After spending more than two years designing, iterating, fundraising, and publishing Pass the Buck: A Game of Corporate Responsibility Management, I’ve got a lot of experiences to share that I hope will help to prepare other aspiring indie tabletop game publishers for the lengthy and arduous process. This will largely be a financial and production retrospective rather than a design postmortem (which I may write up another time). I’ll be totally transparent about the risks, costs, mistakes, and financial projections of self-publishing my first small-run indie tabletop game, so if talking about money, profit margins, and stupid mistakes makes you squirm, it’s time to get over it.

Regardless of where you are in your career, you will at some point hit a wall and need to get some outside input from a peer or mentor in your field. Having been on both ends of the “I need help!” spectrum, I’ve come to discover that there are ways that you can frame your needs to make your potential advisor more receptive to you, and can even help to encourage a healthy and happy long-term mentor relationship.

At Happy Badger Studio, we may be best described as “experienced beginners” when it comes to promoting our games. We’ve […]

I participated in the IGDA St. Louis’ MiniMortems event in October with a very brief postmortem of Cosmic Kitty Pop. […]

TL;DR: I escaped the chains of “impostor syndrome” by making a silly little game about cats… in space.

I had the opportunity to sit down with my business partner, Dana Huth, and Nerd for a Living’s Adron Buske […]