Using Print-on-Demand for Prototyping and Fast-to-Market Paths in Game Design Research

[Music] good afternoon everybody welcome to we demand games the gdc uh people have asked me to remind you to please silence your cell phones for takeoff and also to remind you please to rate the talk afterwards i'm owen gottlieb assistant professor of interactive games and media at rochester institute of technology and i'm also there at the magic center so i teach in the school of interactive games and media and the magic center is our game studio and also a laboratory where we do all kinds of research there i'm the founder and the principal researcher at the initiative in religion culture and policy at the magic center this is our new campus our new building which is opening in the fall a brand new building where we're moving from a beautiful building to a very special new building so maybe you'll have a chance to come and visit at the initiative which i we call rcp

we do original design and research on literacy and comparative religion exploring what anthropologists call the acquisition of cultural practices basically how people hand down aspects of their cultural practices and create new practices within a cultural group and all this is targeted to policy impact either in education or in governmental policy and we're faculty at rit we're faculty at about seven other institutions and that's growing and many fantastic graduate students and undergraduate students we have an alum here reuben today who is a part of uh what we have created and ian schreiber as well we've recently released two tabletop games in the lost and found series and we also have a digital prototype that we delivered for the mobile phone for our strategy game for the national endowment for the humanities so our games are released on uh via gamecrafter which is one of the places that i'm going to speak about today and do some targeted case studies about our work there they're for sale to the public using print on demand and these games happen

to be about teaching religious legal systems so the games are set in fustat old cairo in the 12th century and the first two games address a jewish legal code by moses maimonides called the mishnah torah and we're currently in development on an islamic law expansion module we hear a lot these days about negative perceptions and fears around religious legal systems but we hear very little about what evolutionary anthropologists call the pro-social aspects of religion and these law systems were primary form of governance promoting community sustainability collaboration and cooperation you can see this in the game play and we're working to expand that discourse around religious legal systems in their historical and geographic contest contexts so print on demand comes into play in many different aspects of my work and the work of the team members both in the design studio and also in research in the field as we take our games out to be played and watch what happens when people play them and different iterations of them and then also teaching game design in the classroom so when i'm teaching game

design and development using these systems to help students learn about what it means to ship and that whole process and it's really centered around getting something on sale and in the hands of players so i teach my students about backwards planning planning and visioning and the importance of having a picture in mind of your goal and have your team bought into that goal as a north star with which to navigate and to inspire and aspire and so this was kind of the vision that had started it off these are the finished games in shrink wrap uh that we have had received back and uh the idea was could we get a box game in our hands and have it and so this was our north star we actually had one game in mind and we ended up with two games which i'm very excited about so i start here with this realized vision of games in my hands and then we'll work backwards so this is me turning around the box i can't believe after the years of work we've put into it i'm holding the game it's going to go on the shelf this is the strategy game and here's a the party game

so how did i formulate the vision that we would eventually together realize well i had my previous game jewish time jump new york is a mobile gps augmented reality game for teaching history on location in washington square park in new york city and the game was built on eris an open source platform and so the game is free for players i'm very proud of the game and i learned a great deal about getting games into the hands of players and on the market with that project now jewish time jump while it was a critical success and it's a success from our players perspective keeping it up to date required tremendous and consistent effort every time the software updated so every time the eris platform updated or every time ios was updated and we had to rescale everything for the screen size and entering this new game series i wanted a game that wouldn't require constant updating and nor would it require the kind of raising of funds that i need to do to support that kind of updating meanwhile at the same time my research is shifting so i've been shifting focus from place-based games for teaching history

into looking and add and analyzing the parallels between medieval legal codes and game systems both are rule-based systems and i had moved kind of the law project to the forefront so we were looking at genres of tabletop games that would fit with law codes regarding in particular lost and found objects remember thinking about things like resource management and i'm committed to the intersection of the embodied and the digital just like you see with the gps game out in washington square park and so we turn to a card to mobile approach with games like think about agricola or settlers of catan that you have a tabletop game and they also have a mobile version of it so i was determined to have a game that would have a version that could sit on the shelf for decades without the need for digital update or for emulators to run it because i always get sad when i have to go i have to somehow find later for this game and leaving behind also the freeware model of jewish time jump because i was going to prove that i could generate revenue even if small that could turn back in to support the research and

the kind of work that we're doing about games and learning so i spent a great deal of time researching what it would mean to publish an analog game talking to friends and colleagues who had published tabletop games and gone through all the trials and tribulations of that process and eventually i landed on print-on-demand as the only viable option given my needs and constraints so we settled on the game crafter and i'll speak briefly about some other options over the course of about three years i worked closely with students including matthew fastman ryan muskoff a number of other students exploring all the affordances and limits of print on demand and then we learned about those firsthand and the hard way and i hope that the takeaways today when you uh make your decisions going to print on demand uh you'll take those with you and uh we'll have gone ahead and forged the bridge for you a bit so this is the the game crafter storefront you also may be familiar with a print and play from add magic to people who make cards against humanity um and uh this is this site is advanced since we were making our decisions um it wasn't the right fit for us then it could be now

we kind of scouted this whether to determine it was a good fit you know they now have a storefront as well and i have students in my class now in game design and development who are also using shapeways to sell straight to market game pieces that are 3d printed another kind of model to keep in mind so we landed on print on demand and uh this is the the shapeways site we'd landed on uh print on demands and so i want to discuss what could print on demand afford us so here's like a kind of quick sense of what it was going to mean for us that we could release a game that didn't require expensive and regular updates that we could move forward to commercialization right our games are on the market in the hands of paying customers now with an extremely low budget we could pilot a game that way and get it to market without having to already have high sales figures we could print prototypes with our art and put them in the hands of players in volume quantities and lower cost than actually having to max print each addition each one at our university print shop for example

and we could develop a game for research with a shelf-worthy look and feel that kind of sense of what i was holding in my hands and maybe even more importantly from a pro perspective i could avoid these things i really wanted to avoid so i wanted to avoid laying out thousands of dollars to make a print run prior to sales so low budget entry to market i didn't have to run a kickstarter campaign and raise funds and do community management for kickstarter and or do supply chain logistics for making sure that uh things get shipped out to all the people who contribute i was very hesitant to go the kickstarter route especially on this project but in general i see that the tremendous effort that people who do kickstarters have to do i wanted to try to spend more time in the design studio if possible and when i talk about supply chain logistics some of the things i'm talking about are for example warehousing if you're going to order a thousand games you've got to usually pay rent and store them somewhere especially if you're in a city and you don't happen to have a safe space to store cardboard

other aspects of the supply chain logistics have to do with the distribution am i going to have to walk to the post office you know four or five times a week with bundles in my hand in order to get there and ship them out and then i had spent some time uh doing some work in supply chain logistics when i was a um a management consultant and and knew about aspects of the system like rmas so return merchandise authorizations and i did not want to get involved with that i want to concentrate on game design development and looking at how people learn with games in addition the storefront would give us merchandising so i wouldn't have to fight for shelf space anywhere so that was important and then thinking about working with a printer one of my friends had said to me listen when you're working on getting your analog game printed you need to go to china and you need to meet in person with your printer because you need to have a relationship with that printer or things are going to go sideways and i really didn't want to have to build a relationship and go to china and i had really no way of going to china it's someday i want to go to china but not for working you know with working on the printer in

that regard so these are all things that i could avoid now on the con side because i want you to know about some of the issues right that are right up front that we're dealing with you have an increase in printing cost when you don't go bulk so if you haven't gone bulk you're going to be paying a great deal for printing costs on an individual game or even maybe 10 or 15 or 20 the price is going to go up we're going to talk at greater length when i do the case studies about not having product safety testing and ways that there are workarounds for dealing with that we still needed product liability insurance and i'm going to tie that back to the issue of safety testing um we weren't directly working with a printer so i couldn't pick up the phone and talk to the printer and say listen this is an issue right so that's a downside of not having a relationship with a printer so we have higher prices and then lower margins we're talking about very very low margins because of the cost of printing in a print on demand service that you're not doing bulk with so i want to take you inside some of the case studies of working

inside of the game crafter in particular so that you can avoid some of these pitfalls that we've had and we're going to start at the very end of production and i like to call this one the case of the greedy grabber for those of you who haven't been inside on on the game crafter this is the inside you can see these patterned card backs and i'll show you in more detail all of the art in the game is based on architecture of stock cairo in the 12th century and so this is where you kind of put up all of your individual cards this is uh we i have the students in my class have to have everything ready on gamecrafter they're not forced to actually take it to market but they have to understand the production process to get it so they could take it to market this is another card back working on architectural patterns and we're going to talk about playmats and cards so one of the things these are playmats from the game so it's largely a card game this is also important to think about because the cost of say a meeple is going to be much larger than the cost of a card and so many of the designers i've been

talking to have been saying okay we're going to go old card and you can take mechanics that are based in things that would be more expensive make them a card mechanic and be able to ship a game that's much more affordable so we went the card route from the beginning with the exception of our instruction booklet and these play mats so there's play mats that each player has and then there's a communal play mat where communal play takes place and this is what the communal play mat looks like so that people are placing their cards it's a game about balancing your communal responsibilities with your family responsibilities collaboration cooperation competition mixing and then the trade-off decisions that players start having to make in doing that and this is the cowherd roll uh roll card so that's the play mat that the cowherd is uh plays and and we have both male and female characters for each of the um for each of the roles in the game now this is about qa so there's markings on here that are not the actual cards they're qa markings we went through about 19 qa cycles on the last version of this and i wanted to show specifically ways

that we approached qa so i'm going to close in on the money person the river and right this is so if we have about seven eight people doing rounds of qa because all the details right have to be uh gone over and over and over again that this would point out to them where they needed to look on each one and mark that so we did about 19 rounds of qa on the version that goes to the printer we did a few early print rounds to test things out but now we're talking about the one we took to market we did that and then i ordered proof copies of the game so i could pull the game out i could look at it i could go through every aspect check all the printing check the the the card ends everything went through the whole thing and it looked gorgeous we were like so excited so the teams gathered round we're looking at this okay we can go to ship so we had shipped one of each game we then order 10 of each now these are games in the 35 dollar range and you pay shipping and you pay shipping insurance so we get the boxes back open it up and we start spot checking and this is one of the play mats now you'll notice on the bottom that there's cut off so completed communal responsibility is partially cut

off and on the cow herd you can see that beyond the law pile at the bottom right is cut off and the t of transgression is cut off we're going like how is this possible like we have a proof in our hand that this didn't happen and yet this is happening so we can't imagine what it is and we start to do investigation and i reach out and you're i'm writing right to the gamecrafter and we went back to the designer who followed the specs very closely and eventually we found out that if you pull the template and you look at the margins on the template that you have to follow the marginal template exactly and that the stats on the left won't work to get you there and from there we got into talked to a printer friend of mine at the university and he took me back to my old days when i was working in print and said oh well you know there's bleed and no bleed printing by the way and so when you are going to uh print in bulk it's actually going to change the way apparently the game crafter is going to do this so there's a page actually in help that talk that they talk about in in detail that you know we found months

later this might not even have been up when we first looked that talk about the registration settings and all this but we had no idea even to look for this at all um so what happens is the grabber on the on the multi print is going to pick it up and it's going to grab the sides of it and because it's doing bulk for some reason it's actually going to grab further in so there's no room for any kind of sway so what we eventually do is i i hand redid all of the mats and we get to where the cowherd mat looks more like this to deal with what i call the greedy grabber and now that you know now the game is out and this is fixed and we fixed the 10 copies we got back but for anyone who's going to look at this you know you want to get into the details of of how to work with things like the difference between getting a proof copy which is not a proof copy and how that can change in scale and in particular into some of these printing aspects so a proof copy will not clue you in plan for the greedy grabber that's case study one this is the case of don't eat this game and so i'm not an attorney this is not

legal advice if you want that you need to seek out an attorney this is a story about what i researched and then decided to do and i hope that it's informing for you when you're working in print on demand so this is part of the page of lost and found the strategy game and if you go into the text a little deeper you'll see we have a line that says may contain inks that should not be ingested not suitable for children younger than 14 years is anyone familiar with this issue of testing couple people great so and you'll see so 14 years is our text and then you'll actually see a button from the game crafter that says 12 plus so what are we talking what is this all about what has to do with the hazards to children and players such that anything from a small sharp piece to an untested ink in the card imagine you have a printer overseas or even here well if you don't test the inks with an independent laboratory they could have lead in them for example and if an overzealous player or child decides to chew on a card right you're in trouble you get the picture so we started to look at we dug into

this working with ryan muskoff and working with uh with matthew fassman started to dig into the consumer product safety commission uh regarding third party testing and they're saying well you don't have to test if it's children 12 and under but actually we further research to look at our responsibility and liability potential and we talk to other game designers and our target audience is high school and up including undergraduates we wanted games that were sophisticated enough to have undergraduates engaged in play but for to be accessible to high school students the regulations are actually complex and ambiguous and in some ways we decided to err on the side of caution by including an age restriction in the marketing and merchandising of the game so we're not going to read all that but we you know went through this with a fine tooth comb and the game crafter actually says they don't do lab testing if you go do pricing for lab testing it's maybe in the three five thousand dollar range maybe in the 1000 depending on the lab or the kinds of tests that you're going to uh want to run or consider and the game

crafter says we don't do it you know we don't make games for kids and then their definition is 12 12 and under and i you know so i spent a lot of time talking to labs now the actual standard actually makes reference to 14 years of age in addition to mandatory testing for 12 year olds and so so we picked 14 as the age cut off 14's for us the most relevant standard for our product um and gamecrafter only offers badges for 12 plus because of their reading of the regulation and 18 plus for mature games i guess and uh but our box text and our actual boxes they're marked for 14 and over so what i decided for myself we also got product liability insurance and we you know we work with magic spell studios to do that and i had one designer say you must get product liability insurance so we went ahead and got that and i would say know the limits of the print on demand upfront and plan for them and check the relevant regulations and

confer with other people who've done it before and just plan accordingly for this and there are hundreds and hundreds of games available on print on demand and i think many of them don't take this into account but because we dug into it for so long i wanted to share that with you and kind of the thoughts about how to take this i think you know more safely to market this is called the curious case of the sand timer that grew we uh in the in the in the party game we have this you can either you can dial down or dial up the time for how long people are gonna have to tell their story with and so we said man it would be great if we could put you know a timer in the box so we said all right well the timer they have all these amazing pieces that you can put into your games and it's about two dollars 30 cents so we said all right let's let's do that and then the cascading decisions start to come as we know with coding right also the case with print on demand so we had a medium-sized box and then yet we actually have to gotta count the cards and figure out how many cards can fit in the box and could we fit the timer in the box

and so we're sitting there you know stacking cards and counting cards and figuring out the dimensions and doing all this and we eventually figure out that if we get the timer we're going to actually have to go up and box size and if we go up in box size you're going to have to buy the bottom box in the top box and a wrap for the images on it and the process kind of expands with that timer and so the timer increase to produce the game went from 230 for the timer an additional three dollars an increase in box cost and then we were gonna have to redesign all of our box layouts and so you know we decided people could use their watch because for a game in the 30 to 35 dollar range i'm not adding six dollars to the purchase price for a timer so that's the case of the timer that grew so the cascading decisions that happen when you're trying to make small changes because they're going to have all these physical effects as well so using print-on-demand in the design studio and in research for the field allows us to do things that we wouldn't normally be able to do

and testing games with people with artwork and being able to print some of the the pros that we went over earlier now in the game design classroom i use it for things like okay you're a producer what are your milestones what are your deliverables and how are you going to backwards plan to get there so you've got to budget your pieces and you have to know are you going to put a timer in that box or not and we and my colleague schreiber you know they usually get a price that they need to hit and it's a pretty low price and then they can usually barter they can usually pitch to us as producers to say do they get a couple more bucks on their budget so they're budgeting as well so i find it particularly helpful when thinking about what does it mean to get something into the hands of a player and that process of backwards planning and producing so there are benefits to doing it that way so some takeaways and i also want to open it up to questions plan ahead learn the details of the print-on-demand system weigh that decision of are you going to go digital analog print on demand mix right keep an eye on the differences in

single proofing versus volume with the case of the greedy grabber regarding printer differences realize that small shifts and changes will have ripples in terms of formatting and cost and please don't eat the game that would be my probably number one request thank you very much that's the formal piece and so i'd love to entertain questions about print on demand because i could talk about this for a very long time but i wanted to make an opportunity to converse with you if you can come to the center and speak to the mic that's the best way to get your question and then i'll repeat the question uh so yeah kevin o'gorman i teach at the art institute of dallas and richland college also in dallas and just to back your play here i've been doing this for a year um and just to commiserate with the game crafter another cautionary tale i had

worked on a tabletop game for two years design wise and getting buying myself the prototypes as we iterated along and had it down to the final stretch and it was a tile based game so i was using the literally you know like drink coaster thick tiles and stuff right when game crafters switched from the die cut method to the laser cut for their the giant slugs for those and so up till then they would die cut and bag the tiles and right when i was ready to design the box and go for it they switched to laser cut which meant they left them unpunched in the slugs and so my game no longer fit in the small box because i had sheets and so i actually did call them and and begged and pleaded what's their phone number i don't know well i shot him an email and then i ran into them at a board game conference and stuff so i i you know harassed them and they said there's

really nothing that they could do about it and so i actually had to switch from the like coaster style tiles to card thickness square cards um to replace the tiles just to maintain my my footprint in the box yeah yeah so that that does happen so i was gonna say you know there's there's a the great benefit i you know i couldn't do this without game crafter and so i have tremendous you know love for their their product and their service and what they do and because of what they're doing right we have to deal with some of these things and it's probably through our community where we're sharing these things and trying to plan ahead and trying to test things that we'll get there so um i think using a service like this has benefits and drawbacks but i'm much happier with the benefits than i am uh you know upset about the drawbacks but they're tough yeah yeah and the whole idea of i do the same thing my students uh their their classwork has to be uh game crafter ready like you were saying but i don't require them but i've had two students you know publish their stuff on

on the game crafter so it does work i'm getting uh sorry i'm getting a minute warning i'm trying to see it in the back yes thank you very much i'm going to be around afterwards in this and the after area and i'm happy to talk to people out there yes hi hi i just got one question uh like i'm i'm working myself for board game publisher in poland and run kind of game jams and and this kind of courses with the with the universities is there a big problem for you to reach out for professional publisher help all the all these all these problems it's my first lesson that i that i teach on on my course for uh for board game development process so this could i could also help you in some kind is there a very big big big distance between publishing business and education i mean in europe yeah like in europe we don't have this uh

what was this difficulty in the u.s well we probably have millions of people trying to go to in my guess is millions of people trying to go to individual publishers so kind of like trying to break into hollywood studios and so i think my perception is until you have very high sales like for example the captain is dead has thousands and thousands of sales and they were then they pitched i think eon games but i think the difference between making a game and showing that it's viable in the market is probably part of what is the distance between a publisher that'll say we'll take your game versus the hundreds and hundreds of other people who are trying to pitch their games that's my guess so um you know you're guessing yeah because for example the game that was launched on my game jam uh two years ago now hit the market and meanwhile we had the games that for example nemesis campaign reached 4 million bucks on on kickstarter yes so we can those are proven financially they've made it four million dollars yes but also we had we have space after after launching that successful

campaigns to collaborate with universities just to teach our future uh future employees that we can uh that we can start out while cooperating with with educational business that it would be great to potentially collapse this is mutually beneficial so reach out for this professionals not everyone is open as as me coming here yeah don't leave after this give me your card we'll collaborate but i think this is what happens at gdc is the chance to collaborate and maybe break through what seems to be a barrier that doesn't need to be so i look forward to talking to you thank you for for bringing that um i've got like three i think three minutes left on the clock other questions about any aspect of this i'd love to to entertain a couple more questions yeah so i have a question uh jose segal university of utah so in academia we're also tied to semesters or quarters and there's sort of timeliness factors so i was wondering if you could comment on how this the print on demand and doing all these cycles how you made that work in the context of semesters or the

academic year yes thank you so um and we're starting to a couple people have started to talk about it about not saying you have to take this to market but that you're you go through the process of budgeting and then getting stuff ready to print and i do a couple things i did there was a talk my material was in a couple years ago here about doing non-binding agreements on teams because around ip so at rit all the students own their ip so i have them do a non-binding agreement about how they would carry it forward past the class i have them scope down so that they're gonna actually produce the game in about uh four to five weeks very short and get it ready to print and then i say okay and then continue your play testing maybe you take it to proto-spiel which my colleague ian schreiber you know turned us on to continue play testing continue working but do you know at a certain point you could hit the button and put it to market so um so it's chunked that way and also i talked to them about scope about what type of game are you doing if you're doing a sprawling dungeon crawler and it takes two and a half hours to play

it could be harder to get um play tests in in time so i try to get them to scope for that i'm sorry i can't it says one minute i think so i try to get in the scope so it's a scope they don't have to print then they have to think about and plan for what it would mean to print the next term to give them the the path to access that and the hope is that some some of them are going to go forward and it'll become their portfolio piece or they might then pitch a publisher with it i usually have them list what are the three publishers you want to reach out to with this game and go pitch to that publisher now that you've got a prototype that kind of thing cool thank you you're welcome do we have time for one more are we done i i said one more okay great um and so my question was i saw you mentioned uh doing like play testing with the print on demand uh what's sort of the the the cutoff point when you go from hand making your your play testing materials and when do you go to printing them that's a tough question um i would say we probably did from printing from spreadsheet to cards and

powerpoint in in the lost and found games maybe 60 70 of those before we we were parallel working with the artist team at the same time and then said all right now let's we feel like we've gotten the show stoppers gone now let's try so it was kind of feeling for the play and that the play tests were at the point where players were responding in the realm we wanted them to and we wanted to get the the the artwork together we were also forced because we were on a budget so our budget was going to say look you have that much time to get it done so the budget pushed us um ian always says you know the game is never done it's done when you stop so a combination of the financial pressure of a budget and time like a semester and how the play tests are going was how we made that decision thank you you're welcome all right thank you very much everybody um i'll be outside and happy to talk more about this with you