Kratophagia's Production Model

For my previous games I’ve used a publication model where I finish the game to a certain degree, fund things like art, layout and editing through Kickstarter and then publish the game digitally with some kind of print option through DrivethruRPG and Indie Press Revolution. For Kratophagia I wanted to try something different.

Kratophagia has always gone well at conventions, but I don’t expect it to appeal to a wide audience, even for an indie TRPG. Even more than that, it’s a game that I want to develop in stages so that I can incorporate player feedback, especially around the clarity of how I communicate my ideas for the game. While I ran the kickstarter for The Sprawl while it was in development, my sense is that the crowdfunding climate has changed, or at least I don’t have a particular interest in doing a large amount of development on a game after funding. That’s why we only ran the campaign for Dinosaur Princesses when the game was basically finished. With those considerations in mine, my requirements for a publication model were:

• to be able to publish the finished parts of the game before the whole was complete,
• to embed the game in a context where ongoing development is expected,
• to enable productive interaction with engaged players of the game,
• to reduce (perceived) pressure to produce content with a frequency that didn’t suit the flow of development,
• to reduce (perceived) pressure to produce content on a time scale that didn’t fit with the other things going on in my life.

I considered Patreon for a while, but that funding model seemed prone to failing the last two requirements and seems more appropriate for publishing a variety of discrete pieces of content rather than the iterative development of a single thing.

So with all that in mind, what am I actually doing here?

Kratophagia is a game that I conceive of as primarily digital. I may well make a physical version at the end, but everything so far as been designed with the digital medium in mind. The files that will be available at launch are a complete game. That said, they are not as fully polished as I would like and they only reflect part of my overall creative vision for Kratophagia. In terms of polish, the player-facing material is finished and playtested, but there are a few places where I will be expanding the text to include more MC-facing material: advice for how to run the game, practical tools and tips for running the game, and the like. If you have suggestions or questions that relate to those, please let me know in the discussion forum! At the moment the game could be easily run by anyone who has run a PbtA game before, but if your experience is with more traditional TRPGs, then you might want more. Tell me what and I will add it!

In terms of creative vision, the current files are the Larva Stage. As you will see in the game text, the next stage is the Pupa Stage. Those names also imply at least one more stage. My plan for Kratophagia is to allow you to "buy in" to the design process and  that once you're in, you're in. The same game you contribute to now will be updated to expand the Larva Stage, and then built upon with the subsequent stages as I develop the later parts of the game. The game you buy now will eventually be the final publication. This is why I didn’t adopt an “ashcan” model where the version you get as an ashcan is a cut down playtest version of what will eventually be an entirely separate project.

As I said on Twitter, I've probably already overexplained what might seem an obvious decision to publish a niche game on itch, but because this is a different model to my previous games I wanted to lay out what I was doing with Kratophagia and why.