No pun intended.
I had some technical disagreements with my recording software and after five attempts to record this week's episode I ended up going live on YouTube instead. This might end up being "a thing" in future, because it was relatively painless. If I do it again, I'll give you all some warning, Many thanks to those of you who noticed I was there all the same.
As a small entrepreneur with a markedly rollercoaster ride entering the market, I thought I'd take a look at some...
2022-05-15 13:28:04 +0000 UTC
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A link for those of you who want to follow along, whether you plan to back or not. I'm going to be doing some podcasts along the way, looking at the experience, talking through my doubts and decision-making and hopefully picking up on feedback of all sorts.
However, I'm not going to let KS dominate my media content and will still be talking about other factors and features of the industry, with a new episode planned for this weekend.
EDIT - Sorry. Wrong link. Fixed now.<...
2022-05-13 10:37:34 +0000 UTC
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This is the final brick in my Kickstarter plan.
Those of you who missed Bernard will be glad to hear that she's back and doing the Kickstarter voiceover. The video is slightly less than 90 seconds long and aims to:
1) Highlight the product (obviously)
2) Introduce the setting, in order to garner interest in future projects and signpost people towards the games
3) Articulate that the Precinct Omega project is about more than just miniatures and that it is a business wit...
2022-05-11 14:25:51 +0000 UTC
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I've been away. But now I'm back.
In this short episode, I talk about what led to me having to step away from both podcasting and Precinct Omega in general, what I learned from the experience and, a little bit, about what's coming up from Precinct Omega now that I'm back.
2022-05-07 11:05:49 +0000 UTC
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I don't plan to spam this Patreon with Kickstarter stuff. If you guys are already following any of my social media feeds, you'll get to see enough of that once it launches.
There will be new podcast episodes and videos, very soon.
However, because I know some of you are interested in the business side of Precinct Omega and the whole "follow my journey to victory!" thing* I thought you might be vaguely interested in a preview of the Kickstarter content:
2022-05-06 14:33:14 +0000 UTC
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As promised earlier: actual news!
Right, it's finally going to happen. 18 months later than planned, but there you go. Target launch date is mid-July.
My main objective here is to raise the money to pay the sculptor the balance of what I agreed to pay him. But if it's possible to also raise the funds to create some new designs from my as-yet-unpublished additional concepts, this would also be good. But the Big Picture is to try to use this as an opportunity to raise the profile of...
2022-05-03 11:35:57 +0000 UTC
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...but I hope this is a useful early illustration of the kind of thing I'm hoping to do with it to enhance the video and other media content for Precinct Omega.
In my next post: actual news about Precinct Omega.
2022-05-03 09:06:02 +0000 UTC
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Yes, I have jumped on the bandwagon and am learning to use Blender.
Although, yes, technically I could use it to sculpt miniatures and do plan to learn how to do this at least for my own personal entertainment, it's value to game design is rather less arty. My hope is, first, to be able to begin producing quality 3D illustration of table layouts and rules to provide better-looking and more hel...
2022-04-29 14:33:11 +0000 UTC
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I'd welcome my patrons' thoughts on the place of heroes in the conceptual space of Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark. As it stands, the rules are very much a bolt-on so can be extracted almost entirely without impacting the rest of the rules and I'm a little on the fence about them.
If you've been following Precinct Omega since before Zero Dark, you'll be aware that the original Horizon Wars had no heroes, very much by design. My position at that point was that, at ...
2022-04-28 10:35:12 +0000 UTC
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A feature of my design philosophy has always been to make simple things work as hard as possible. Hence why, for example, Presence in Horizon Wars was a tool for army building, and a CQB stat. It's why, in Horizon Wars: Zero Dark the target for CQB is achieved by adding together F and D. You'll see examples throughout my work.
So, taking a fresh look at Horizon Wars as I develop Midnight Dark, I spend a lot of time thinking about how I can squeeze mor...
2022-04-12 16:11:40 +0000 UTC
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I seem to be reporting a lot on the changes to orders and command in Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark, but so far it's the part of the re-write that is occupying the most time and engaging me intellectually the most.
My early conceptual thoughts got refined and these have now been through more playtesting to see how they pan ou...
2022-04-08 09:11:17 +0000 UTC
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There's a lot of whataboutism going on in the current media debate over the war in Ukraine, in which the strength of the Western reaction is being critically contrasted with its reaction to past and on-going modern conflicts in Syria, Iraq, Yemen and elsewhere with the general thrust being "you didn't care about this because it involved brown people".
Although I don't think these arguments are ...
2022-04-06 11:29:13 +0000 UTC
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UK patrons might like to know that I'm organizing a group order to the UK of the Zel-1 Tow Tractor from Strato Minis, in aid of the Ukrainian Armed Forces.
Strato's own profits from this mini go straight to the UAF's own funds. Any surplus I accidentally make on shipping or exchange rates will go the ICRC.
https://www.precinctomega.co.uk/product-page/zel-1-tow-tractor
As an...
2022-04-05 15:39:32 +0000 UTC
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Quite a few patrons have, very understandably, wandered off over the last few months on the grounds of getting nothing for their investment. The fact that so many of you are still here is little short of a miracle and very humbling to have you continue to pitch in to keep this show on the road.
I am now actively making plan for Precinct Omega going forward - not only with new content but also with a more intelligent and better structured programme of work. It feels a lot like starting f...
2022-04-04 10:22:36 +0000 UTC
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I could fairly be accused of sometimes stretching things to make them fit the context of a wargaming content creator. In the past I've talked about capitalism, intellectual property, BLM, #MeToo and even the alt-right and its connection to our industry.
To those who whine about "keeping politics out of my hobby", I have consistently stuck up two fingers, because everything is politics. And my own lefty-liberal ideology has been key to informing my approach to not only the ficti...
2022-03-03 17:00:07 +0000 UTC
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To those of you who offered to have a chat about marketing and strategy, thank you! I will be in touch eventually to take you up on that.
Just so you know, I am working consistently on new content, but I am tending to leap from one thing to another, so nothing ever seems to be quite finished enough to share with you guys. But Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark is coming along nicely, as is Zero Dark: Operation Kurgan. I've also got some sketched-out new content for Blood ...
2022-03-02 16:48:32 +0000 UTC
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Back some time last year when I was still holding things together a bit better, I was all enthusiastic about publishing some fan-made content for Horizon Wars: Zero Dark.
Well, here's a learning thing: there aren't enough players of Zero Dark to be able to consistently generate fan-made content for publication. It's always interesting to me to think about the relationship between sales and actual games played, but that's a topic for another day.
Today, instead, I...
2022-02-16 09:01:00 +0000 UTC
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When I set up this Patreon, it was with the idea of providing patrons with an insight not just into forthcoming products and designs, but also into the process of running and growing a small business in this market.
Conscious, as I inevitably am, that the greater media content I used to generate has contracted to zero for the time being, and that development on new games content - whilst on-going - is hardly enough to keep your attention let alone repay your support, I thought I ought t...
2022-02-04 10:37:57 +0000 UTC
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So, after grinding through some calculations and playtesting on the ideas in my last blog, I've stripped the whole concept back quite a lot.
The main problem was that I was adding tests that consumed time, but also delivered some unhappy results. No one wants to see their entire turn lost to a string of bad rolls. So I brainstormed what was good about the idea (command matters!) and what wasn't, and I seem to have boiled it down to something more interesting.
Instead of a test, co...
2022-01-28 12:43:51 +0000 UTC
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This article began as a look at playing Horizon Wars: Zero Dark on smaller tables but, as I thought more about the subject, I realized that there was room to look both wider and deeper at the subject and consider options for all kinds of games and how to play them with less space available - or just in different ways, to keep them engaging and entertaining beyond the norm.
A Question of Scale
The obvious starting place is to look at the scale of the minia...
2022-01-26 12:01:02 +0000 UTC
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Very quick one (I have more content in draft, but it's not quite ready - watch this space).
Listen, quite a few patrons have dropped off recently and I just wanted to say, to anyone who wonders if this Patreon is "worth it" while I'm running quiet, that it is completely fine if you want to drop off and push your support to more active or more interesting campaigns.
I'd just ask that you follow me on social media before you go so, when things pick up again, you can re-consider comi...
2022-01-26 08:40:59 +0000 UTC
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It sounds like the perfect solution to our "pile of shame*", doesn't it? Just sell stuff off and your pile gets smaller and your bank balance gets larger. But there are some significant problems when it comes to doing a money run on your pile.
No one wants me!
In theory, there are enough miniatures wargamers out there that it should be possible to find someone who wants whatever you've got, however badly-painted, bashed-about or out-of-date it is. There are enthus...
2022-01-17 10:00:04 +0000 UTC
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I need to go straight in, here, and say that #hobbyneutral can mean different things to different people. What I have to say is about what it means to me. You can take some or all of this with as much salt as you need.
But the obvious root of the idea is "carbon neutral", essentially meaning to put less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than you offset through measures that remove a...
2022-01-10 09:01:01 +0000 UTC
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A second edition of Horizon Wars: Zero Dark has always been the plan. And the plan was always to give the game a minimum of five years in the market. So there's no need to discourage people from buying it, y'hear?
But if I'm going to embrace the idea that my games need to take longer in development to really be the kind of quality of design I'm aspiring to, Zero Dark II (not the official title) is going to need to start being brain-stormed here and now. So I thought I'...
2022-01-05 09:01:00 +0000 UTC
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It was @apocrypha_now (who is a patron, btw) who tipped me to (his?) tag, #hobbyneutral, that was largely inspired by his horror at recent GW releases increasingly adding yet more plastic crap to the tabletop. It may not, technically, be "one use" plastic, but let's not kid ourselves that it won't end up in landfill eventually.
And that got me thinking.
You see, one of the things I've been doing while...
2022-01-03 09:01:00 +0000 UTC
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I've talked about my plans and aspirations for Midnight Dark before, but ignore that stuff. It's kind of still relevant, but I'm moving forward from there.
An aspect of the original rules that never really sat right with me was the issue of command and control. This is a major feature of a lot of different miniatures wargames, especially at the strategic level of play. And I kind of touched upon it in the New Adventures section of Over the Horizon, in which players mig...
2021-12-29 10:01:01 +0000 UTC
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First, let's hit the personal stuff. If this isn't interesting to you, scroll down to the business stuff.
Non-Precinct Omega Work Stuff
I've spent two months working on a contract as a union official for the Royal College of Nursing, primarily helping nurses and other health workers resolve disputes with their employers. This is something it turns out I'm very good at. Going into bat aggressively for people being f***ed over by either incompetence (usually) or mal...
2021-12-26 14:49:03 +0000 UTC
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Quick heads up for my favourite people:
For various reasons, I'm going to be taking a social media break for a couple of months. I want to dial it back to just Patreon and Discord - and only the Precinct Omega Discord, at that. There might be some podcasting and videos. I have at least one recorded that just needs editing.
I'll post on FB this weekend about this and open up the Discord - less the Patreon-exclusive channels - to the Grunts.
This is partly a mental health t...
2021-11-11 21:25:00 +0000 UTC
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I have some cool new stuff, rules and story for you all this month, but... as you know I have literally just started a new job. Give me a few days and hopefully I'll have it up for you this weekend.
Gobs for Blood & A Black Flag, a late-Halloween mission for Zero Dark and some new fiction from the Fallen Earth is all on its waaaaaay!
2021-11-03 19:10:35 +0000 UTC
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I've mentioned Warsurge a little on social media, and I thought it was, perhaps, time to bring it more to the fore. So I was pleased when Nick and Rich, two out of its three creators, agreed to come on the podcast and talk about the game.
Warsurge is a new miniatures wargame from Australia. They call it "universal", I call it "miniatures agnostic". But regardless, they've got a unique and interesting approach to design and market access that's worth hearing about. And ...
2021-10-30 15:08:58 +0000 UTC
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