❖ Version History ❖

1st of November 2021 – 10th of June 2022
Throughout the course of this past year, Librarium Games has gone from being a hobby based game design idea to a fully fledged business. In this transformation, we’ve spent a lot of time talking about the graphic design that goes into all of our product, but we have spent comparatively very little time talking about our digital presence in the world.

A key component behind the scenes of developing into a business is establishing the Website, and within that, there is the monumental task of establishing some format of e-commerce. Now generally, when it comes to small scale businesses, there are a wealth of commercially available methods to get started in in the digital marketplace (options like “Wix” for website development and “Etsy / Shopify / Amazon” for the commerce side of things).

While these options are all fine and good, they are costly in the same sense that renting an apartment is more financially burdensome than owning property is over time. While these temporary solutions have been nice to me in the past, this is the moment when I have started feeling like it is time to progress to something a bit more serious. As a result, I sided with team WordPress in early 2021. It took most of the Summer and Autumn of 2021 to really get the basics of the site built into place, but once we got through the major hurdles it became to start the process that we are going to discuss today!

Luckily, within the WordPress software suite of web development tools there is this amazing option known as “WooCommerce”. It allows someone who has established a functional website to start introducing the option for visitors to shop through custom-listed products. I started looking into the addition of WooCommerce on the Librarium site as we were concluding the journey of The Great Chase, because I knew that I was going to need to have links for customers to click on when shopping for the game.

However, I also knew that we were going to rapidly be approaching a time where various other interesting products were going to start getting developed (I had already been working on a cool shirt design for The Great Chase, and had little to no plan on stopping the fun there). Throughout November of 2021, I had begun shopping around for bulk T-shirt options, as, I had recently bought a Circuit Vector Cutter and wanted to try my hand at some Vinyl Shirt Designs:

I decided to make some basic shirt merchandise for the Librarium Games Website as a way for me to not only build the framework of an online store with a bunch of options, but also as a general way to test the waters of this merchant process without introducing too much risk on what I am offering.

I also had a bit of a chaotic time approaching Christmas of 2021, for, I had not really gotten any products for the company officially online as had been predicted in the Summer. As a result, I had a great wealth of people wondering if I was going to be offering anything for sale going into the holiday season.

In a last minute pinch, I decided to buy a bulk of materials and began to make some of my absolute favorite craft: custom bound sketchbooks. But, I wanted there to be something truly special within these books… a gift to my amazing followers because… well we are a game-publishing company after all! So, as a special gift to my followers I made a whole secret game that I hid within these books… but unless you are the owner of one of these special books you are not allowed to know the secrets that are held within!

So in any event, the end of 2021 came with the successful creation of the WooCommerce storefront… but this is only the tip of the iceberg in our tale of where Calendra was progressing at this point in time. By now, we are almost totally finished with the design needs of Calendra as a game… but we are eons away from being ready for big business still. What else needs be done though…?

Well, at present, it is time to start really considering what is going to go into the marketing campaign and release of Calendra as an official product. A heavy-hearted decision that comes with this phase is the horrible question of: Crowdfunding. I had very much concluded in my head that crowdfunding was not how I wanted to accrue initial sales of Calendra, because realistically I cannot afford to wait around and wonder if I will get the funding for this particular product. I know that I am going to be serious about following through with game design into the coming years, I love this game, and I need an original product to get to the marketplace as fast as humanly possible so that I can start showing people something real when I tell them I design games.

Now, The Great Chase is an important element of this… but I only have partial ownership & profit that will be coming in from the sales of that game, and also it was a game that I had designed for someone else’s line of products. So, though I love the game, it is not necessarily the flavor of product I want to sell into the future as the image of the Librairum company.

After a long, long, time of thinking about it, speaking with financial advisors, and touching base with some of my other design peeps, the idea of a Kickstarter Project became more desirable… but only because of a totally different approach than what is normally done with a Kickstarter.

For those who have never participated in crowdfunding before, the typical process is as follows:

1. Develop like 95% of a game by getting Print on Demand copies made until a prototype is nearly at the fully finished professional design phase.

2. Run a Kickstarter campaign where all of the images, videos, reviews, and details that you can share about the game at this point come to life. The goal here is to present the “idea of a game you want to produce” to a crowd of people and receive funding for the official production of that game.

3. Spend several months taking the funding that you have received in your crowdfunding campaign to get the production finalized, then distribute to your customer base.

Now… I loved the idea of following the Kickstarter path when it came to The Great Chase, because I was legitimately not sure if the game would be well received by the community (as it was our first published product), and also, we had no funding in place at the time to make a game so expensive by ourselves. In essence, we needed the resources. But, when it comes to Calendra by comparison, this is not the route I wanted to follow.

Then, something crazy was suggested to me. My CPA had suggested finding a way to take in Pre-orders for the making of Calendra to try and gauge what the market would want as we were still in the production process. Additionally, I had been told to try using crowdfunding in this same way… and that’s when I really started to shift my opinion on this journey.

So… at this point, I know already that we will be getting Calendra produced and delivered to my house sometime in the September-October timeline. And. We are also now considering what a campaign for Calendra might be like if we treated it as a “Pre-order platform” rather than a “funding needed platform”. As a result, I started telling myself that its time to think about a “Kickstarter hosted Pre-order”… but what else could we possibly offer to people beyond just the game? A Kickstarter with only one reward for customers is a terrible and boring idea. It has no creativity, and it won’t be ‘fun’ for our customers, which is always my top priority.

As such, I began scouring the internet for good ideas on simple merchandise. I know that I have essentially 3 months to work with to make this Kickstarter Preorder more exciting… so what else might I be able to make that is: Cheap, Interesting, High Quality, and Massively Reproducible? The custom shirts shown above were definitely a fun and easy idea to work with (though many of my friends have already purchased one of these shirts already… so that doesn’t entirely work)… but then I came across this wonderful idea:

I have seen so many convention tables for game companies where a super simple, beautiful, and somewhat collectable enamel pin was available for sale. It’s a really basic idea for a product, but it is something that I myself have felt the itch to buy so many times when I like a company’s aesthetic. It was a perfectly good solution… but what would the cost of such a thing look like to our budgets, and would the turn around time on these even be possible? Well… the only way to find out is to dig into it and see what the options in the market look like for this type of production. After sifting through some various web pages for the custom production of things, the prices started showing through:

While searching through all of these price catalogues I am both deeply inspired and equally discouraged. Many of the prices that are offered on these sites are pretty reasonable… but mostly only in the sense of creating one design as a pin. For this to work the way that I want with Calendra, I am interested in making a set of four pins. However, I am trying to be reasonable about the amount of money I am spending as well. Which it is nice to not rely on a Kickstarter for initial funding, it also makes it hard to tell what I might offer as good rewards without bankrupting myself.

In this journey I am trying to get the largest wealth of pins created at the cheapest price point while trying to budget myself under $1,000. I think it will be a good way to diversify my overall sales later, so I am okay with the process of overstocking at the moment (this also gives me lots of options for the layout of the Kickstarter), but no matter what we are trying to not exceed the $1,000 price pint.

With these parameters in place, some of our best options are looking like approximately 100 pins of each of the four designs… and even still, with the addition of shipping, that $1,000 price point is looking like a difficult number to maintain. But I am determined. So I continue my hunt until I get to the discussion I have with a company called: ViviPins. This company seems to offer a pretty good discount on their pins, and also offer some of the best diversity that I have seen across all of the options I have investigated thus far. With a little bit of haggling and several emails back and fourth, we come to a conclusion that I am totally satisfied with: They will produce a batch of more than 150 of each pin while also keeping the overall price under our $1,000 benchmark.

By comparison, this is already better than the prices that we have been seeing, AND they offer what I consider to be the classier metal clasps on the back of their pins as well with an absolutely amazing turn around timeline.

The deal worked out with Vivipins made this option totally affordable and easy. Not only that, but they essentially promised a 17 day turn around from transition of designs and finance to product being at my front door. I’m not even entirely sure how that is necessarily even possible timeline wise by comparison to everything else we’ve been up to, but I am beyond excited to progress this idea forward.

As we now accrue all of what we need to make a Kickstarter project possible, we will now start to look at how we might go about organizing the crowdfunding campaign to launch, what the timing of it will look like, and how we will be accommodating of proper marketing and advertising as we approach this new goal. Be sure to check back in to the Librarium Games Design Journal sometime soon to see how we progress from here!