What Nobody Tells You About Making a TCG/CCG (The Real Production Journey)

I shared an update earlier this week about Escape Land being printed and showed off a video from the printing process showing a sheet of Foil Rares and Foil Fabled Rares and it got me thinking a lot about the journey from day 0 to now.

Being a Game Designer, working with a Japanese based company on a game supporting a popular anime IP, my focus was very much on just gameplay, card balance, tuning cards to make them more exciting or interesting, and helping to curate a competitive meta game. The focus is so much on the details of the actual game, but there’s so much to this world we dabble in than the cards and the games themselves.

One of the hardest lessons to learn was that you can’t just make the game. The game is important and the way it plays is important, but that is just a small piece of the puzzle. I learned this lesson with my first game, the Runes of Ede Expandable Card Game. I designed RoE during the COVID era, right after I decided I wanted to stop working for a company designing games and make something of my own. What is funny is that I created that game with the same mentality that I had previously – being so fixated on those details. The game itself played great and I had a lot of positive feedback, so much so I sold 50 copies of it! What I didn’t realize was that the game was actually such a small percentage of what I needed to be doing… which ultimately led to me stuck in a sort of paralysis and/or fear since I didn’t know what to do next and I didn’t know how to get people to care about this cool game I made.

Making a game vs producing a game. As spoken about above, there are a lot of unknowns when entering this space – and with lesson number 1 being “you can’t just make the game”, this one here is a key thing Game Inventors will need to think about when they’re working on their next project – “Is my goal to just make the game? Or is my goal to produce the game?” There is a significant difference between the two. Making a game is just that you are taking whatever steps you deem necessary and setting out to just make a game for you and your friends to enjoy, or you’re making it in hopes of selling it to someone else to produce. If your goal is to produce the game, this is where the journey shifts. Again, the game you’re making is important, it just now means that the creation of the game is now a smaller percentage of your overall focus.

Everything counts – especially to the audience. Perception is reality and the presentation of your game, when you’re producing it, often matters more than the game itself. What this translates to is that if you’re going to be producing your game, you must take steps to ensure it can be shown off and attract the eyes of others. This means if you aren’t graphically inclined, you either need to learn or be able to hire someone to assist with this piece. Additionally, it is okay to get better overtime – if the level of efforts you’re going through to get better are demonstrable. Look, I have been at this for years now and my posts and such still aren’t great – but they are 10,000% better than they were on day 1. This took time, energy, effort, and practice – and is required every single day. Every day you choose not to do something or try something; you’re putting yourself behind. This is why I say that “everything counts”, because it does.

Consistency builds trust and meaningful relationships. I want to put this here, because this does factor into a topic down below about crowdfunding. There have been some hard moments when making Escape Land, one of the hardest was starting up the Weekly Learn to Play Nights in the Discord Server. In the early days, there were weeks I would be lucky to get 1 person to hop on and play a game with me. What was important here was that I stuck with it and delivered on running the event every week at the same time and in the same place. This consistency created trust and out of it came a ton of new relationships and genuine friendships. Now, the events tend to mostly have multiple people stopping in to learn, jam, and spectate. Consistency is so important, if you’re going to do something for your community, deliver on that promise. If you’re going to post every day, deliver on that promise. Some days may be better than others, but the consistency and dedication don’t go unnoticed – especially when you look back at the previous lesson, “everything counts”.

Money is a real thing and is often one of the biggest reasons for success and failure. Software, art, prototypes, graphic design, marketing, website stuff, etc. – all these things have a real cost and to be honest, I am very fortunate that my profession put me in a position to be able to support these expenses. I did have to pick and choose what I could devote money to and when, but I was still able to spend X amount of money over the course of two years and get 3x back via Kickstarter funding – which about 80% of that return is going to fulfilling the Kickstarter pledges and the remainder will have to be used to support the business moving forward for marketing efforts and other initiatives to sell through the product that will be left over from the Kickstarter print run.

If I had to offer advice on how to spend less overall leading up to your Kickstarter go-live: if you’re a solo creator with no investors, like me, skip conventions entirely and instead engage your local game stores to see if you can run demo events. For prototypes, I leveraged TheGameCrafter to purchase my own prototypes and as a way for others to purchase prototype decks and try the game. This option not only helps you get what you need but also enables a way to earn a little money back as you go – not super significant money, but everything helps.

 Art is expensive and if you have a specific artist you want to work with, my recommendation is to reach out to them and at least have a conversation about your vision and where you’re at.

For graphic design, I highly recommend paying someone in the short term to help you get started but that you also work to learn as much as you can so you can start doing a lot of it yourself. I do highly recommend working with Zilla for all graphic design needs, especially the major ones like packaging, rulebooks, Tabletop Simulator Mods, and foil masks for cards – not just incredibly talented, but an amazing person. With this strategy I was able to get major milestones checked off while getting good enough at it myself to support my daily social media posts, marketing efforts, and doing the entire Kickstarter Pre-Launch & Launch pages myself.

Marketing takes a lot of finessing if you’re going about it yourself, which I did. Boosting posts on Instagram/Facebook is a necessity and is a real cost. You also must pay attention to analytics to figure out what is working and what isn’t. My strategy overall was to start low in terms of daily dollar amounts, like $5 to $10 a day, and ramp up as the campaign drew closer, and pouring it on the week of the campaign launch and for the weeks after launch, $100 a week or more. Reddit can be harsh haha, especially towards Escape Land, but the reach is unmatched for unpaid posts – I highly recommend posting on Reddit at least once to twice a week. If I were to look at how I did marketing wise, if I only look at my marketing costs compared to Kickstarter success, I 5x’d my marketing dollars – which isn’t too bad!

Website stuff such as a site for a Card Database, Deckbuilder, Events, etc. – this could be seen as controversial, but I actually started using Base44, an AI platform, and it has been incredible for building a functional site that supports a Card Database, Deckbuilder, and more – I did it all on the $20 a month package with absolutely 0 coding experience.

Crowdfunding measures how you did in building relationships, whether your marketing was effective, and if you created a compelling enough product. This doesn’t go for crowdfunding games with established IPs, or with significant dollars behind the production and marketing for the game, this is targeted towards solo creators and smaller teams – in the space we’re operating in there are 3 things that will determine your success when you click “Launch Campaign”: did you do enough to build meaningful relationships that led to the creation of a community, did your marketing help pull new community members in and help explain your value, and are your product offerings compelling enough to get people to buy-in regardless of their connection to you.

The first 2 things are directly tied to the piece about consistency above and the third focuses in on your product presentation, messaging in terms of what your product is looking to accomplish and whether someone finds that compelling, and the various offerings and price points available depending on the level of engagement someone decides to have with your product regardless of their connection to you. As you can see, the game itself is a part of all of this in that it is your product and the end result is to get this product into people’s hands, it just happens to be more about how the product is produced/presented and whether you were able to successfully share its value through your messaging and marketing. I didn’t crush this by any means, if anything I think I got carried by the first 2 parts of what can make a campaign successful with a little bit of help from the third.

Post Campaign. Funding isn’t the end of the journey; it is just another step. If anything, the road gets harder because you now accomplished this big goal, the hype of the campaign is over, and now you’re tasked with delivering on what was promised, continuing to engage your audience, and trying to grow your audience even more and continue selling product once the campaign is over. What I recommend for this is continuing to be consistent with your weekly events you were holding prior and focusing heavy efforts into finding more opportunities for your community to engage with your game prior to Kickstarter delivery.

I have done this in the form of a monthly tournament where I give away sought after cards from the prototype booster box I ordered, reward people for playing with foil promos that you can have printed by MakePlayingCards and are decent quality, and now I am doing a Weekly League that lets people play based on their own schedule and has a batch of rewards to give out for everyone who completes the league with a grand prize being an uncut sheet from the Kickstarter print run to the person who earns the most points once the league has ended.

I have also already setup a Shopify site to easily support sales post campaign and each day I have to work on different ways to optimize it. Additionally, work has continued on the card database and deckbuilding site… as you can see, this work never stops haha.

For printing, I am working with WJPC for the print run and my biggest advice here is that if you are going to print with them, contact them early in your process so you can start to get a feel for exactly what they are going to need from you. A few things I learned was that I needed to save my PSD files as editable PDFs, ensure the files were in CMYK instead of RGB, resizing the card image and border using the WJPC template to ensure enough bleed is there for printing, and for foiling you must do a special foil mask layer – which I pay Zilla for to handle for every Escape Land card and it is beyond worth it.

Some other things to think about when your producing your game is what all needs to be included in your packaging and how the rewards you offer can impact your overall costs. I did a lot of pricing early on for auxiliary components and different packaging options – at the end of the day, they increase your production costs substantially. This is the biggest reason I kept my products for rewards and stretch goals limited to:

Cards, booster packs, booster boxes, starter decks, printed artwork, and playmats. This lineup is simple, but except for the printed artwork and playmats, all the other stuff gets lumped into one giant order with WJPC, which helps keep the bulk of my costs with one party and all comes in one single order. The options for printed artwork and playmats are limitless and you have some decent options to not overpay to have those done.

I recommend thinking through your packaging and product offerings, since the logistics of shipping and the cost of getting additional items made can take an unforeseen toll on you post campaign. Reducing complexity for you, and ultimately your audience, is a huge win and can help ensure that you have everything ready to go by the time your order arrives from the printer and it is time to start shipping.

I know it is a lot of info haha, and folks may have just skimmed through it, but I really just wanted to take a lot of what I learned and try to share that with anyone who maybe looking for a bit more insight into what all goes into producing a game, going to Kickstarter, and beyond. If ya got this far, thanks so much for reading it all! Honestly, I can say that learning all of this stuff and working this hard has been incredibly rewarding. I have made a ton of new friends, got to create something that people enjoy, and now I get to go about on trying to push the game as far as it can go and learning even more along the way!