Battle Century G Remastered Update and... OH GOD IS THAT A PATREON PAGE

I've just put out an update to BCG R and its SRD. This will be the first of (hopefully) many more. What's the purpose of these updates, you ask? Glad you asked! I'll be making updates for the following two reasons:

• To fix as many writing mistakes and clarify as many instances of confusing text as possible. In the past two months I've edited over 40 paragraphs to correct typos, fix awkwardly written sentences and make various rules bits clearer to understand or more consistent with how the rest of the book is written. 
• To add as much art as possible. There's still quite a few blank spaces left in the book, and I would like to fill as many of those as reasonable. This will probably take a while, because art costs money and earning money takes time, but I'll continue adding individual pieces here and there while possible.

Lastly, after some discussion regarding one paragraph in the Troubleshooting section regarding Threshold Levels and Genre Points, I decided to make a correction that counts as a rules change. This was the specific paragraph that started it all:

Using Genre Points while taking Damage

You can use the Genre Point you get from losing your last Level of Threshold to activate a Power that has an effect in response to taking said Damage, but not to prevent said Damage from happening. This means you can use Live Another Day or I Cannot be Defeated (but not My Defense is Impregnable or Can’t Let you Do That) even if you are out of Genre Points and an Enemy blows past your last two Levels all at once.

This paragraph implies that all PCs get a bonus 4th Genre Point from losing the 4th Threshold Level. IIRC (and it was several years ago so I'm only like 90% sure), at the time it was written, I decided that was fine and not worth rewriting the damage and genre points sections, because there's not much you can do with a GP after you've already been Defeated, anyway. What's the harm in letting PCs have a free Live Another Day, right?

Yeah, in hindsight that was just lazy of me. My bad.

Later, the expansion added Parting Shot and many more Reaction speed Powers, but I'd already forgotten about this little exploit. As of the Remaster, PCs are balanced around earning three Genre Points per Operation, not four. Additionally, everyone having either a free Live Another Day or Parting Shot cheapens their value and/or makes them considerably more annoying.

Late is better than never, I suppose, so I'm rectifying this error by rewriting that paragraph and making it explicit in the combat rules that losing the fourth Level of Threshold does not give a Genre Point. While this is a clarification, it is one that actually changes the rules, so I am updating the rules version to 1.8 with it.

Lastly, I want to announce that I am launching a Patreon. This Patreon is strictly for donations without any tiered rewards, so you're not going to miss out on anything by not subscribing to it. The purpose of this Patreon is for adding extra art to the book. Ideally, this art run would have been funded by sales, but, well, there weren't enough sales for that, so I'm resorting to this.

The timeline for this side-project is around 6 months, which would let me add everything I want to the Print-on-Demand version of BCGR by the end of the year, when I hope to have that available to the public. If I get the funding, awesome. If I don't, then having less art than ideal is not a terrible loss.

I think that covers about everything!

Gimmick Out.

Monsterpunk Week IV Status Report

Me a week ago: lol kicktraq projects we'll end at like 9k that's dumb it'll probably be something like 7500 before the final 48 hours then another 1k or so during the last 48 hours.

Me now:

I'd feel sillier if it wasn't, like, amazingly good news.

Look at that jump. That was like 3k in 3 days. That's dumb. I jokingly posted some Retroactive Stretch Goals that had already been met (tl;dr more bestiary entries, more maps and 4 new class handbooks after the expansion is delivered) because I felt bad that people were giving me more money when I had no more stretch goals and then they give me even more money?????? What am I even supposed to do with all this, huh???????? Stop being a starving artist cliche???????????

I don't even know why I'm posting these numbers anymore with the campaign already being over. I don't know why I even try to understand them. I don't understand my world right now. I'm just going through the motions. Maybe tomorrow when I wake up I'll be able to process any of what has happened this past month. For now it still feels surreal.

If it sounds like I'm tired it's because I am. I wrote this post like 30 minutes ago then said "Yeah that's good enough" then alt tabbed and forgot to post it until I alt tabbed back and noticed I didn't. I slept 4 hours last night. I could take a nap now that the campaign is over but I don't want to mess up my sleep schedule so I guess I'll be a zombie for a few hours.

See y'all in a later update.

Gimmick Out.

Monsterpunk Week III Status Report

Day 22. It's one minute past noon. Time is a blur. Days and weeks have lost meaning. I almost forgot today was Sunday and I was supposed to write an update here. I've been awake for six hours yet it feels like a Saturday afternoon and the weekend somehow slipped between my fingers.

It's been a weird and busy week. I figured people would stop giving me money when I said there wouldn't be any more stretch goals.

They aren't stopping.

I already wrote an update about the demon race representative, otherwise I'd take the opportunity to do that in celebration of the 666% funding benchmark.

By last week Kickstarter's promotion-boosting algorithm had already surpassed the direct referrals in quantity and total value of pledges, but by this week it's almost doubled it in value and around quadruplued it in quantity. We could leave this thing on autopilot and it would keep going up.

Looking at the graph, weekdays have a constant and stable stream of new backers while weekends seem to hit a slump. Last week's I attributed this to Easter, but it is happening this weekend as well so I guess it's a pattern. The 14th, 22nd and 23rd are the big anomalies with huge influxes of backers making the graph jump up noticeably and stop being a nearly straight line.

With that said my sample size is of two weekends (the first doesn't count because it was during the rush of the initial 48 hours), so maybe I'm just seeing patterns that really aren't there.

So frustratingly close to the lucky 777, yet so far away. Most followers don't convert even at the end but if they do it's going to be ridiculous. I joked above that I expected people to stop giving me money after we met that last stretch goal but they aren't. I really didn't think we'd pick up another thousand and half in the third week, so among all the other things I'm doing I'm also trying to figure out what I can offer as a token extra reward for backers, sort of as a surprise stretch goal retroactively added in after it has already been met.

So far the best I've got is to write some additional classes and release them as PDFs later, giving them for free to all backers, but only after the core book and expansion are finished so they don't threaten to disrupt our schedule. I'll write a campaign update about that later when I've got it figured out.

Until next week, may you be continuously pleasantly surprised.

Gimmick Out.

Monsterpunk Kickstarter Week II Status Report

Second verse, same as the first.

At this point I figure I could tell people that our next stretch goal will be to buy me a skull fortress on a volcanic island for a million dollars and if it happened by next weekend I'd just go "Yeah, that checks out."

It's a shame I have too much integrity to do that. We're not doing more stretch goals, because this is all the work I can safely take on and I'm not looking forward to becoming another Peter Molyneux.

We've still got two weeks to go and we're still going strong though. More funding means more and better art assets. Monster art, landscapes, combat maps, all that good stuff. I figure I could say "Give me 10k and I'll get 3 landscapes plus a bestiary with 50 monsters and a map pack with 20 maps." But I can't 100% promise that with our current schedule, it's a lot of work not just for me but also for the people I'm paying to make these assets. If they get sick for or, you know, life happens at them for a week or two we won't meet the deadlines, so I'd rather just do however much we can with the money we get and leave it at that.

That number isn't a complete fabrication, by the way, it's the figure I ended up with after doing a lot of math. We might actually make it at this rate. It seems farfetched, but so seemed every stretch goal before. Crazier things have happened. If we do then, well, now you know how much I want to expand that bestiary and map pack, I guess.

Who knows, maybe next week I'll ask for that skull fortress.

Gimmick Out.

Monsterpunk Kickstarter Week I Status Report

Mkay it's been a week so let's check in how we're doing and --

--huhwha?

To say this has blown away all my expectations is an understatement. I genuinely doubted we'd reach the expansion book stretch goal, let alone that we'd reach it in four days. In a little over a week we've not just made more money than BCG did in its whole month but also we got more than double the backers. It's not unrealistic to expect we'll meet the 5k stretch goal before the final 48 hours. Hell, it might happen before the last week.

The numbers even went up again between taking the screenshot and finishing writing this update. Twice.

So how come MP is doing so well even though I've basically done less marketing for it than BCG, which pretty much had none at all?

You see that "external referrers" side of the pie chart? That's word of mouth. That's the people from my Discord that have either pledged themselves or showed the game to other people. For the first 2-3 days of the campaign the direct referrals were the grand majority of the funding and ever since then Kickstarter's algorithm has been promoting the game based on its success to make it catch up.

So the answer to the previous question would be "Turns out cultivating a chill community that upholds basic human decency for a few years without asking for anything in return makes people want to support you." Weird thing, huh.

And I didn't even have to show people any silhouettes of new classes hidden behind a number of retweets or put pictures of boobs front and center to do it!

The majority of pledges occur during the first few days and the last 48 hours. If the people that put this game on 'remind me later' all decide to pitch in for the basic PDF to reap its rewards we'll not just meet the last stretch goal, we'll soar past it for an absurd 777% funding. That's not even a joke. We have $3,669 as of me writing these words and $4,100 would give us $7,769.

That's terrifying.

I am not used to success. I had taken for granted that I would forever continue to barely get the funding needed for these dumb games of pretend that I keep making and to continue subsisting with only the base of Maslow's hierarchy of needs covered.

With success come expectations, notoriety and also stakes. I now not only have to keep a lot more people happy and will get a lot more negative attention my way for no reason, but also I have something to lose. That is a hell of a motivator.

I would continue writing this blog post but I think that I've already said all that needed to be said. Plus I've already written 9 of the expansion book's 12 projected new classes and I would like to finish the other 3 today.

Until next week.

Gimmick Out.

The Monsterpunk Kickstarter is LIVE!

And also it's already funded!? NANI!?

Yes, really, go see for yourself. I've spent like four hours writing personalized thank you messages and also hastily writing the first update and let me tell you it's a great problem to have.

Crazy world.

Kickstarter Week IV

As you can see on the right, we pulled through. With 79 backers and 111% funding, all's well that ends well. Just like during the first week, let's go over a few numbers.

Edit: I keep forgetting that images posted in blogger have a fixed resolution. That says 5613 downloads total for those of you who don't have microscopes built into your eyes.

Just going over this very quickly, about 1,4% of our total downloads represent one backer. Let's assume some of them are repeat downloads and round it down to 1% for basically one backer every 100 downloads. Most of the downloads (roughly two thirds) are after the campaign started, but I'd be willing to bet most backers are long time fans rather than new blood.

The pie chart does not differentiate between external referrals from this blog and other websites, but it does basically show that Kickstarter is good at promotion but not very good at retention unless you already have a large enough budget to wow people right out of the gate.

So where did most pledges come from? A full 35% (That's $1192) came from direct traffic, that means word of mouth person to person linking and another 26% ($880) came from widget links. That's 61% ($2072) that I bet came mostly from you wonderful people. Thank you, I really don't have enough words to express my gratitude.

So before we get all sappy and stuff let's talk about the other update we had about mechanics this week about Giant Rivals and PCs. Here, I'll sum up the rules for you. Giant Mecha use the following rules:

Unnatural Disaster: You occupy a size between 4 and 9 Zones, chosen during creation, but the number must be your Power Level plus four or lower. Your size can be increased when you go up a Power Level as well, but once increased it may not be reduced. All Zones occupied by your body count as Extreme Terrain for Enemies in them. Abilities that can usually ignore the effects of Extreme Terrain will not help against you if you have a similar ability that works in the same kind of Terrain.

Raw Power: You cannot Engage or be Engaged in a Duel, but all your Melee Weapons gain an Advantage to their use, and Shooting Weapons used against you suffer a Disadvantage to their Might Tests. When measuring the maximum Range of your Internal Upgrades or Weapons you may use any part of your body as the origin point.

Segmented Areas: Your four external Areas are distributed across your body each with its own separate Zone. Each Area has a single Level of Threshold having to be targeted and damaged individually. Other body parts are impervious to damage, and excess damage from breaking through a Threshold Level will not carry over into a different Area. When you restore lost points of Threshold, you choose how to distribute each point individually.

Exposed Weak Points: Abilities that let you treat Maimed Areas as normal have no effect. Replacement Maim effects like those of Biological still function as normal. Offensive Actions that target multiple of your vulnerable Areas gain an Advantage to their Might Tests for each additional Area affected. Any time you would take Damage to more than one of your vulnerable Areas at once, only one Area of the attacker's choice receives Damage, but if the Damage is more than enough to break past that Level of Threshold then the remaining Damage will transfer to another Area of your choice.

As you can see, they've got a lot going on in terms of rules. Colossus works just fine if you want to keep things simple, but Giant has a little more personality to it and gives more options to GMs... As well as to entrepreneurial PCs.

The expansion does not shy away from this kind of complexity, but at the same time this is about the most complex I want any individual mechanic to get. There might be one or two more mechanics just as complex as Giant, but nothing more complex than it.

What Now?

The holiday period is always a busy one so I'm probably going to space out updates more. I still owe you all that series of posts about Gurren Lagann and I'm going to do it as soon as things calm down.

So I think that pretty much covers everything. Until next time.

Kickstarter Week III

Week III is basically Week II redux. You know how bad guys with multiple forms are remembered for their first and last forms but the other ones in the middle all kind of just blur together? Yeah, it is a little like that with crowdfunding too. This is an appropriate comparison, given our subject matter, but more on that later.

Here's your weekly summary:

Three Updates in Three Minutes

First of all there's Design Flaws which are Upgrades that you can take during Mecha construction to have more MP to spend but give your Mecha a big weakness. Here's the two examples:

Limited Battery Time (+30 MP)

Internal Upgrade
Effect: At the beginning of every one of your Turns after the first one, your Mecha reduces its Energy Attribute by 1 until end of Operation. After your Energy is reduced to 0, you will lose your current Level of Threshold every Turn instead.
This is a prototype so experimental that it cannot run for more than a few minutes at a time. It is so inefficient that after its battery for external equipment runs dry it the limbs will start to power down individually until it can't move at all.  

Walking Coffin (+60 MP)

Internal Upgrade
Effect: Double all the Damage that you take.
Your Mecha is a fragile little thing and the designers have made it a testbed of every feature they could think of, but apparently forgot to armor it with more than aluminum foil and to fill the tank with something other than explodium.

Then there's Interference Terrain which is a variant of Defensive Terrain. with a focus on jamming sensors and obscuring vision. Unlike Defensive Terrain, Interference Terrain does not provide real cover, it only makes you harder to pinpoint and is thus useless against weapons that don't require precise targeting and cover a wide area of effect.

Interference Terrain works both ways, any Units attacking from within, into or through Interference Terrain will suffer two Disadvantages to the Might Test unless it is with Weapons that have the Blast ability or that affect Zones instead of specific targets. That means you can use it offensively to force enemies to move out of their current position, defensively to nerf their (most likely) strongest weapons, or as a barrier between both groups to do a little bit of both.

Lastly there's nerfing Guardian of Steel. The update goes more in detail, but here's the two options I'm considering the most:

The first is to reduce Guardian of Steel's area of effect to a 1 Zone radius. This makes it only work with a team full of snipers or after a lot of setup positioning the party properly, which in turn makes everyone more vulnerable to kiting (the group now has to move at the speed of the slowest member of the party) and area weapons will hurt more. Waaay more. The effect is just as strong as it used to be but it is more situational, so you have to think about how and when to use it.

The second is to halve the Defense bonus granted to allies. Cutting the bonus to half makes it go from 6-8 to 3-4 which is a lot more manageable. Those 3-4 extra points are usually the difference between hitting for very little and not hitting at all, meaning that weapons with effects that trigger on hit can still have an effect with a good roll. Still not enough to make using those over Finger Nets and Bombardments a good idea though, but it is something. This is a boring change, but an effective one.

The Finish Line

The beginning and the end are the most important stages of a campaign. Continuing the comparison from before, this is when all the fighters get serious. I may not be able to blow up a planet in 5 minutes (that somehow take a zillion episodes) but I've been preparing for this period the most. Maybe this will work out, maybe it won't, but I sure am not going down without fighting to the end.

Kickstarter Week II

Kickstarter creators whisper to each other in hushed tones about 'the slump', that period between the first and last weeks when activity dramatically cuts down. When you have to earn every 1% by trying out all sorts of things.

It is a learning experience to be sure.



Not what I'd call an utopian experience either.

There are many ways to approach this problem, and I'm trying to take the high road whenever possible. Many creators want to trade pledges and positive comments with each other like it is a business transaction, saying nice things about each of our projects and offering support without actually feeling it. That's not for me and I would rather fail than succeed through lies.

In other news, I would make a pretty bad politician.

But hey, we're officially 2/3rds of the way there and a new week means new ways to approach backers. Now that I know what works what doesn't work, I am going back to the drawing board for a new strategy.

But enough about that, let's talk about game things. This week I started previewing some of the material that will be in BCZ, our first two previews are about Genre Powers and Weapons respectively. It is important to not lose sight of the ultimate goal here. No matter what happens, one thing will always be true: I want to make fun games and fun games will be made.

Now I'm off to the proverbial war room of the mind.

Kickstarter Week I

Things are looking good. I won't bore you with the details of what it feels like and everything I'm doing. Instead I will bore you with data. Yes, data, that most elusive of resources that all anime scientists go crazy over. What kind of data? This kind of data:

So as is more or less expected, there's a quick initial surge in contributions from all of you awesome people who were waiting for your humble deliverer of roleplaying goodness to get this thing going. Then it stabilizes and slows down until the day where I make the first update and promptly starts to climb up again. Note that this is before I make today's update or rounds of promotion, so the line is flat precisely because I haven't done anything new.

What I find more interesting are the near 3k downloads in the span of a single week, it is especially interesting because I still have under 50 backers, most of which already had the game. This tells me that either there's a high rate of interest (not in the economic sense) but a low rate of retention, or that a really, really high number of people are waiting for the magic moment when everything spirals out of control with crazy stretch goals. If you've ever followed a successful Kickstarter you know what I'm talking about.

Also, just to let you know that I didn't forget about you guys: Have an offsite poll. For your convenience, and here is a link to the non-backer inclusive update discussing the matter at hand.

That'll be all for now, I gotta go back to making games. Toodles.

Good news, everyone!

It is a good thing that I'm a really stubborn person and I really like game design, because the non-game design aspects of this adventure have been an experience I can only compare to rubbing fire ants all over my face

See, I like writing new stuff and adjusting existing stuff, and I can convince myself that I enjoy doing the layout work and also indexing things manually too, but it is really hard to keep repeating "MMM YES I LOVE HOW IT BURNS AND STINGS AND INSECTS ARE EATING MY EYES." when it comes to everything else. Here, meet our metaphorical colony of arthropods that has been torturing me as of late:

Imagine coding errors stamping on a human face - forever.

When I contacted IndieGoGo Support, they said that they were "aware of an issue that currently affects a small subset of campaigns from saving changes." but "at this time we unfortunately do not have a work-around." which is pretty bad news. I tried creating a new campaign or even a new account and kept running into this problem. I tried doing different things and managed to make it work once every ten tries experiments or so, and only if it was the first draft saved each time for one account, leading me to believe that "small subset" is something of an underestimation and also that their website runs on fairy magic.

Pretty much all of the issues I've been having so far were because I have been trying to publish as an individual through IndieGoGo, and this was the straw that broke the camel's back. I have now teamed up with my good friend and fellow amateur game designer LawfulNice (of DtD40k7E fame) to make a Limited Liability Company for our mutual benefit. Meet Gegenschein Games.

I swear I did not choose the name. Honest.

I am basically banking on him being the cool, successful Jerry Seinfield to my aloof, unlucky George Constanza and between the both of us somehow run a good campaign. Grab the popcorn because this frankly sounds like the setup for a buddy movie and we will somehow end up saving the planet from alien invaders by the time this is over. If I'm lucky, there will be robots.

Anyhow this means I am making changes to the plan - slightly. Going from the second best crowdfunding platform to the one that is just the best but also the one with good tech support and less sketchy practices doesn't really change much as far as you are concerned. As far as I am concerned? Costs go up an additional 5% from extra fees, so I have to be a little more careful with the budgeting. Frankly I'm just happy that I will not have to put up with stuff going wrong from this end again and that I can use the platform with the better prestige.

We're currently getting everything verified, a process that takes up to 7 days. If my plan to leech off LN's good luck is any successful, we should be going live this next weekend. Fingers crossed!

PDF - Pretty Difficult to Fabricate

Part of making a game is presenting it in a way that makes the reader want to play it and the player glad that everything is presented so well. About the worst thing you can do throw over a hundred pages of words in a .txt file at people. On the other hand, you don't need to insert a dynamic document with hyperlinks everywhere either.

The industry standard is the PDF, because it works as a document to read and is a good format for printing. In this digital age there are other options, especially if you don't intend to actually print out anything, but generally speaking if you want to write your own RPG you'll have to make a PDF file.

Too bad that working with PDF files from the creator's side of things is terrible.

Microsoft Word can, technically, export documents as PDFs but good luck not having an aneurysm if you try to add images, sidebars, or anything remotely fanciful to the text. Dedicated software like Quark or Publisher will work better, but they each have their issues.

Probably the best one of the bunch is InDesign, which is okay as long as you admit to yourself you are okay with having to do your tables of contents manually - or are okay with it looking like crap and taking up twice the space it should. Second best is probably Quark and it is one hell of a drop in quality, I used it a few years ago and this twitter account is not mine but it totally could be because it sums up my feelings pretty well. Maybe it has improved since then, but I wouldn't know and I really don't want to have to find out either.

Oh and good luck if you lose the original files or need to convert them to another publishing software. See, all those fancy programs work with their own file extensions then export the document to something the average user can read. If at any point all you have to work with is the resulting pdf, you are boned. About the only thing you can do at that point is edit what you have left with a PDF editor.

Don't do it. PDF editors are the spawn of Satan. I swear they work on Lovecraftian alien physics because none of what they do makes any sense. If you so much as try to insert a new line into an existing block of text then when you export it will roll 1d100 on a mishaps table and the resulting document will likely have one of the following:

• The line will be in a completely different font and size than the ones you used.
• The edited page will show up completely blank.
• You find a whole new page for that one line right after the original one.
• The document will be entirely written in blood and signed by Qos-Ukthtog, Cacodemon of Despair.

Bottom line is for the love of Valsione keep a backup of your original. If you can do that and can find suitable workarounds for whatever problems you can find with your publishing software of choice (I'm told Scribus is both decent and free, so there's that) then you'll be good.

For the record, I do use a PDF editor in JPDFBookmarks, but just to add bookmarks and leave it at that. It saves the bookmarks as its own .txt file you can import later to another version of the same document and modify from there. InDesign can do bookmarks but I don't like the way they are arranged automatically, and if I'm going to touch them up then might as well do them manually and keep them in a .txt for later use.

Unless you want a document that looks good in, say, a tablet. Then you are super boned because .epub and .mobi files are unruly children and you need to pretty much write up files entirely around them from the ground up. You can't approach them like you would any other manual, because they behave somewhat like a webpage in a browser and thus much of the end result depends on the end user's settings. They are not a very popular format for RPGs, understandably so, but that is a shame because they are much more useful as a reference document when you're gaming in meatspace.

If you really want to use them though, here's a few tips:

• Stick to the basic fonts that everyone should have. Even if you embed your own fonts into the document they might not look good.
• Don't divide things by pages because what fits on a page depend on the user. Divide things by sections or chapters instead
• Don't work in layers because foreground elements will be pushed below the objects behind them. Basically don't have background objects.
• Tables tend to lose their formatting so be careful with them. You might need to apply some HTML.
• You really, really need that Table of Contents. Automatically generated ToC's work pretty well here.

If you're going full-digital there are other options worth considering, like using a wiki or cloud-shared documents, that might be worth sticking with instead of dealing with all this stuff. I use them to run my games, for example.

This was a pretty nuts and bolts post type post, I stuck to the key points and didn't really want to lengthen it with images because either you're interested in this stuff enough to keep reading or you don't care. If this was interesting I might do more in the future with more detail to them.

Next Week: Things Happen.

In Which I Totally Sell Out, Man

Next week or the next after that (I swear it will be this month) I am going to launch a crowdfunding campaign. My intent is to raise three thousand dollars, which is a lot less than it sounds, and basically spend all of it betting on horse racing on artwork. It would not just be for the core book but also for the expansion in one fell swoop. It will be through IndieGoGo because that's basically the best option I have available, since Kickstarter is not open to residents of my corner of the world (Argentina).

Not much of a choice when one of them just isn't available, is it?

Let's have a quick FAQ.

Is the game going to continue being free?
Yes. Well, mostly. I spent a lot of time debating how exactly to go about this. I like to say "Games are meant to be played." which, in this case, means that I think people deserve to play a good game first and I deserve recognition for a job well done after the fact. Also piracy exists and that's not a battle I can win by conventional means. The current System Reference Document is a good example of what I will give to everyone who wants to give BCG a try. 

Why should I pay money for a free game?
Because you want it to look good and art is not cheap. Because you want the game to be better and if we overfund I can spend more hours on it. Because you want a limited edition hardcover that won't be accessible otherwise. Because you want to have one of your own ideas in the expansion. Because you want to show the industry they should be making more games with a focus on good rules. Because you just want to help me pretty please with a cherry on top?

What is this about an expansion?
BCG is cool and all but I want to use it as a base from which I can build other, more flavorful and genre-specific stuff on top. Battle Century Z, the innovatively named sequel, is going to feature around a hundred pages of supplementary material, of which the most prominent are a series of 'hacks' or alternative rules to, for example, set your BCG games on fantasy worlds with magic-powered robots. Of course, it will also feature an expanded armory of powers, weapons and other goodies to spice up your non-hack games.

What kind of rewards will you be offering?
There won't be any T-shirts, custom dice or other paraphernalia that doesn't really add anything to the game. Instead I'm going to offer, in addition to getting things at a discount of their retail value, limited edition hardcover versions of the manual and a few limited slots to let you commission abilities for the expansion. You think of a Miracle, an Upgrade, or any other cool thing you want in that doesn't exist yet, I handle the rules, and you get your name in the description to show everyone what a totally radical person you are.

How much is it going to cost?
Exact prices are subject to change but I want to keep them around the following tiers (all prices in US dollars): 10 for both digital pdfs, 30 for both softcover manuals, 40 for both hardcovers and 60 for two hardcovers and two softcovers. These costs don't include shipping, but I'll be delivering via the awesome folks at Drivethru who have experience in sending stuff all over the world at decent prices so there shouldn't be any surprises there. Because printing won't happen immediately, anyone who gets physical product pays half when the campaign ends and the other half when it is time to start printing things out (next year). I'll go more into detail on this later, but it is a pretty cool thing and it is all thanks to Drivethru.

What will be the format of the books?
BCG will hover around the 200 page range, BCZ will be around 100. Both books will have softcovers with black & white interiors to keep things cheap for me and accessible for you. Games are meant to be played, after all. This is not going to be a book you keep in your library to show off, but the one you want to actually play with. The limited edition hardcovers exclusive for backers will also offer to have a softcover companion copy so you don't have to damage your collector's piece. Overfunding means more art and me adding things to the books, so they could go for up to 20 or 30 pages more each.

How is the money going to be spent?
Carefully. I'll post a full breakdown later, but a quality color cover or splash page (the kind you see in works with a real budget) is going to be around 200-300 dollars. Smaller illustrations range from 50 to 200, and surprise surprise, anything involving giant robots requires a skillset that is more expensive than anything that doesn't! BCG has about 75% of the art it would need (40 individual pieces), but that's still only about half of what a 200 page book would need in a best case scenario to space out the walls of text better. BCZ obviously has none yet.

Do you have an expected delivery date?
If things go well: You'd be receiving a finalized BCG pdf around the start of next year and the physical versions would deliver one or two weeks after that. BCZ would be a year from then. These are my estimations based on the assumption that no plan survives contact with the enemy. I'd like to finish things before the new year but there's no way I won't run into unexpected inconveniences. If things don't go well BCG would deliver around the same time and BCZ... Well, let's just say it'll have to wait.

How we got Here

Roleplaying is special because any GM is part-time game designer, and the more effort they place in crafting an experience for their group, the more likely they are to end writing up their own custom rules and whatnot. I like games. Or at least, I like games in the broad sense, because I tend to find most games lacking. After enough goofing around homebrewing various systems to make a Super Robot Wars-esque experience, I realized I might as well write the game I always wanted to play myself. Clearly no one else was going to do it for me. That was Giant Guardian Generation.

I admit I miss the overwhelmingly ridiculous name. Dearly.

Quick aside for those not in the know: Super Robot Wars is a turn-based tactics RPG, often featuring pilots and mecha from various anime, manga and videogames. It combines all these wildly different series together by not even pretending to care about realism and carrying its pretty basic gameplay with a lot of style. End aside.

GGG was as much of a fangame as it could be without outright calling itself a fangame, because I really wasn't aiming any higher than 'fangame' at the time.The concept of maybe publishing my own thing was there from the start, to be honest, but as the kind of thing that would be cool if it happened. Like world peace, a solution to global warming, and getting to see Rebuild of Evangelion 4.0 in my lifetime.

The movie is just going to be two hours of Anno laughing in a pit of money and figurines.

That was around three years ago. Time may not fly but it sure rides the shinkansen. I've been doing this long enough in my spare time that I figure I have a shot at this as a second job. Still, my priority is to make a good game, and get more people to play it. As I stated earlier in the year, the part of the process that is not just my own work has been going well but not fantastic. I mentioned before that you can do things cheap, fast or well and you can only have two options of the three, and I ended up choosing well and cheap (in that order).

This entire year so far I've basically not even tried to get the word out, because I've invested all my effort on the design side of the game and going back and forth with artists, editors, and of course you, my intelligent readers of refined taste. More eyes on the game is obviously a good thing, so that's what I'll be doing next. And if I can trade 'cheap' for 'fast', that would also be really, really nice. Over the course of the year I've been debating exactly whether crowdfunding from Argentina is a remotely viable idea for something like BCG. There are many hurdles in the way, but ultimately I lose nothing by trying.

If we don't go next week then I might actually treat this like a normal blog and discuss some other stuff related to the game that has been going on. I eagerly anticipate good news rather than shaking my fist angrily at the sky, but I'm prepared for you, sky. Give me your worst.*

*Please don't give me your worst.

The Long Road to Printing

A big chunk of game design does not actually involve designing any game parts, but rather the best way of presenting it. Some of it needs other people to step in (illustrators and editors, mostly) but there's another element that is crucial and you need to work it out: Text presentation. By that I don't mean choosing the right words to express something (that's for your editor to worry about) but rather choosing the right look for your words.

This is relevant because I spent several days fixing issues that came up when I talked with a local printer. The issue is more complex than it seems, even though I was already familiar with a lot of prerequisites, I still missed some. You don't see a lot of discussion about this aspect of game design so I figured I'd offer my experience and thoughts on the subject.

Put on a Happy Typeface

Characters (the symbols, not the fictional people) are the atoms of writing. And one of the most subtly important steps of proper presentation is to choose the right typefaces and fonts for your text. But first a clarification: A typeface is not the same thing as a font, rather, fonts are individual styles of typeface. Verdana is a Typeface, but Verdana Bold is a font. I call typefaces fonts all the time in everyday talk, but this is one of those instances where the difference matters. And now that we all have learned something of mild usefulness we can move on.

Your typefaces must fit your style. Sometimes the best way to explain something quickly is with an example, and I am going to use a controversial one: Comic Sans is actually a pretty decent typeface, it just doesn't go well with anything you want to be taken seriously. It looks super goofy and cartoony and yet people use it for their Linkin Park AMVs made with Windows Movie Maker and I have no idea what they're thinking. There are hundreds of thousands of typefaces out there for pretty much any style you can think of, you have to find one that works. Don't just use Times New Roman and Arial for everything, because you are missing out.

Your typefaces must be comfortable to read. Times New Roman and Arial work with eveything partly because they are solid typefaces and partly because we are so used to seeing them everywhere our brains already recognize the words written with them automatically. Point is: The more distinctive and unique your typeface is, the harder it is to read and the slower the text is to digest. Fancy fonts make cool headers and titles, but are terrible for reading full sentences.

Balance serif typefaces with sans serif typefaces. There is some research indicating that typefaces with the pointy ends (the serifs) to be easier to read on printed paper, while the reverse is true for sans serif typefaces and text on a screen. Honestly a lot of it is ambiguous and highly subjective so I don't particularly subscribe to the idea, but it bears keeping in mind. I personally find serif typefaces to be an overdesigned blight on my eyes, but sans serif fonts annoy a lot of other people so I try not to go overboard with them. What I get out of this is that you need to use them both. My method of choice is to use headers in sans serif and body text with small serifs.

The less typefaces, the merrier. Good design is as little design as possible, and that extends to the number of typefaces you should use. All your headers should have the same typeface, as should all your tables, and basically everything you can think of. You do this because you want readers to recognize the parts of the text that interest them the most immediately, and also because you don't want your text to read like a ransom letter. Distinctive, unique sections can have their own typefaces if you want them to stand out, but for the most part you want to have no more than three or at most four typefaces per page: Chapter Header, Paragraph Header, Body Text and Table Text.

Get the Layout of the Land

Ease of use beats fancy visuals. If you can fit a whole section of rules text in one page or can split it into two pages with some art in the middle, you should do the former. Games are meant to be played. I'm going to care a lot less about how pretty your book is when you make me flip back and forth between 10 pages just to check out the descriptions of the weapons in your huge weapons table.

Mind your Margins. Margins are not a problem as long as you are working with just .pdf files, but they become very important if you want to print things out. You don't want to accidentally have large chunks of text missing, after all. The amount varies depending on page size and publication type, which is why you ought to figure out both of those before you commit to writing anything. Hardcovers need more inner margin space, color books need a sizable gutter and bleed. There are too many variables to list, really.

Backgrounds are nice but they should be unobtrusive. People have been reading black text on white backgrounds for hours at a time since forever without any significant problems, but now there's this trend where RPGs need to have the text on a background with pretty colors and give their sidebars ornate borders and so on and so forth. Sometimes this is helpful, but the grand majority of the time it doesn't add anything and only gets in the way.

Don't be afraid of splitting text into columns. If you need to write many short text blocks with short sentences in your page, you should split it into columns because you can fit more text in one page that way. I could fit 10 weapons in one page by using two columns, or I could fit six without columns. It is a matter of practicality. Don't use them if you don't need them though, and you should not have more than two, or text will be too small to read at a glance. Newspapers get away with it because you're supposed to take your time with them.

In my case I had to change the body text typeface and make a few extra milimeters of space in each margin. This may not sound like much, but I had to basically go over every page readjusting the columns and making sure the text still fit within its borders, because the same characters have different lengths depending on their typefaces.

It got so troublesome that I decided the book interior will only be in black and white. I already have some things in color but the requisites to do something good in color would require me to cut on text or increase pagecount considerably. The positive side of this is that it'll be cheaper for everyone involved.

It basically took two weeks and the better half of a third but that hurdle has now been solved.