Playtesting First Solo Campaign

[korric]

Any news on this? The possibility of a solo-focused expansion is the reason I'm still holding on to this game.

[Horizon Jeff]

We're trying to finalize another ship pack and an errata pack, so that we can put them up at the same time on Drive-Thru-Cards as the solo pack. This way people can get them all without paying so much in shipping, which is a concern especially for UK/EU fans who find the shipping costs prohibitive for the current range of PoD products.

[Kedvenc]

is there any update on the solo campaign or the state of the games development in general?

[Horizon Jeff]

is there any update on the solo campaign or the state of the games development in general?

At the onset, I want to say we really appreciate the support and the continuing interest. It means a lot, and provides much of the motivation to continue.

We do very seriously want to release future material, and at least the Lab Ship has a firm commitment behind it as it will allow us to enrich the pool where is concerned. Even if we were at some point to cease operations, I expect the Lab Ship would still get released in some format.

Beyond that, we have things such as the Broadsword, mechanics for a Vargr / Vargr ship, and a solo campaign in various stages of development. Will they ever come out? Good question.

So this may be more inside baseball than you were asking for, but our situation is a little tricky. We are a break-even type company, which is fine for a passion project. We didn't go into this expecting to get rich. But our pace of sales and current resources really complicate efforts to make a future retail scale release, for a couple of reasons:

1. Art costs: This is the biggie. Although perhaps some costs can be deferred through AI-generated art, first of all even if we could go 100% AI we wouldn't want to displace artists in that way, and secondly our own experiments with AI art have not been encouraging. It's a whole skill of its own, and not one that we've yet developed to a stage where we could put anything on product we'd want to release publicly. Going forward, the most likely use of AI for us is backgrounds for new Adventure Cards, as things like star fields and nebulae are fairly easy.

2. Resources: As I mentioned above, we're a break-even company. We do make a small profit, but that is fed back into the company. Because our margin is so slight, our ability to "guess wrong" with a product and absorb the losses is not encouraging. While we do believe in Traveller and think that, despite some issues, it's a good game, at this point its growth potential is pretty well known. Our players are fantastic, but not exactly numerous. If we put our resources into another expansion pack and it doesn't match even the modest sales of previous products, we're basically sunk.

3. Sales: So on the point of sales, we have actually managed decent sales on the follow up expansion packs (CSC and RGs). The materials from the Kickstarter sold decently, but not amazingly. Our stock on some items is pretty low, and for purely aesthetic items like playmats, probably once they are OOS they're gone for good. Card packs may be re-stockable, but even converting to Print on Demand (PoD) for them isn't without cost (the formatting for PoD is different from retail, so there's art costs to convert).

PoD is an excellent capability to have as an option, but realistically for us, PoD is tricky. None of our PoD packs have come close to paying for themselves, let alone shown a profit. A solo campaign of Adventure Cards would be different as those are essentially free for us now. But a ship deck or anything more ambitious is a significant undertaking. The ship decks we have as PoD are a way for us to try and expand the game at a modest financial loss, but with the upside of keeping development moving forward. As a primary release method, PoD is questionable.

4. Playtesting and Development: We have a significant bottleneck in playtesting, and as a result there are issues with live release cards that a more robust process would probably have caught. We are actively working on an errata PoD pack (another product that costs very little as the art already exists), but it makes us hesitant of putting out future materials without better testing. Unfortunately, our testing options are very limited.

So we're in a situation where our resources allow us to sustain the game for quite a while, and even contemplate a few PoD small scale expansions or potentially an Expansion Pack style release, but we have very little margin for error.

I've said we're a break-even company several times now, but I want to bring it up again to emphasize that the community and getting to be a part of Traveller is what motivates us. So thank you very much for your interest!

[Buzz Saiyan]

Thank you for being honest about your current situation. It's reassuring to have some response from you and your team time to time. I'm in 100% support of whatever cards the future brings and would like to help with playtesting, but I'm iver the pond and this games doesn't lend itself to camera play.
I'm unaware of the costs, but has another Kickstarter campaign on the table? Could be used for expansion packs, additional solo play tools, new playmats, tokens, etc..?

[JoeKundlak]

Hi folks, has there been any movement on this front?

[Horizon Ian]

There has not been progress on a solo campaign.

We are not doing a good job communicating what is going on. For instance, we just had some events at KublaCon.

I'm going to talk to Jeff about our making more use of this site.