Formalizing Your Game Business

Recorded at Metatopia 2015

Presented by Fred Hicks, Steve Segedy, Darren Watts and Brennan Taylor

Is your company ready to take the next step? We’ll discuss how to turn a tiny game company into a slightly-larger game company.

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Matters Of Scale: Running A Small Gaming Business

Recorded at Metatopia 2015

Presented by Fred Hicks, Rob Donoghue and Steve Segedy

Game publishing is a very different beast depending on how new you are to the industry and how much reach you and your game might have. Small press and independent creators will find that which printers, distributors and fulfillment channels they might use varies wildly depending on their goals and how much risk they’re willing to take.

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Genius Loci: Your Setting is the Character

Recorded at Metatopia 2014

Presented by Will Hindmarch

Places, rather than protagonists, are often what RPG campaigns have in common because the characters are bespoke but the setting is shared. How does your game’s space inform its setting – and vice versa? How does setting pose and reflect theme? Settings can be characters in their own right, tuned and portrayed through your design to dramatize the themes and issues at the heart of your game. In this seminar, I’ll share some of what I set out to do and some of what I’ve learned designing Project: Dark and its play spaces.

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Opacity, Transparency, and Player Incentives in Your Strategy Board Game

Recorded at Metatopia 2014

Presented by Gil Hova

Do people understand what’s going on in your game? Not just the rules, but can they tell who’s winning? If they should watch out for a dangerous player? If they know exactly how their move will impact their next few turns? Join designer Gil Hova as he discusses transparency and opacity in strategy board games. We will discuss what makes a game mechanism transparent or opaque, how they work (or fail) in existing games, and how to use them to incentivize players to make interesting plays.

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Lovecraft WTF

Recorded at Metatopia 2014

Presented by Julia Ellingboe, Kenneth Hite, Darren Watts & Bill White.

H. P. Lovecraft is one of the grandfathers of weird fiction and horror. His racist and anti-Semitic beliefs are no secret. They are the foundation of his fictional worlds. They are interwoven throughout his work and for many readers, impossible to separate from the genius of his writing. Can a Lovecraft-inspired game make his work more accessible? It’s okay to like problematic things. This panel will be neither an attack nor a defense of Lovecraft’s work. In a broad sense, it will be a conversation about how designers might interpret or use source material with themes or images that are problematic.

Apologies for sound quality issues.

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Explicit vs Role-Based Knowledge

Recorded at Metatopia 2014

Presented by Clark Valentine, Shane Harsch and Evan Torner.

This seminar poses the question of whether it is possible to support a detailed, knowledge-rich environment for an RPG without creating a situation where the character that should know how to do something actually does not. Where is the balance between detail and role?

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Editing Rulebooks

Recorded at Metatopia 2014

Presented by Joshua Yearsley.

Your rulebook is the heart of your game, so why not give it the love it deserves? In this seminar, you’ll learn ten best practices for improving the structure, style, and clarity of your rulebook. Got any burning questions about rules craft? Get answers from a professional rulebook editor.

Additional references and a copy of the presentation is available at http://joshuayearsley.com/case/ten-things-you-can-do-to-make-your-rulebook-awesome/

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Social Media Action Steps

Recorded at Metatopia 2014

Presented by Beth Rimmels.

Social media is a crucial marketing step, especially for new and small businesses. Even better, it can cost you little to nothing, but can be confusing or overwhelming. This panel will explain what’s essential, where to start (and on which social media channel), free and low-cost tools that will make your life easier, and how to grow an audience organically.

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Executing a Smart Crowdfunding Campaign

Recorded at Metatopia 2014

Presented by Fred Hicks, Joshua A. C. Newman & Hannah Shaffer

How do you plan your crowdfunding campaign? How done do you need to be before you open? How do you engage your community? How do you plan for all possible outcomes? Joshua A.C. Newman (Mobile Frame Zero: Rapid Attack and Shock: Social Science Fiction), Fred Hicks (Fate Core, Designers & Dragons, and more), and Hannah Shaffer (Questlandia) share their experiences and then ditch out on their planned talk to address your questions once they realize they can’t afford shipping.

Special Kickstarter Mentions

Sig: The City Between

Headspace RPG

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The Best Practices for Information Organization in Tabletop RPGs

Recorded at Metatopia 2014

Presented by Brennan Taylor, Matt Wilson, Meredith Reitman, Krista White & John Stavropolous

Tabletop RPGs serve as both a “let’s play!” and a reference document. RPGs designers and writers often attend to one of these goals at the expense of the other. Come to this panel to learn about professional theories of information organization, best practices for making the important information in your games findable and learn lessons from experienced game designers who have made information organization innovations and mistakes in their own games.

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