And Now The News

I started this blog to keep everyone informed about my RPG project. Then I got tired of silly little updates that basically equaled "No news yet" and started blogging about other stuff. Now when things do happen, it's fighting with all the other stuff in my brain.

As I write this, I am one illustration away from having all of the art for the book completed. Once that is turned in, then the layout can be finalized and the book can pretty much go up for sale.

The only thing that could create a significant delay beyond that is the ENnies. It would certainly be nice for my game to be considered for such an award (and maybe others if they come up). But the cutoff for the latest round of awards is April 30th.

My challenge is that in order to enter, the game must not only be released to the public by April 30th, but I must provide 6 copies for judging. That not only requires money (and the game itself will not have been on the market long enough to pay for itself in this regard), but proofing time (Print-on-demand may be a modern miracle, but it isn't perfect yet). And if a problem does turn up in the proofs, that'll delay things even further.

My current options are:

1) Scramble to get everything done by April 30th. This may result in a sub-optimal quality and less chance for an eventual award.

2) Delay the print version, releasing only the PDF version before the deadline. PDFs are much harder to mess up in transmission. The downside here is that the print version would not get a fair shake.

3) Delay the release of the game until I have enough good quality copies to be eligible for judging. If this means waiting until next year, so be it.

4) Deliberately delay the release until after April 30th. With no deadlines to worry about, I can prepare for next years' ENnies in relative peace. A May release does have a certain appeal, given that I can release it on L. Frank Baum's birthday (May 15th)