy is full of people stealing artist's work and printing it cheaply as their own!
Several folks have also commented on the project with their recommendations, so take a look if you're interested!
You can also hack a standard deck of playing cards to make a tarot, or use an online tarot generator. It won't be as seamless or special, but it's a good option if you're looking for something cheaper/free.
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2. ~20 regular, six-sided dice of a similar size.
As well as the cards you'll be building towers of dice (a bit like Jenga) that will eventually fall, signifying a mishap or failure in your witch's journey. Depending on how dextrous you are (!), you'll need around 20 of these. If you don't have any dice, you can get them really cheaply all over the place (as they aren't special D&D dice or anything). I've been using a Chessex dice block for testing, which is perfect (they're pretty, and available everywhere).
The dice stacking is the part of the game design that is most 'in flux' still (mostly me testing whether it's better to have one or two towers), but I won't suddenly be adding lots of weird and wonderful polyhedral dice to the design.
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You can usually find all these things at your local game shop. If you've never been to one, you can hopefully find one close to you using this site (US) or this one (UK). I can't vouch for individual stores on those sites of course, but I've always had great experiences supporting local places (rather than giving more money to Amazon).
For those of you who've asked, we did consider doing custom dice and decks as part of this campaign. I know they'd sell well, but they're a lot of extra work and coordination and we decided that they would ultimately stretch our little operation too far.
We want to bring you something brilliant, beautiful and unique, but we also need to be able to deliver it alongside raising a family and doing our day jobs 😊 part of that math is leaving some things on the table. I hope you understand.
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Finally, it's worth mentioning here that accessibility in my games extends beyond screen-reader friendly documents and plain-text formats. Each part of the game's design (in particular, those that require manual dexterity like dice stacking) is considered, with alternative options provided. Currently I'm testing an escalating 'roll under' dice mechanic to replace the tower, to provide tension without stacking (dice rolls can be simulated digitally if rolling/sight is also an issue). As a non-disabled person, there might be a bit of back and forth on the design with those of you who would benefit from these modifications, but that's all part of the process.
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That's it for this update, sorry it was a bit of a bigger one. Thanks again, everyone :)
Jack
