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.

This looks interesting: a site for self-publishing games.  At Game Crafter, you can create an account and then upload your artwork for cards, boards and rule booklets, then add dice, play money, tokens, and so on and so forth.  In fact there’s a ridiculous number of bits and bobs available.  Then they’ll put everything into a box and post it to you, plus they’ll offer it for sale on their site, on your behalf.

I did some quick calculations, and it wouldn’t be worth me using it for Army Of Zero, partly because the unit cost would be too high, and partly because the packaging is a bit basic, but your situation and requirements might well be different.  But you can order as few copies as you like, so it looks like a great option for producing quality prototypes and proofs-of-concept, even if shipping from the US might introduce a bit of a time delay.

There are a few little secrets hidden away in Army Of Zero just because they amused us. This post is about the “easter egg” hidden in the game’s barcode, if you can believe that.

Army Of Zero's Barcode

For any product that you want to put on a shop shelf, you’re going to need to slap a barcode on it.  There are several different formats for barcodes, but the format for retail items is called EAN-13.  The design of this kind of barcode is such that the scanner can interpret it no matter which way it’s passed front of the scanner.

The “EAN” part stands for “European Article Number” (although EAN-13 is actually used worldwide).  The “13″ reflects the fact that the barcode has 13 digits.

All barcoded products have a unique barcode, so not surprisingly, there’s a centralised organisation that hands out codes - GS1.  Their UK website is at www.gs1uk.org.  As a publisher or manufacturer, you register with this agency, and they assign you a block or sequence of barcodes that you can assign to your products as you like.

The number of codes that you are assigned depends on how many products you want to barcode, but the minimum that you get is 1,000 - that’s how many we have, and it’s more than enough for us.

Of the 13 digits in our barcodes, the first nine are proscribed for us, and we’re allowed to choose whatever we like for digits 10, 11 as 12.  Those first nine characters?  Well, the first two or three digits represent the country code (50, for example, represents the UK).  The remaining balance of the first nine characters (”6018516″ in our case) uniquely identify the company or organisation that owns the barcodes.

So that’s 12 digits accounted for.  What about the 13th?

Well, the last digit is a check digit, which helps the scanner to be confident that the scanning worked correctly.  When the item is scanned, calculates what it thinks the 13th digit ought to be, using a defined arithmetic function based on the first 12 digits.  If that doesn’t match with the 13th digit that it thought it saw, then the item won’t scan.  Usually this is followed by the till operator trying again until either the item scans successfully or they give up and enter the product code manually.

For Army Of Zero, we opted for “237″ as the three digits.  As chance would have it, the check digit works out as Zero, which as you know is our lucky number.

But it’s cuter than that, because the last four digits of the barcode are “2370″, which - if you squint - also reads “ZErO”.

Clever, huh?