Yesterday, as I'm putting pieces in place to have a successful launch today - uploading
the game to Drivethru, setting up the merch shop, getting the banner ready to go, and deciding on some 'marketing' ideas (insofar as I do marketing - not my jam), Mary and I got into a bit of a debate. We have a fundamental disagreement about how I should be going about things. I came to this creative life of mine through two big influences weighing on my thinking - first, my favorite creators were independent guys; they forged their own pathway. They wrote articles and gave interviews and composed editorials about creator's rights, maintaining your copyrights, controlling your own destiny. Second, I read horror story after horror story of someone who had their ideas consumed by corporations and received a pittance. About people who were the creative workhorses, and nobody knows them, and they died with nothing. I became convinced at about 20 years old that the industry doesn't care about me, will never care about me, and will only ever try to manipulate me and (as Hamlet suggests), will use me as a sponge, wringing me dry and then throwing me away.
Every MCU movie convinces me I was right; nobody cares that Roy Thomas created this character or composed that foundational storyline that became an entire phase of the MCU. Nobody is concerned that Jack Kirby set the visual motif that is now being wrung dry. John Byrne is not collecing royalty checks for creating the entire aesthetic of the She Hulk series. I didn't see his name in the credits (now, I didn't look very hard - but I shouldn't HAVE to look very hard. He came up with the whole idea).
But Mary walks into Barnes and Noble or sees the newest release from PIXAR, and says, 'that should be YOU'. And she's not wrong. I produce objectively good content. I write excellent games - they are very playable, engaging, well-designed and sometimes quite clever. I write excellent stories - character driven, with well-developed worlds and consistent narratives. They are sometimes quite clever.
But there are a lot of people producing a lot of content. Much of it sucks. But a significant portion is well crafted. It's objectively good. Some of it is quite excellent. They even have clever ideas, too. They also sit at their keyboard and wonder why a blog they've been working on for over a decade averages a handful of readers each post.
[Insert shrug emoji here.]
Mary wants me to 'swing for the fences' and try to get with a traditional publisher so that I can reach a bigger audience. She sees self-publishing as a one-way road to insignificance. I don't know how to tell her that my soul would likely be lost in the exchange.
This becomes (to my mind) the fundamental reason that the comics industry keeps folding in on itself. It's the reason that actors and writers are on strike in Hollywood. It's because there are FAR more creative people making quality content than there are legitimate pathways to reach an audience. The audience is only so big, but we have more and more people creating every day. Mary asks me 'well, how did JK Rowling do it, then?' and my answer is that I have no f-ing idea, but I don't think it can happen again. Once in a generation convergence of luck and audience and idea and execution that we might never see again. It's like, who's the next Tom Brady? There is no next Tom Brady - because we have ten guys all playing at Brady level now, and they are going to knock each other out every year.
All of that said, Cupcake Scouts represents, to this point in my creative career, my best chance at breaking through. Here's why I say that:
It's GOOD. It's a fun game, designed well, executed well; it is fast to learn, fast to play, something you can do as a one-off and have a lot of fun, or something that will lend itself quite easily to extended campaign play if that's your thing. You can drop in and drop out as much as you want, and the game holds up. The art and writing are top notch. Some of the pieces (the cover in particular) look professional. It looks like I paid someone to create parts of this. This is the LEAST important reason (because great stuff gets ignored all the time).
It's DIFFERENT. It's just different enough from other things to stand out. It doesn't look or feel like anything else in the market right now. It has a unique worldview, an unusual perspective, and a feeling of being pretty fresh compared to what's around it. It is not a re-tread of anything. My fantasy games try to stand out among thousands of fantasy games; my superhero games try to stand out among dozens (if not hundreds) of superhero games; this game is in a market of one. It's not really competing for a specific audience with anything. It can find the edges of a bunch of different audiences and Venn Diagram them together.
It's SIMILAR. But, it evokes enough stuff you already know. It's got Supernatural, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Scooby Doo, and Stranger Things vibes. Those are things people know.
It's TRENDY. All of the similar stuff above helps. But it's also very pink, and pink is suddenly very in. My style has, despite my best efforts, started to take on Anime/Manga vibes, even though I am not influenced by Anime or Manga at all. My style just kind of moved in that direction. That's trendy (or at least has been - who knows what tomorrow brings?) - and so it's ended up being 'in'. My wife and daughter react more positively to my art for this than for anything else I've done. They say that other pieces I've done are 'good', but they actually 'like' some of these. 'Good' implies no emotional connection; 'like' means you feel something when you see it. People need to feel something in order to connect to this.
It's a POINT OF ENTRY. This is weird, but it might be the most important reason of all. Gamers can use this game to get their wives and daughters and friends and cousins and students to understand RPG gaming. It's a very simple concept to understand (cupcake scouts go on missions to kill monsters - got it); it is easy to learn mechanics (I roll 2d6, add a number to it, and try to get a 10 - got it); it is very easy to make and personalize a character (I have a dagger, and a few special abilities - got it). You can be playing in ten minutes, and done playing in an hour. Or, you can spend weeks, months, or (theoretically) years playing. However, for new people to the hobby, this is MUCH less intimidating than D+D, and it introduces the idea that all games don't have to be fantasy adventures set in the world of Lord of the Rings.
All this is to say that if my dreams come true, I can one day be walking down the street and see a stranger wearing a Cupcake Scouts t-shirt, and I'll stop them and say, "Hey, I'm the guy that made that!" And then he can say, "NO. Teepublic made it. Who the Hell are YOU?"
Then my life will be complete.
