This is a copy of Update #27 from the Kickstarter campaign.
Update from Jonathan Liu, Designer
Hello, Backers!
Right
now I'm waiting for Game Salute to get the initial survey together, but
I thought you might want a little update. So here's a peek at the
stickers for the dice, plus a lost Designer Diary entry that got missed
during the last week.
In the preliminary survey, you'll be able to
tell us whether you had any add-ons, whether you want the white (ROOS)
bits or the colored (TROO) bits, what size T-shirt, and that sort of
thing. You'll have one more chance for more add-ons or additional copies
of the game at this point. (As a reminder, the Create-a-Game Kit will
be available from Game Salute later but it won't include the sticker
sheet and items may vary slightly; the Emperor's New Clothes version is
available exclusively through the Kickstarter campaign and won't be sold
in stores afterward.)
Dice stickers!
So, here's a look at the designs for the dice stickers:
These icons were designed by Heiko Günther, one of the designers interviewed in Update #12.
The green fig leaf is for Dignity, the red jester hat is Gullibility,
and the gold coin is Gold. The Wolf and Sheep icons are for the other
mini-game, The Boy Who Cried Wolf. (The actual dice are less rounded
than the rendering here, but you get the idea.)
As explained
before, the stickers for Emperor's New Clothes are optional—I prefer
playing with the blank dice, but I really love these icons, too. Since
we decided to use color on the stickers, the TROO-bits option will come
with colors to match these: green, red, and yellow (rather than white,
black, and yellow).
To play The Boy Who Cried Wolf, you will need
to use at least 3 dice for wolves; the Sheep die could be optional
because I've got some variant rules in which you will bid the number of
sheep at risk, but I'll get to that later. The game could also be played
with standard six-sided dice, since the Swindler-level compact game
includes 4 dice and you'd have to decide between stickering the dice for
Emperor's New Clothes or The Boy Who Cried Wolf.
NOTE: The
Designer Diary entry below was actually written up for the last week of
the Kickstarter campaign and was supposed to be posted with Update #20,
but between PAX East and the camping trip we had some dropped signals
and it never got posted… and I didn't even realize it until just last
week. So, of course, this is a pre-reveal update but it still
communicates my feelings about expectations and execution.
Designer Diary: Great Expectations (or, Executing the Emperor)
I
have a good friend who was sick for a long time and was unable to
travel or have much face-to-face interaction. So he started what he
called his Hypothetical Birthday Party, where he emailed friends from
near and far, asking them to attend his party by writing descriptions
and sending photos of what they would bring to his party. Being
hypothetical, you could bring anything you wanted, no matter how
difficult to prepare or impossible to procure. Although these parties
weren't "real" in the sense that you couldn't physically partake of all
of the fantastic dishes and drinks contributed by all the party-goers,
they've become a tradition that many of us look forward to. My friend
was able to have a non-hypothetical birthday party this year, but he
still held the hypothetical one too, and it was well-attended. The
question that arose is whether the real could possibly live up to the
imagined.
Whether it's a birthday party or board game or book or
movie, there can be a difference between your expectations and the
reality. In some cases the reality ends up exceeding expectations, which
is always awesome. However, when you're making something, particularly
something creative, there's almost always a gap: the reality falls short
of your expectations.
Why is that?
Well, to put it simply:
you can imagine perfection, but that's pretty dang hard to achieve. It's
why people are so often disappointed in the movie after they've read
the book and already pictured what everything and everyone looks like.
It's why video game graphics, no matter how powerful consoles get, will
never beat the resolution of a text adventure game.
Years ago I
read a book called Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and
Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland. It's about
creating art, mostly in the traditional sense, but I think the lessons
apply to nearly any creative process. The book talks about this gap
between ideas and execution, and argues that not only does the gap
exist, but that it SHOULD. Because if everything you make turns out
exactly the way you imagined it, then you're limiting your imagination
to what you know you are already capable of. Artists and creators should
be pushing the limits of what they can do. We should be testing
boundaries, trying new things, taking risks. That's how you grow. And
it's also how you make "mistakes" that actually lead you in new,
exciting directions.
Here are just a few quotes from the book that really stuck with me:
Making
art provides uncomfortably accurate feedback about the gap that
inevitably exists between what you intended to do, and what you did.
Art is like beginning a sentence before you know its ending.
People
who need certainly in their lives are less likely to make art that is
risky, subversive, complicated, iffy, suggestive or spontaneous. What's
really needed is nothing more than a broad sense of what you are looking
for, some strategy of how to find it, and an overriding willingness to
embrace mistakes and surprises along the way.
That
moment of completion is also, inevitably, a moment of loss—the loss of
all the other forms the imagined piece might have taken. The irony here
is that the piece you make is always one step removed from what you
imagined, or what else you can imagine, or what you're right on the edge
of being able to imagine.
So that leads me back around to
executing my Kickstarter project. When I first started working on
Emperor's New Clothes, I had a vision of what it would look like, how it
would play, even how the Kickstarter campaign itself would look. I
thought about the cards, the logo, the cover art, the gameplay, the
story.
Parts of it turned out the way I imagined, other parts fell
short, and still others surprised me. Of course, Emperor's New Clothes
is not a singular vision: I started the ball rolling, but to make it a
reality I needed to share my vision with all of the other people
involved: the artists and designers and folks at Game Salute. But
everyone pictures things a little differently—what I see in my head may
not be exactly what you see. Until we all become telepathic, there will
always be something lost in translation—but that also means that each
person brings their own unique vision to the project and that can lead
to very cool results.
And last but not least—arguably MOST
important—is YOU! What is art if it is not observed? What is a game if
it isn't played? What is a Kickstarter project without backers? By
backing the project and giving feedback and arguing about it on Twitter
and BoardGameGeek, all of you have shaped Emperor's New Clothes as well.
It isn't something that popped fully formed out of my head, but
something that has evolved and shifted thanks to you. Whatever the end
result of the Kickstarter campaign itself, I'm grateful for that. It's
been terrific (and terrifying) to see my idea take shape this month.
It's
hard for me to know whether Emperor's New Clothes, in the end, will
live up to your expectations. With so many different people, everyone
has a slightly different vision of how things should turn out. No matter
what I reveal at the end of this week, I expect that some of you will
be delighted and some of you will be disappointed. But I hope you'll
love it. I hope that you will be as excited about and as proud of
Emperor's New Clothes as I am, because I think you and I have created
something pretty magical together.
Note: This is a copy of Update #26 from my Kickstarter campaign. The campaign closed at 9pm PST April 1, with a final count of 280 backers and $6,330 in funding.
THANK YOU!
We did it! Despite the big drop in pledges over
the weekend after my "Pulling Back the Curtain" update, we still managed
to regain a few backers and pledges toward the end, and Emperor's New
Clothes will be a reality. I think it's a fitting birthday present for
the man who provided the inspiration: Hans Christian Andersen. He turns
208 today, and his birthday is also celebrated as International
Children's Book Day, so take a moment today to read some stories to your
children—or to your inner child!
So what's next?
I'll
be sorting out a few details with Game Salute in the next couple of
weeks and you'll get a survey asking for your shipping address. This is
also where you'll be able to tell us what add-ons you pledged for, if
any, and whether you want the ROOS (white) bits or TROO (colored) bits.
Since
I'm unable to post updates directly to the Kickstarter page, you won't
be hearing from me regularly after this, aside from short updates about
production and shipping (which may come from Game Salute). To keep up
with the latest news about Hoke's Games, follow me on Twitter (www.twitter.com/hokesgames) or Facebook (www.facebook.com/HokesGames).
I do hope that as you receive your copies of the game, you'll share
photos, videos, and stories of yourselves playing Emperor's New Clothes.
Plus, I would love to see what new games you come up, and I will try to
have something set up in order to submit your rules so that other
people can try them out.
It's truly been a fantastic experience
and I'm incredibly thrilled for all of you who stuck it out to the end.
But, of course, it's just the beginning!
Jonathan H. Liu
Swindler, Emperor, and Child
Photo: HCA statue in New York City's Central Park by Dismas, used under Creative Commons license.
Note: This is a copy of Update #25 from my Kickstarter campaign.
Happy April Fool's Day
Sorry, I just realized that many of
you were waiting for something funny on April Fool's Day and then I went
and posted a serious update. So, rather than bombarding you with a list
of online April Fool's jokes, I'll just show you one that I think is
particularly pertinent for Kickstarter board game fans: BoardGameGeek.com
has transformed itself into GeekStarter today, a place where you can
pledge GeekGold to support projects. There are a lot of meta projects,
including one to change GeekStarter back to BoardGameGeek.
Not to be outdone, I figured I'd better launch my own GeekStarter project page as well. If it succeeds, I'll retroactively go back in time and launch a Kickstarter campaign for Emperor's New Clothes.
Reddit AMA
I
figured today is as appropriate a day as any to run a Reddit AMA (Ask
Me Anything) for a project like mine. I'll be taking and answering
questions for a couple of hours, so if you want some honest, sincere
answers about the project, now's the time to do it!
Here's the link to the Reddit AMA. I'll check in periodically for the next couple of hours, until about 2pm Pacific Time. Ask Me Anything!
Note: This is a copy of Update #22 from my Kickstarter campaign.
The Last Hurrah Every board game (or any other creation, for that matter) begins with this: something that nobody else can see. It's a vision that exists solely in the mind, and part of the goal of creating is transmitting that vision to other people, getting it out of your head and into the heads of others. Whether that's through pictures or words or actions or some sort of physical object or a melody, that last step of the process is always the hardest.
You can draw and paint and design and write and think about your project by yourself, but at some point art of any sort is meant to be observed. A game isn't a game until somebody plays it. The magic of a book really takes place when somebody reads it. But handing over control—giving other people a choice about what to do with what you've created—is always a scary thing.
Emperor's New Clothes began with this vision: a box of blank white cards and boards and wooden bits, and people sitting around playing it. I had seen pictures of printer's proofs from other Kickstarter projects. I'd also been to a few game day events where I'd wander around, looking at what other people were playing, trying to decide what I wanted to try. I imagined a game that invited scrutiny, one that made people wonder "What is that?"
I imagined a game that didn't just include a small group of people playing it, but one that drew in even more people and engaged them. Even as somebody who is very comfortable playing any type of board game, I'm not always comfortable approaching a game in progress to ask about it. Most gamers don't intend to shut other people out while they're playing a game, but we can unintentionally give off a "don't bother me right now" vibe when we're really engaged in a game. I wondered if there could be a game that encouraged people to approach players, one that started conversations instead of shutting them out.
That was the initial spark of my idea. Sure, it was a bit half-baked. The game as it is now isn't entirely the same thing as it was when I first approached Game Salute, or when I wrote a letter to send out to reviewers and blogs, or when I asked artists if they wanted to sign onto a crazy project. Once I made it public, it was no longer solely my creation: other people introduced ideas and added to it. Some things I liked, and some I didn't, but it wasn't entirely within my control anymore.
If I were to do it all over again, I'd still run the campaign. I probably would have picked a better time to do it. I'd write all my updates ahead of time, and not run it when I had a camping trip planned in the middle of it or at the same time as a major shift for GeekDad. I would have thought more about the fact that people would be dropping into the project on day 1, and day 5, and day 17—that not everyone was following the same threads at the same time. I would have spent more time playing the game with people and less time talking about playing the game.
I won't know until the end of the day whether enough people stick around for the big finale. I won't pretend that I'm not disappointed if we drop below funding, but in the end, I'm proud of what we've accomplished together. We made something out of nothing this month.
At the end of this month, my wife and I will be welcoming our third child to the world. It has nothing to do with Emperor's New Clothes, and everything to do with it. I know that at the end of the month my world will be filled with smiles and cooing and dirty diapers and rocking. Things like Kickstarter and writing for GeekDad just won't matter as much at that point. I wanted to wrap up this project on April 1 not just for the significance of the date, but so that I'd be done with some time to spare.
Whatever else you get out of this Kickstarter campaign, whether you're a backer or you're just here for the schadenfreude, this is what I hope stays with you: You can see things that nobody else can see … yet. Figure out what they are, and then share them with the rest of us*. You never know what might happen.
*Including Game Salute: Dan Yarrington has said he'd love to see game submissions made using the Create Your Own Game Kit.
