Point Zero Games will be at GameCon 09, in central Manchester on 17th and 18th of October.  Looks like there’ll be LOADS going on.  We’ll be showing off Army Of Zero, of course, and offering the usual freebies.  You’ll be able to play the game, and beg for puzzle hints, though we’re not promising to reveal anything.  Come and talk to us anyway, because we might inadvertently let something slip.

(Note: we’re not going to let anything slip.)

Not a week goes by, it seems, without someone suggesting putting a playable version of Army Of Zero on the website - either someone wants to play against a computer, or they want to help out by writing a program for us.  Technically, it’s absolutely do-able.  You might remember from an earlier post that we used a computer program during the play-testing, to simulate a lot of games and make sure that the balance works, so it wouldn’t take a lot to adapt that, along with some nice graphics, into something we could put on the website.

Unfortunately, it’s there are other complications, related to the Army Of Zero trademark, and I’ll tell you all about it.  By the way, this all happened about nearly a year ago, and it’s probably worth making the point that we’re not upset about it: it’s just the way the intellectual property world works, and it was ineresting to see it in action.

We chose the name Army Of Zero because (a) the number “zero” is significant to both the gameplay and the prize puzzle competition, (b) there are a lot of warrior-type characters and (c) it references the well-known expression Army Of One.  It’s a good idea to get a trademark registered, partly to make sure that no-one pinches your brand name and partly to make sure that you’re not going to get into trouble by inadvertently pinching someone else’s.

In the UK, you apply for a trademark via the Intellectual Property Office.  You can do it yourself, but it’s one of those jobs that’s probably best left to a specialist, so we employed an Intellectual Property Attorney.  She began by carrying out an initial search for existing trademarks in the same market - toys and games - that might clash with Army Of Zero.  It’s a good idea to do this so that you maximise your chance of getting your own application accepted.  The only thing she found that she thought might be a problem was a game called Army Of Frogs, but she thought it would probably be OK.

We decided to carry on with the application.  With the IPO’s process, you get an initial response in a few weeks stating whether the application has been accepted, and in our case it was, so that was good.  You can then put TM on your stuff, indicating that the trademark has been accepted by the IPO, but then there’s a three-month period during which other trademark holders can raise objections if they feel that their own IP is being infringed upon.

Fortunately the three month period passed without objection, and we became entitled to change the TM to an (R).  It was a long wait, because we didn’t want to go to manufacturing until the whole process was done with.  Apparently people sometimes do decide to do this, if they think they need to get to market fast, but it’s a risk.  We waited, and were pretty relieved when the process had run its course.

Literally a couple of days after the trademark was awarded, we got a very polite letter from Electronic Arts’ legal representatives in California, saying that they’d noticed our trademark application, and pointing out that they had a (computer) game called Army Of Two.  They told us that they wouldn’t object to a card game called Army Of Zero, but that they would get legal on us if we started doing computer games, including web-based games.  They didn’t want people to think that Army Of Zero was in any way related to Army Of Two.

At this point, we had three paths open to us.

First of all, and probably silliest, we could take issue with the EA legal team and see them in court if they felt like being litigious. But it’s not unreasonable to assume that EA have bigger, more expensive lawyers than we can afford, and consequently it doesn’t really matter who’s in the right: whatever the outcome, we don’t really want a drawn out legal battle.

Secondly, we could choose a different name for the game, but we didn’t want to do that because we’d just waited three months for the application to run its course, and didn’t want t owait three more months. And there was no guarantee that at the end of it we wouldn’t have someone else kicking up a fuss.

Thirdly, we could accept EA’s position and agree not to develop computerised versions of Army Of Zero.  Which was what we did - it seemed, and still seems, the least bad option.  I’m sure EA knew we’d see things that way too, and probably that’s why they wrote to us directly after the trademark application was over, rather submitting an objection during the process.  And although it was kind of annoying, it’s probably better for us too that they let things pan out the way they did, otherwise we’d have had to think up a new name and go through the trademark application at least one more time.

Except that we can’t do an online version of Army Of Zero, and now you know why.

This post is aimed at those game designers amongst you who are considering going down the self-publishing route.  It’s a few of the lessons we’ve learned about putting together that initial order.

I know a lot of people have a hard time deciding how many copies of their game to order from the printer.  It’s a significant decision, because usually the printer will quote you a range of unit prices, and the more you order, the lower the unit price.

If you have any kind of business head on you, you’ll then put the a range of volumes and corresponding into a spreadsheet and work out the various different options.  You’ll estimate your trade and/or retail selling prices, and maybe what the mix between the two might be.  Then you’ll crunch the numbers.

Of course, the costs that you need to recoup aren’t just the production costs.  You’ve probably got some fixed costs too - in our case, these were mainly for professional fees and artwork.  Plus it would be nice to pay yourself, wouldn’t it?  So you factor those in too, and you find out that you need to shift a heck of a lot of units…

At this point, you may be tempted to over-order, just to get the lowest possible unit price from the printers.  Our advice is to think twice.  We can’t tell you how many copies you’re going to sell per year, but somewhere in the low thousands for a new player is a very respectable number.  If you need to sell more than that to break even, you might want to think again about pricing, costs, or whether it’s even a viable product - no matter how much you love the game yourself.

If you’re in doubt, consider starting off with a much smaller initial run, with the option to reorder from the printers.  The unit price on the first run would be high, but you should be able to negotiate a nice low unit price for future runs, since a lot of the printer’s initialisation and set-up costs would have been absorbed into the first run.  (Negotiate reprint prices with the manufacturers before getting the first run done, and be prepared to haggle - they’re struggling for business at the moment just like everyone else.)  Hopefully you’ll sell out, and can go back for reprints, and it’s a terrific feeling to be able to go and do that.  If you don’t manage to sell out, just think of the money you’ve saved on not ordering those extra copies!

Also, getting your units manufactured in smaller runs should help you keep your inventory down, so you might save on storage costs.

One last consideration: if you do multiple smaller runs, you have the option of making changes to your packaging (or anything else in the game, come to that).  It’s likely that you’ll make your packaging decisions and at some point after it’s all been made up you’ll think, “yeah, it’s OK, but I wish I’d used a different font”, or “the colours were a bit off on that print run” or “the box should have been a different shape” - something that’s not worth trashing the whole production run for, but you’d just change if you had the chance.  Possibly there’ll be an additional cost involved, but at least you’d have the option.

P.S. For a different approach, and non-variable unit production costs, see this post from last week.