Venting

I just finished watching Lost in La Mancha, a documentary about Terry Gilliam attempting to make a movie based on Don Quixote, and having the universe at large vehemently thwarting the whole thing. My personal favorite moment was the sudden storm with lightning, hail, and major flooding not only destroying a bunch of film, but also transforming the desert they were filming a huge scene in into a muddy pit.

Watching this reminded me of a few situations I've been in lately, but more importantly reminded me that tales of frustration and failure can actually be wonderfully entertaining if someone's in the right mindset. Plus, venting now and then is good for you. So, I'm going to spend this here rant recounting some recent things that just plain suck.

Now, I have the slight problem that there is, in all likelihood, going to be a huge overlap between the people reading this and the people who are in part responsible for the issues detailed within. So... let me apologize to any such people in advance. I'm not saying you suck, and generally speaking I either know how things are out of your hands, or can imagine a scenario that leaves you blameless. This is all just about me and my issues, so don't take anything personal.

That said, the single biggest problem I have sitting in my lap right now is R.K. Milholland. Let me back up a bit. I am currently bleeding money like it's going out of style over MvM, which I'll get into more down the road. My big plan to climb at least part way out of debt here is to launch a second game that can turn a profit much faster, and let it carry the weight. So, for a while, I've been working on the in-dev game with the lowest possible production cost (well, aside from web based stuff, but that requires people to know about me first). The game in question would be Red Shirt, my Star Trek spoofing card game. It's decently balanced, it's decently fun, and it's just a couple decks of cards, so I SHOULD be able to produce it with what little balance I have on my credit cards. All it needs is some fine-tuning, and some actual decent artwork.

For MvM, all the artwork (except for the sucky icons on the reference sheets) was done by my very good and generous friend Susan, who is, simply put awesome. I didn't want to commission her for this game though, because, first off, I still haven't been able to pay her for her last project for me (it's a percentage of profits arrangement you see) and I am too wracked with guilt to ask her to illustrate something else, even if I am going to pay a lump sum when it goes to print. Second, she really excels at deeply textured oil painting style artwork, while Red Shirt here really demands a clean iconic sort of style. Plus, since public awareness is a bigger issue at the moment than costs, this is the sort of project it'd help to have a Special Celebrity Guest Artist for.

So, I sit down and think, who would be the absolute best possible person to do this in a perfect world? It needs to be someone who has a really identifiable comic art style, with particular emphasis on the ability to give people noticeably different faces. It needs to be someone more famous than me. It needs to be someone who's generally into the gaming scene. It needs to be someone whose stuff I like. It would be really nice if it was someone who isn't getting constant work illustrating games, because I'd like to make this a positive career move for the artist too. The first name that came to mind was R.K. Milholland of Something Positive fame, so I went ahead and sent him a quick pitch. The timing was really fortunate, since it turned out we were both guests at NonCon this year, and I actually had a chance to talk to him about it face to face. He seemed generally keen on the idea, and really surprised me by not haggling his fee up at all. So, all seems to be on track.

I go home, I toss him an e-mail with more details. A couple weeks go by, I get a bit nervous, finally I hear back from him, saying he's working on it, e-mails hadn't reached him, situation generally under control. This was... 6 weeks ago give or take. I haven't heard a peep out of him since. There are two possible explanations for this.

1- He has totally flaked out, decided not to do this, and doesn't want to deal with an awkward conversation with me.

2- Due to some combination of e-mails being crazy unreliable, various problems/distractions arising in his life, and things just taking a while, he hasn't been able to get back to me with where things stand here.

I'm hoping it's the latter. Either way, I really need to find out what's going on here. If I have to wait a few months for things to come together, I'm cool with that, if it's just not happening and I need to find a new artist, I'm cool with that too (albeit quite disappointed). Life in limbo here though is really hurting me though. Aside from the little things like losing sleep worrying about this, and kinda needing to get the game into print ASAP to start getting out of debt, I have this big front page announcement that he's on board and I am going to come off as a lying jerk at the forthcoming batch of cons and trade shows if I keep on promoting it and it winds up falling through. So on the off chance anyone reading this is in a position to poke him to toss me an e-mail (or IM, or whatever), it'd be appreciated.

Now then, the next big concern I have, as I've been hinting, is my financial situation. It's... not so good. I have somewhere between $20,000 and $30,000 in credit card debt thanks to MvM, and sales of said game are literally my only source of income. No day job, and thanks to a fun little medical condition I don't like to dwell on, I can't go get one. This isn't one of the things that's bugging me though. I've been down here in the red for long enough that I've more or less come to terms with it, and I have this crazy sort of faith that eventually MvM sales will pick up enough for me to at least break even. No no no. The problem is that people around me are constantly just completely failing to understand how broke I am.

First, there's the obvious. Every time a new game comes out, someone asks me what I think of it, naturally assuming I picked it up day one. I have not. All the money I'm making (which isn't much) is going towards paying off debt, so no, I have not bought Mario Kart Wii. Just like I hadn't bought Apollo Justice when you asked last month, or Mass Effect before that. All my game acquisition is currently gift-certificate based, and my birthday's not until June.

Worse than that though is the weird assumption so many people have that I can just kinda pull copies of MvM out of the ether. Yes, I do have 900+ copies of it just sitting around here, but no, you can't have them. I need to sell these, they aren't nearly paid off yet. No, I won't make a longer profit in the long run if I send every game store in the country a demo copy. I'd love to be able to do that, but there are more stores out there than copies of the game in existence. And again, I don't get them for free. I put them together from parts I have to order from various other places. Yes, I do understand the economics of scale, but that doesn't work by magic. That works by taking those larger volumes of cash and investing them in infrastructure to make things more cheaply. I don't have profits to reinvest at this point, and if I give you that 75% discount you're hoping for, you're paying me less per copy than they cost me to make. The discount you're getting now is only leaving me with about $2 of profit per copy of the game people.

Then there's the theory talkers. "Bah, you should be able to make these cheaper! I bet I know someone who can make these boards for a tenth of what you're paying!" Well, again, see, I'm not actively paying for these. I have paid for these. There is not some elaborate machine in the other room into which I insert a few bills, and out pops a game. There is just box upon box filled with boards, pieces, cards, and so forth. I put them together, and give them to people in exchange for money, which then goes to the credit card companies that paid the people who sent me those boxes. Also, no, you probably don't know someone who can make these for a tenth of wha I paid. At least not morally. I got everything for as little money as I could given the quantities I was ordering, and my policy of not dealing with anyone that uses slave labor. Believe it or not, a lot of companies actual advertise how they "handle all their manufacturing in countries with the absolute cheapest labor costs possible, and pass the savings on to you!"

Oh, and then of course there's the weird little hiccups with sane promotions. I think this one magazine for instance wants a reviewable copy of my game, but between all these e-mails and phone calls, they might actually want 10. Really need to get that one worked out... and I really need to see a write-up from this other magazine that got 2 review copies out of me back in, like, December.

So yeah, nice getting that all off my chest. Here's hoping it was a fun read.