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Sunday, January 01, 2012

ADB LOOKS AHEAD TO 2012

Steve Cole reports:

Next year looks to be fun, with a lot of great products. I wish I could make Jean (and all of you) happy with a specific month-by-month list of the entire year's products (and then release each and every one of them exactly on time), but in many cases I simply don't know yet exactly what will happen. The best I can do is sort of a rough outline (through a scanner darkly as the saying goes) with a few comments. I am going to go through next year, one product line at a time. Where I have specifics, you'll read them.

A Few General Notes

We want to get out as many products as possible before the world ends on 21 December 2012. After all, the guy who dies with the most games wins, right?

If we only had one product line, it would get multiple products, but with several of them, each will get one or two. There just aren't days on the calendar or money in the bank to print four new products for each of eight or more product lines.

Without an Origins trip on the schedule, we can look forward to a less chaotic and more steady flow of new products. At least I am finally going to get to do some serious work on my lawn during the spring when it actually would do some good. (That would make Leanna happy.)

More products by outside partners means more total products. That includes not just the two partners we already have, but one or perhaps two more who will come on board during the year. We're talking to several potential partners.

Some new technology is coming available that could make short print runs of card decks and die-cut counters possible. If that works out, it will be a game changer, literally.

We're hoping that the increased sales from the joint-venture lines allow us to bring someone else into the office who can take over some of my (Steve Cole's) non-design workload. There are a ton of design projects that I want to do, but it's literally a matter that every hour of work I do on (say) Federation Commander Reinforcements Attack is an hour of work that was not done on Prime Directive Gorns.

If the company is going to be any kind of a success, I have got to do a better job of marketing, specifically getting accurate information (and cover art) to the wholesalers in a far more timely manner. And while I love the social media marketing that Jean does, I wish she'd limit the hours she spends doing it so more hours went into proofreading my products and doing her own. Until she moves permanently to Texas (June 2013) that's not going to improve.

Leanna was so impressed by the fact that most game companies don't work during the week between Christmas and New Year's that she had declared that I will take off at least three days right after Jean goes home. My health could use the break. The doctor has all of my blood numbers in a good place but I'm totally exhausted all of the time.

Star Fleet Marines

First and most of all, I want to get Star Fleet Marines: Assault finished and in the stores in February. This game looks to be very popular, given how many people who have never even seen it are trying to submit scenarios, tactics, new units, new rules, and even fiction to go along with it. Playtesting is in the final phases, and you can actually watch me playing a small scenario on YouTube.

Many have asked about a series of miniatures for use with the game. I'd love to do them, and we might. (They could also be used for other things such as Prime Directive and KRAG and games I'm not going to talk about yet.) I've got a few ideas how to make that happen and we'll just have to see how it goes.

Starmada

This was our first joint venture with another company (Majestic Twelve Games). They report that they're doing another edition of Starmada, which will result in new editions of our various Star Fleet Universe books during the first quarter of the year. We also expect to release Battleships Armada during the first half of the year. There are also some existing Starmada books which we have never done print-on-demand and distribution deals for, and we really ought to make at least one of those happen.

Mongoose

The guys at the Mongoose casting shop are trying to get the un-sent pre-orders out, and expect to clear that all up in January (as new equipment triples production) and re-launch the line to the stores in February with the fleet boxes. The spring and summer will see a steady series of releases for Starline 2500.

August will see ACTASF2 (tentatively titled Battleships). The plan is to complete the Tholian and Orion fleets (i.e., Tholian Attack, Orion Attack), add the battleships (i.e., Battleships Attack), and add a new ship or two for every empire. Once that's done, we'll see how many pages are left in which we can add other things. Perhaps this would be the Lyrans, or perhaps the heavy and/or light dreadnoughts (or maybe both). This book will of course come along with a whole range of squadron boxes, fleet boxes, etc.

The Hydrans will all but certainly wait for 2013 (perhaps titled ACTASF3 Fighters), more new empires will appear in 2014 (perhaps titled ACTASF4 Gunboats), while the Andromedans will wait for 2015 (perhaps titled ACTASF5 X-ships). Ok, we all know that predictions three years out are worth exactly as much as the ion cloud they're written on, but at least we have a plan ... well, an outline ... well, a vague concept.

Star Fleet Battles

The girl who brought us to the dance will always get her turn on the dance floor. The question is just what. Obviously, it would be a new module (maybe two) and there are plenty of ideas for Steven Petrick to pick from. I'd really love to see Module X2 get published, but I seriously wonder if I'd have the time to support the design of so many new rules and ships. Other options include Module R13 (More Ships That Never Were), Module J3 (more fighters and carriers), Module Omega Six, Module C5A (Return to the Magellanic Cloud), Module X1B (more X-ships), Module Y4 (more Early Years), C3B (more ships for the five smallest simulator empires), and other ideas.

One thing that will definitely happen next year is for us to update more and more of the SSD books and post them to e23 for you to download and print whatever you want.

SFBOL will continue to grow, and will move into a new graphic format for ship descriptions that will work better for the players and do less damage to product sales.

Federation & Empire

F&E may or may not get a new product in 2012. (If not, expect Civil Wars in 2013. Just a note, Civil Wars may turn into two products by the time I figure out what's in it.) That is going to depend to some extent on when we sell out of some of the countersheets and have to reprint them. (Reprinting F&E counters is very expensive and to justify the cost we pair that with a new product. I think we're only going to be short of one sheet and if rumored new technology makes shorter print runs practicable, we may do a short run of the one sheet.)

What F&E will get this year is a set of updated Ship Information Tables and (perhaps) a new edition of one of the existing expansion rulebooks.

Federation Commander

You will get Reinforcements Attack (along with its boosters) in 2012. You may also get a book of some kind, perhaps the Reference Starship Book, or the Reference Scenario Book, or the Federation Commander Tactics Book.

I am also determined to see Federation Admiral printed next year, although I cannot promise when. What I can promise is that Jay Waschak and I will pound our way through a few pages every week and see how fast we can reach a point of critical mass.

It is all but certain that Borders of Madness will be the next "attack product" for this line (with its own boosters), but I don't want to give anything approaching a promise that it could appear in 2012.

Captain's Log

I can predict with a great deal of confidence that we will get Captain's Log #45 out in May and Captain's Log #46 out in November. What I cannot predict is their format. We are tossing around the idea of going to more pages (140?) and a $24.95 price point. That will probably involve reducing the Supplemental File to just the designer's notes and the rejected tactical notes (and using the better material in the main issue itself).

Prime Directive

We should have PD20M Romulans out in the first few months of 2012, completing the transition of the existing books from d20v3.5 to the d20 Modern system.

The big move then will be into the Mongoose Traveller game system. Jean Sexton (line editor) is working with Traveller author Mike West to bring these products to the market. I don't know a precise release date but I'm going to get very cranky with Jean and Mike W if we don't have a book or two out in time for GenCon.

We'll certainly do some kind of 16-page adventure (probably on the planet Texmex) for Free RPG Day.

Beyond that, I'd love to finish Prime Directive Tholians (done by Loren Knight) or maybe Prime Directive Gorns (which I have taken a fancy to doing myself) and get such a book out for at least one of the RPG systems. (The way we do these, the other systems would follow fairly quickly.) The problem is that there are only so many hours in the day, and these RPG books consume a mountain of Steve Cole Time and Jean Sexton Time, and there are a lot of demands for those very limited quantities. When Jean moves to Amarillo (June 2013) she'll have a bunch more time and we should see RPG books pouring out of the print engines in 2014.

And Other Things

If the new card printing technology pans out, we will see the long-awaited expansion for Star Fleet Battle Force.

I really want to print the second fiction anthology (Day of the Eagle). It would seem that this would be the easiest of products (go get the already published stories and put them into the page layout software) but the project gets complicated if we're expected to revise them to standardize things like titles and date/time notations and capitalization and other terms. Then again, getting them printed is only part of the battle. We need to get them into distribution, which is another battle. The game wholesalers might not do much with them, and the book wholesalers don't even know ADB exists (and frankly, they don't care). A better solution there might be to make them into Kindle books, something I want to look into.

I want to get a third joint venture deal done. There are two companies we are talking with, another two we want to talk with (who are waiting to see how the Mongoose thing works out), and I have an idea for another joint venture deal that would be so easy to manage that it wouldn't block us doing a fourth joint venture. The problem with joint ventures is that they take Steve Cole Time to manage, and every hour I have to spend teaching a joint venture partner what they can and cannot and must and should not do is an hour I am not working on some actual product.

Jean wants me to create a small free booklet introducing the Star Fleet Universe that she can give away to new customers on e23 and DriveThru. Worse, she claims that I actually agreed to create it (and to do so in the very new future). I wonder what she thinks is in it?

If the technology for short production runs of die-cut counters work out (and I can convince Leanna that I can sell a couple of hundred sheets by mail order) I already have one F&E sheet and one SFB sheet done, and Steven Petrick wants me to do short-run sheets for C3A, E3, and E4.

There is one very creative (and very useful to you customers) book I really want to spend time on, but I'm going to have to pace myself and do just a couple of hours a week on it. When it reaches "critical mass" maybe I can convince Leanna to put it on the schedule.

I don't play train games (not unless I can blow up the train as it crosses the river on a bridge) but Jay Waschak's Merchants of the Federation has attracted the attention of at least one potential partner for a joint venture.

I definitely want to see more iPhone apps done (and to expand those into Android apps) but so far, sales aren't even paying for the annual cost to have a store. Sounds like we need to do some better marketing there.

Starline 2400 ships will continue to be available by mail order (and some stores will carry them). We're looking into what new ships might be added to that range, but honestly, there aren't a lot that haven't already been done and would sell well enough to bother doing.