Once upon a time there was a game called Evil Intent being funded on Kickstarter. Though the funding was successful, and though the printing went mostly well, there is a cautionary tale to be told from this experience.

Being our first game and our first success in Kickstarter, we were unaware of one very important lesson; a lesson I am here to share with you today.

THE LESSON: DON’T OFFER ANYTHING BUT THE GAME!

There’s going to be some debate about this. Probably even from others who have successfully added other items to their games like buttons, t-shirts, dice bags, etc. This lesson is for them as well. They were lucky. Most likely they didn’t even know it. Let me tell you why.

Meet Natasha Petrova.
She’s one of the characters players can be in Evil Intent, and she’s on the cover of the box. This is a 10 inch tall statue that we had made for Backers of a certain tier and up on our Kickstarter.

As you can see, she turned out pretty well. In fact, the final product was very nice. So “what’s the problem” you ask? The problem is we had to go through quite a bit to get it there. The following is why I ended up in goggles and a mask holding a broken Natasha figure.

THE START

When we were funded, we immediately started looking for a company that could make Natasha. The printing company making our game seemed the logical choice. If we could have everything made by them, then we’d only have to deal with one person for all of our needs. Our printing company was PandaGM, and despite what I’m about to say on the matter of the Natasha figure, they were perfect in their printing of Evil Intent the game.

Admittedly, PandaGM said that making a figure like this wasn’t something they did but they were willing to try. My guess is, they won’t try again. Not having any experience with this large of a scale figure, they reached out to an artist to sculpt the figure. From the image we provided below on the left, we received a model that looked like a figure from Gumby on the right.

THIS WAS MORE LIKE THE BEAVIS AND BUTTHEAD VERSION OF NATASHA. IT WAS CLEAR FROM THIS POINT, THAT WE’D HAVE TO REACH OUT TO ANOTHER COMPANY.

Again, the game was wonderfully produced by PandaGM.

Eventually we found a Chinese company called Shenzhen Xin Ju Xin Toy Design Company. Everything seemed to go well and when we got the pictures of what was made, it looked great. Their artist was almost flawless in recreating the 3D file we gave them. 100 Natasha’s were assembled, painted and shipped to our shipment company, Greyfox Games (also known as CoolStuffInc).

In between we were ripped off by a Chinese scam artist named Dawn Dhen who had hacked into a yahoo mail account we were using. That’s another lesson off to the side. If you’re using Yahoo mail for anything having to do with business, stop it. Stop it right now. In the end the scam artist took off with over $2000.

Back to why I’m wearing a mask…

So, everything was on its way to our shipment company and everything seemed like it was going well. Until…

The shipment company sent me an email saying that they opened 3 boxes and all 3 had both arms broken off. I got an email an hour later saying they opened 10 and all 10 were broken. Some were scratched up and the paint was all messed up on the faces and arms. I asked if they’d open all 100 and they did. Out of 100, only 9 were in good condition.

NINE NINE NINE

The Chinese company didn’t believe that 91 were broken. They required proof. We sent images, but they wanted more to prove that it was 91 that were broken. Eventually we had GreyFox Games open all 91 and make a video of walking down the line showing all of them broken. We had to jump through hoops just to get them to accept that we weren’t lying. Eventually they accepted that they were broken and said that if we paid for the shipping to send the figures to them in China and then back again, they would glue them. That cost to us was in the thousands.

Thankfully the shipping company, GreyFox Games, was much more pleasant to work with and offered to glue everything back together. I thanked them and asked them to go ahead. An hour later I got an email saying that it wouldn’t work.

The arms had sticks in them that went into the figure. When they broke, the sticks inside broke and shattered a little, making it impossible to simply glue together. We were told that each Natasha would take some heavy work to be fixed, and that they weren’t equipped to do that kind of work. We had to have them shipped to my house to be fixed. In come the masks!

Thankfully I had friends who were willing to work on the statues with me! With drilling, paint thinner, and styrofoam in the air, we had to use some safety equipment. That’s why it looks like we’re running a meth lab out of my place. At one point we had plastic hanging from the walls, but I missed the opportunity to take a picture.

MASKS FOR EVERYONE!

And the work began.

STEP 1

Drilling holes in the arms and in the figures.

STEP 2

Gluing wooden rods into the holes and lining up the arms with the figure.

STEP 3

Fixing the paint. As you can see, there were some major problems with the faces.

STEP 4

Finally packaging. Of course, the reason why they broke in the first place was the packaging didn’t fit correctly. We had to make room in the styrofoam, then wrap each one in bubble wrap to make sure it was secure.

In the end we did this for 50 figures.

We still have about 35 more, but most of them aren’t salvageable. The fixed figures are on their way to the shipment company as I write this. I wrote “Fragile” a million times on the large boxes and added Fragile stickers too. My fingers are crossed until they get into the hands of our Backers. If you’re receiving one and you’re reading this, just know that we put a lot of love and care into putting that back together for you. We hope it made it to you in one piece.

So, remember the lesson…

DON’T DO ANYTHING OUTSIDE OF THE GAME!

I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that buttons aren’t that big of a deal, or that shirts are easy enough. The truth is the more complex you make a process, the more probable complication becomes. Adding shirts to a campaign could end up being a catastrophe. Why add the headache?

More importantly, the biggest response we got from Backers was that they didn’t care about anything outside of the game. If you’re adding something to the game through tiers or stretch goals then great, but if you can’t play the game with it, leave it out. Save yourself and the backers a pain you don’t ever want to go through.

Our next game hitting Kickstarter on May 21st called Asking for Trobils will feature only the game and game enhancements for stretch goals. We learned our lessons in some difficult ways, but we learned, and that’s the important part.

More importantly we’re not giving up. In the end we still got a great game out to a bunch of wonderful people that backed us and helped us along the way. We love gaming and designing and we’re here to stay. Hopefully, if you feel the same way, you’ll take my advice and avoid the same issues we had.