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Post by jeffgeorge on Apr 20, 2017 19:36:09 GMT -9
I've been working hard on getting the Dungeons of Olde tile set ready for wide release. I've made a few changes, most notably making the walls taller (3/4", up from the original 1/2"), and replacing the textures with a more painterly, less pen-and-inky look. At this point, I've got all six of the basic set tiles ready (field, single-wall, corridor, corner, dead-end, and four-walls), and I've updated the clips. I'm in the middle of working on new clip-on doors to match the new tiles. Here is the set as it looks at the moment: (Note: the door in this picture is a prototype, made by gluing texture samples onto a blank model. It will have better detail in the final version!)The first release will be a free introductory set, including the six basic tile configurations with a single skin each, along with clips and doors. I hope to follow that soon after with a paid "Classic Dungeon" set, with two more skins of each of the six basic tiles, plus the diagonal and quarter-circle tiles you've seen prototyped in the prior DoO thread. I'll also include several door variations, and some other clip-on dungeon features (ladders, torches, cave-ins, etc.). I'll stick dungeon prop standees in the margins as space and time allow (things like the chests, barrels, and fires you've already seen). Later sets will handle narrow corridors, tiles to make odd-sized rooms (15x15, for example), and oversized tiles for big rooms. Those add-on sets will have a modest cost. As I wrap up the development of the core tiles, I'd love any input on what should be included in the various sets, and what appropriate price points might be. I think I want to avoid PWYW. I've seen many people write that they hesitate to download PWYW products for free to try them out, defeating their usefulness as introductions to the line. Any thoughts on any of this?
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Post by squirmydad on Apr 21, 2017 9:06:47 GMT -9
As I wrap up the development of the core tiles, I'd love any input on what should be included in the various sets, and what appropriate price points might be. I think I want to avoid PWYW. I've seen many people write that they hesitate to download PWYW products for free to try them out, defeating their usefulness as introductions to the line. Any thoughts on any of this? I find that odd, my PWYW sets are constantly being downloaded, sometimes customers even pay a little as gratis. Why would someone balk at free or low cost? Try making them initially enormously expensive to put them out of a casual gamers reach and then have a sale by making the sets PWYW, shake the tree so to speak. Looking good.
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Post by jeffgeorge on Apr 21, 2017 11:53:09 GMT -9
I read a bunch of forum discussions on various game dev sites, and an argument was put forward by someone who published many products through OBS (possibly the guy that runs Sine Nomine Publishing, iirc) that many people who would download a "free sample" hesitate to download a PWYW for free, because it seems to them like they expected to pay something, although they don't even know yet if they really want the product. Therefore, those people--who have a mindset that probably makes them more likely to become paying customers once they know they like the product line--never try out the product. On the other hand, many people who download a PWYW for free are doing so just because they can, and are never going to seriously use it--they download tons of stuff, way more than they can ever use (I have days like that, myself, frankly). Those people are extremely unlikely to ever turn into paying customers. So, the guy argued, the people who download something for free when it's PWYW are exactly the wrong people if you are offering the product as a loss-leader to a larger, for-fee line. He found he'd had better overall sales offering the first product in the line for just plain free, and charging for the rest of the line. Anyway, that argument made sense to me, and several other commenters on the site seemed to agree. I don't expect anyone to pay for the freebie set, and I don't want anyone to not download it because they are presented with an option to pay something. When I was first shopping on OBS, I definitely felt a twinge of guilt when I downloaded a PWYW for $0. I've gotten over that now, but I feel like it's a real thing, and I don't want anyone to have any reason at all to not download the freebie set. (These days, if it's PWYW and it looks like it might be interesting, I download it, and eventually look it over. If it's something I really like and use, I will go back and "re-buy" it for money; if I never find a use for it, I never pay for it.) I would love to have some real information for this argument, tho. squirmydad , have you directly compared results between similar "free" and "PWYW" products? I expect that a free product gets downloaded more than a PWYW, but I have nothing but my gut to base that on.
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Post by squirmydad on Apr 21, 2017 15:18:49 GMT -9
Hmm, I had never actually looked at my own data, I just ran a report and there was about a 75% dropoff in downloading the FREE! sets at OBS vs. the same sets being PWYW. Though the 75% loss in FREE! customers is not 75% less sales on the rest of the lines. Product sales have been pretty consistent over the years, both before and after I switched the FREE! sets to PWYW.
I do see his point about making your very first set a FREE sampler to get your name and style out there as an introduction before you start putting prices on products.
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Post by jeffgeorge on Apr 26, 2017 13:21:47 GMT -9
I just ran a report and there was about a 75% dropoff in downloading the FREE! sets at OBS vs. the same sets being PWYW. Thanks for running that report. Upon rereading it, though, I'm not sure I'm reading the before-and-after relationship in that sentence correctly. Tell me which one of these is correct, please: - The sets were originally free, but after I switched them to PWYW, they were downloaded 75% less often. That is, downloads went down after a change from free to PWYW.
- The sets were originally PWYW, but after I switched them to free, they were downloaded 75% less often. That is, downloads went down after a change from PWYW to free.
- The sets were originally free, but they were downloaded 75% less often than they were after I changed them to PWYW. That is, downloads went up after a change from free to PWYW.
- The sets were originally PWYW, but they were downloaded 75% less often than they were after I changed them to free. That is, downloads went up after a change from PWYW to free.
- None of the above.
Sorry for the SAT format. We're prepping our daughter for her upcoming standardized state tests right now, and that's how my brain works at the moment...
Thanks again for input based on real numbers!
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Post by squirmydad on Apr 26, 2017 16:49:09 GMT -9
"A" is the correct answer. However, sales of paid sets remained the same so changing the FREE sets to PWYW had no effect on sales.
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Post by jeffgeorge on Apr 26, 2017 16:57:53 GMT -9
"A" is the correct answer. However, sales of paid sets remained the same so changing the FREE sets to PWYW had no effect on sales. Right. That latter point I did get--changing the "bait" sets from Free to PWYW had no impact on sales of the rest of the line. I was just fuzzy on the first part. Thanks!
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Post by jeffgeorge on Apr 27, 2017 1:10:13 GMT -9
Worked most of the night on clip-ons. I have the single door open and closed, the double door open and closed, and the secret door closed, as well as the generic straight tile clip. You can see them all in the image below: Last clip-ons that are absolutely necessary for the base set are the corner clip and the open secret door, both of which are kind of big jobs, for different reasons. May be a couple of days before those are ready. Edit: The color variations are due to low-quality lighting, not any variation in the models or printing. I do a better job with my photography when I'm not just shooting a quick pic on the desktop.
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Post by oldschooldm on Apr 27, 2017 6:13:20 GMT -9
Your clip-on doors are cool looking, but don't match one of the important patterns in using terrain/tiles: Matching a pre-existing map. Specifically you have them straddling the squares. Do you plan on offering (or do you already have) a single-wide door that aligns with a tile square? No is a completely fine answer, but I just wanted to point out the first thing I noticed. Honestly, I've not yet found any tile system that 100% allows me to duplicate any map (usually due to each tile being a fixed multiple size: 2x2 or 3x3) - but this was the first time I realized this tile/door design would not allow me to match *any* room on *any* map.
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Post by jeffgeorge on Apr 27, 2017 7:03:06 GMT -9
Your clip-on doors are cool looking, but don't match one of the important patterns in using terrain/tiles: Matching a pre-existing map. Specifically you have them straddling the squares. Do you plan on offering (or do you already have) a single-wide door that aligns with a tile square? No is a completely fine answer, but I just wanted to point out the first thing I noticed. Honestly, I've not yet found any tile system that 100% allows me to duplicate any map (usually due to each tile being a fixed multiple size: 2x2 or 3x3) - but this was the first time I realized this tile/door design would not allow me to match *any* room on *any* map. Actually, you can slide the clip-on features anywhere you want, right to left; if you go back to the older pictures in the other thread, before the texture change, you'll see the doors (same design) lined up with the tile grid. In this picture, I was lazy and put them across the cracks between tiles to act as tile clips as well as doors, since I've only assembled a few clips that match the new design (with the taller walls and new texture). I normally align the doors with the tile grid when I set up a layout--the single doors are one space wide, and the double doors are two spaces wide (which is the same as one tile, of course, since the tiles are 2x2 spaces). In practice, it is not necessary to clip every tile to every adjacent tile; if you clip them into groups of 2 to 4 tiles around the edges of the layout, that's enough to hold them in place just fine. Because the tiles are somewhat light in weight, single tiles are easy to bump or sneeze out of place in play; if you attach them to a couple more tiles, they sit still pretty well. The point of the Dungeons of Olde tile design is that you can set up any old-school-style dungeon drawn on grid paper, with the standard 10' per grid square. The caveat is that the six tiles in the free introductory set only handle maps in which all rooms adhere to the 10' grid. The first full set, "Classic Dungeons", will cost a small number of dollars, and will include tiles to handle 45-degree angles and quarter-circle tiles, as well as stairs up and down. Subsequent sets will handle 5' corridors, odd-sized rooms (multiples of 5', instead of just multiples of 10'), and over-sized tiles to make large rooms faster to set up and more stable in play. All those are tiles are laid out toward the end of the previous Dungeons of Olde thread. Thanks for taking the time to reply, by the way, and for pointing out that the photo I posted might be misleading. I won't set up the layouts that way in the future.
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Post by jeffgeorge on May 5, 2017 17:22:14 GMT -9
After a few days off to work on the Cantrips OSR supplement, I got back to the tiles in the last few days, and I've wrapped up all the pieces necessary for the free introductory set. Here's a shot with the final pieces in place: The last pieces were the corner clip and the open secret door. In this shot, you see the corner clip and the open secret door in place, along with the "discovered" secret door. Note that I haven't clipped every tile to every adjacent tile--I've just clipped them into groups of 2 and 3, which seems sufficient for most purposes. The two open doors--the single at the top left, and the double at the bottom right--are aligned exactly with the tile grid, with no tile-clipping functionality. The closed single door--at the top right--is cheated slightly to the left, so that it overlaps the adjacent tile, and does do some "tile-clipping." Even so, it's still perfectly clear with tile the door lines up with, so it's not necessary for doors to fully straddle the gap between tiles in order to help stabilize the layout. In any case, with the important tiles and clips completed, I can start working on assembling the distributable pdf. I've got updates to make to the instructions pages, and I need to re-shoot all the assembly photos, so it will take some time, but at least it's getting near the end of the process.
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Post by jeffgeorge on May 23, 2017 10:06:40 GMT -9
I heard a rumor recently that Readi-Board--makers of the cheap, thin foamcore that crafters like DM Scotty and Wyloch love--had "upgraded" the quality of their product so that the paper doesn't peel off easily anymore. (That was why the gluestick crafting crowd liked it so much.) I just picked up a load of Readi-Board at Dollar Tree to build a big set of DoO tiles for photographing, and discovered that not only did Readi-Board improve the quality of the paper coating adhesive, they also increased the board from 4mm thick to 5mm! DoO tiles never cared if you could peel the paper off easily, but the 4mm thickness was the default configuration for the DoO base thickness, so that threw me off.
Anyway, because of that change, I was rebuilding all of the tiles in the set, to be sure they worked properly with 5mm board at both 100% (1.25" grid) and 80% (1" grid), and found that my measurements for the thicker boards were off by a large enough fraction of a millimeter to cause problems, especially when it effects the two-sided walls. So now I get to redo all the cut and fold lines on every tile. It's really not Readi-Board's fault--the error was there already, and needed to be found and fixed--but that means I'll be reworking tile skins that I thought were ready to go, so that will add a few days to the whole process. Sigh.
Every week, I finish 90% of the remaining work. At this point, I'll be finished in just infinity more weeks...
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Post by Vermin King on May 23, 2017 10:09:17 GMT -9
Razzum frazzum!
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Post by oldschooldm on May 28, 2017 17:24:28 GMT -9
Has this shipped yet?
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Post by jeffgeorge on May 28, 2017 20:16:34 GMT -9
TL;DR: Not yet. Hopefully it will be on OBS by mid-June; I'll put up a preview version here within the week.I am trying to finalize the free basic set now. I had the pieces laid out on the pages of the PDF, and was building every piece at each combination of base thickness (dollar-store and "good" foamcore) and scale (1.25" and 1"), when I found some errors in the cut/fold guidelines on the 1" grid sizes, so it took me a few days to work those out and rebuild the pieces to verify. Now, I need to update the PDF pages to the corrected images; my plan is to post those pages here at CWF for anyone who wants to download them and build them before the official release--comments and error-corrections welcome! They won't have the instructions or covers at that point, but all the pieces will be there to build the pieces in the set. Look for that mid-week (I'm out of commission for Memorial Day). I plan to rewrite and re-shoot the instructions, to have more pics and less words, than the previous version of the set. What I'd like to have happen is to get the new instructions done by the end of next weekend. Once that's done, I should be ready to start getting set up on OBS. I'll have the free DoO tile set and my Cantrips OSR supplement as my debut products, probably about mid-June, if what I hear about how long it takes OBS to process a new publishers' first products holds true. Those products will be followed by the full DoO Classic Dungeon set, which will include the basic tiles with two new textures each (for a total of three each, if you count the free set too), as well as the quarter-round and diagonal-wall tiles, and probably some new doors, pillars, pit traps, and other dungeon-dressing features. The five-foot corridors and odd-size room tiles will probably be a supplementary set, as will a set with over-sized tiles for laying out big rooms. My learning curve is still pretty steep, which makes this slow going. I'm still finding and correcting errors that I won't have to repeat on subsequent releases, and I'm getting the nets for most of the tiles drafted, so a lot of what goes into later sets will just be new textures. I'm hoping that all this work will pay off in the future, making later sets faster to produce. If there's any kind of response to these tiles, there's a lot that could be done with the basic concept-- sunraven01 is showing how much can be accomplished by changing out the textures on the physical tiles in another thread around here somewhere.
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Post by sunraven01 on May 29, 2017 7:44:19 GMT -9
Take my money!!
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Post by jeffgeorge on May 31, 2017 15:58:40 GMT -9
As promised, here is the preview version of the Dungeons of Olde Basic Dungeon Tile Set. The big changes to this set, from the original, are the new stone texture, the taller wall height (3/4", up from 1/2"), and much more careful testing of all possible grid size/base material combinations. It's been a lot of work to get to this point, but I think the improvements over the original version are significant. This file includes all the tiles, clips, and accessories that will appear in the published version, laid out on pages as they will appear--unless you guys find problems that I haven't noticed! It doesn't include full assembly instructions, though there it does offer sufficient guidance for semi-experienced papercrafters. If you need more specific instructions or illustrations, check the PDF for the original, gray-stone DoO set--the procedures haven't changed since that set was released here on CWF. Hopefully, the full release of the Basic Set, with instructions, will be finished by the end of next weekend. I'll keep you posted. Edit: Found and fixed a font-embedding problem in the PDF. All better now.
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Post by oldschooldm on May 31, 2017 21:57:42 GMT -9
Thank you for the preview!
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Post by lightning on Jun 5, 2017 21:20:48 GMT -9
They look great. Love the fire :-)
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Post by jeffgeorge on Jun 6, 2017 11:01:35 GMT -9
Had a very busy weekend--wife's B-Day, getting rear-ended in traffic, putting my dad on an airplane, etc.--so no progress made on final version. Hope to get back on track over the next few days. Thanks for the patience and encouragement, everyone! Also, special thanks to sunraven01, who sent me a design for a DoO-style tile with 3d columns at the corners. That won't be in the free set, but it or something like it may appear in one of the early supplements.
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