Finding the Time, Keeping the Passion

You may have seen in my blog profile that I work in retail.

Truth is, I work in retail a LOT.  I am a store manager of a Walmart store and work some pretty long hours some days, and often work from my cell phone and computer at home as well.

I also have a wife and children, and love spending time with them.

So... between a 60ish hour work week, to handling household chores, and spending time with the family, my game design time is about an hour or two per day if I'm lucky (generally from 10p-Midnight when the rest of the family has fallen asleep).

I truly want to launch this product this year sometime, when exactly depends on how much better I can understand the programs it takes to create the game, and how involved I can get myself into the online game board community.  I have read that in order to have any success with Kickstarter you really need to carve a niche for yourself and create a contact list of people that would actually be interested in the game, then as you approach your Kickstarter launch time you want to keep those contacts aware as they can be your strongest supporters to spread the word of what your are trying to achieve.

In any writers, designers, and artist's How To books you will always see a few common themes:

• Work on your project everyday, even if it's only a short time, and even if you delete or don't use the work in the long run.  It shows a commitment and passion.
• Be willing to fail, you may create things or have ideas that just don't work no matter how much you thought it should.  Maybe those ideas will come to life later, or in another project.
• Find and listen to critics/testers of your work, you cannot just rely on yourself and family/friends.
• Set timelines for yourself.  Goals of what you want to achieve.  You may not hit all of your timelines, but you will hit much more than if you don't set any timelines at all.

There are plenty more pieces of advice than that, but those are some pretty important ones. That last one is something I haven't done yet... so I'm starting today.

By March 15th I plan to have all Reward card images completed in my personal card format.

By March 30th I plan to redo the Class and Advance Class cards to fit in my personal card format.

In the month of April I plan to complete all of the Event cards and the Creature cards for my formats.

In the month of May I plan to convert/attach all of my images to an online card creation site to see how they look/work (already testing as I go, but have to redo them all at once for final game print).

By mid June I plan to have a unique card back design for the cards (all decks will have the same image backing in case of rules changes or potential expansion rule modifications).

By July 1st, Canada Day, I plan to have a first full printed card set printed from an online company and shipped to me.  That will be the first true game set, what some people would refer to as an Alpha set.

By July 30th I plan to have a Kickstarter campaign designed and ready to launch, however the launch date relies on the success/failure of the timelines above, as well as the success/failure of playtesting (which will be ongoing from now until then).

By the end of September I would like the Kickstarter campaign to have started and ended, of course hoping for a successful campaign to begin a true production of the game.

There we go... some challenging timelines and goals in mind for the future of Kearth!