Anthromancer: A Game. An Oracle. An Album. A Myth.

Ping! Final warning for Backerkit surveys.
over 5 years ago – Sun, Dec 27, 2020 at 11:19:16 PM

Great news, everyone - the Codex is almost wrapped. We only need one more bit of text compiled to finish off the typesetting and get a .pdf ready to go to the manufacturer as well as your e-mail inboxes (with the print-n-play assets of course). That text? Our backers names!

As of right now we've got 89% of our backer surveys completed meaning that 11% of our backers (about 42 people or so) haven't filled out the backerkit surveys. Some of those folks pledged at a lower level and won't be getting a physical copy of the game, so its not as important that we get their mailing addresses, but part of the survey is filling out how you wish to be credited in the codex - and I can't credit you in good faith without that response! Last thing I want is to accidentally violate someone's witness protection (or, y'know, deadname them) in the credits of a product that will hopefully last for a really long time. So if you haven't completed your backerkit survey yet, please do that ASAP! I just sent a reminder e-mail so you can check for that if you're not sure (I know it's been a while coming).

I will continue to send those reminder e-mails to make sure I've got the mailing addresses for everyone who supported, but we might miss you in the codex credits if you don't find time in the next few days to take care of that.

--

Otherwise, I'd just like to wish everyone who reads this a very hopeful new year and thank you for coming along for the ride. This project is really a labor of love and it can get a bit intimidating seeing more established gaming companies run their kickstarters more efficiently or professionally and feel like I'm doing something wrong. I've kept coming back to the faith that as long as I keep pouring myself into the art - the product itself - it'll all pan out, but sometimes it gets hard to stay mindful of that. So...thank you. Great news coming soon.

Dan

December 2020 general update (with a illustration sneak peek at da end)
over 5 years ago – Wed, Dec 16, 2020 at 06:24:10 PM

Hey everyone. Just wanted to take a few minutes this evening to hammer out a general update and keep y'all abreast of the development as it continues to unfold.

Since the last update, 2 pretty rad things have happened:

1: an acquaintance named Ethan has become a friend and collaborator on the project, using his knowledge of LaTeX to pour gasoline on the typesetting process

2: my friend and partner Wella had the chance to help me conduct a massive review of all the instructional diagrams and design assets, to help me turn things like this:

into things like this:

Wella is an actual real professional designer! Their counsel has helped me narrow down the information each diagram needs to provide considerably, which means the text and the diagrams in the codex will actually work together to quickly and efficiently make the abstract game concepts obvious to readers. It's a huge step up from what the codex looked like before. Having Ethan and Wella step into my life to help with this makes me so much more excited to get this thing finished, and we're making excellent progress.

I've also been working most of my nights to trawl through the text and update all the language, all the graphics, and the subtle wordings of the hymn meanings etc, to make sure this thing is as usable and accessible as it can be. Ethan sends me revisions of sections and I compile long lists of notes for how to make sure every page of the manual is both doing its job and looking nice doing it (often they're the same thing). It's only now that we're really digging into the assembly of the codex that I'm realizing how much of this product IS the codex. Based on my current estimations, this thing is going to be close to 125 pages without appendices (Alex is updating mercenarium competition notation now, which will be an appendix, in addition to a glossary/index). It's gonna make the box feel heavier than it looks like it should be. Yknow, like smartphones. I love that feeling, the opening of a heavy small box, and our subconscious association between weight and value. It's treasure we're delivering here! 

I want this product to succeed commercially and not just fade away as a weird white dude's mystical delusion, so to that end I'm further enlisting Wella's professional help in designing a 5-10 page quickstart insert specifically to make Mercenarium more accessible to new players. I'm a big fan of Kohdok's youtube series, 'The Seven Deadly Sins of TCG Design', and as I've flirted with the idea of building a bonafide TCG on top of the Anthromancer mechanical package, I've been watching his videos pretty religiously. In particular relevance here is episode 7, 'No reminder Text' - and Wella watched this video with me and we decided to try and emulate the starting guide that the Pokemon TCG uses to help new players visually understand the core mechanics. I'm confident that they can make something that'll completely ease your experience with the game, and it'll also serve beautifully as the 'rulebook' we include in future 'slim' editions of anthromancer (in which you'll be able to download a digital copy of the full codex instead of paying extra money to have this phat-ass book in with it lol).

Now, I don't know how realistic it is and I may beat myself up for even saying this, but my hope is to be able to email digital assets to folks around the start of the new year. Ethan has basically finished the typesetting for the first 2 sections and is almost done on the 3rd, and the 4th and final section is just text with full-page illustrations so it ought not be too much trouble. Dana has committed to having the illustrations finished by Christmas (and we've already got placeholders so the typesetting can proceed whether these are done or not) and as for me, all I need to do is spend a day digging through the assets and updating everything with new suit icons (realized that, as far as accessibility is concerned, it's better to have black icons with colored shapes behind them, than colored icons with no shapes). That shouldn't prove too challenging.

...

So we're getting close and progress is happening. 

I literally have no idea when we'll be able to deliver the physical product currently. I've heard from a few folks that shipping in general is kind of a cluster right now, and I haven't bothered to ping the manufacturer for an update recently if only because it feels like a waste of my energy unless I can give them a definite date that all the assets will be ready. I think long term it makes sense to wait for that quick start guide to be finished, and that shouldn't take too long, but I hesitate to make promises I can't keep. Hate that shit. shouldn't have said the digital assets will be done by new years, w/e

Anyway I hope this update finds you healthy and cozy this winter. I know things are tough right now. They are...yeah. Tough. I don't know what the next few weeks will bring and I suppose I'm kind of past caring; I've realized that I have very little control over the outcome of global events, emergent trends and even the things that happen to me. I'm just trying my best to keep my business ventures afloat and continue to work on this project (6 years now I guess?) so that one day I can look back and be glad I made it. More than that, I don't have the time, energy, or money for. So...thanks for being here. For reading. And for supporting this dream in this nightmare of a year. I'm really grateful for the opportunity.

Dan

10,765,931 (and general project update)
over 5 years ago – Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 09:38:19 PM

Well howdy y'all. Dan here, and it's time for another Anthromancer project update. This is going to be a bit long and perhaps a bit more 'vulnerable' than past updates, so strap in and bear with me.

I mentioned some good news I couldn't share quite yet in the last project update. Time has moved forward and I'm free to reveal that we've officially been awarded a patent for the orientation-dependent tokens we built Anthromancer around. US Patent no. 10, 765,931 was officially awarded to Tetra Entertainment, LLC on September 8th, 2020. I waited to reveal this because I was informed that the patent could theoretically be challenged up to about November 9th - after which point it gets locked in and legally belongs to us for the next 20 years. That date has passed, and so I am at liberty to share this with you.

There's a couple reasons that I'm excited about this. I mean, obviously, there's a bit of an ego thing there - it feels really cool to have my name listed as the inventor of something filed with the US Patent office. Ma, I'm an inventor! More importantly though it has given me this sublime sense of creative freedom. It's weird to say! If you've been following me or this project at all then you know I constantly have my head crammed in esoteric literature about the nature of magic spells and whatnot, and I think this counts. The closest thing I can relate the subtle psychological change I've undergone as a creator with a newfound patent protection is...marriage, I guess? I'm not sure how many folks will vibe with this but, being married to a person, even if none of the particulars of your relationship with them changes, has a tendency to subtly shift the way that you 'feel' about that person, and therefore changes the potentialities within that relationship.

Which is to say, now that I have this patent settled I've been EXPLODING with ideas for expansions and new iterations of this orientation-dependent token, safe in the knowledge that we're free to try things without having to fear some bigger dog coming along, stealing our core idea and using their greater resources and experience to do it better than we can. MTG meets Chess for REAL tho.

There's a couple other things I wanted to bring up about this process, about why we sought the patent and how we hope to use it in the future, as well as a general update on the state of the project. So here goes.

First of all, I hope that the fact we sought this patent doesn't alienate any of our backers. I started a reddit thread a few months back during the campaign to talk about board game patent law and was essentially told by the regulars there that 'seeking a patent excludes you from the board game community'. Talk about a firm boundary. 

So then, why'd we seek it out? I guess I never cared a lot about being 'in the community'. My biggest fear during this half-decade development process has been that...I'm painfully aware of how many layers of complexity I've draped across the top of a workable, bare-bones gaming system that is fun and enjoyable and could be sold easily and cheaply at a profit. So it would be very easy to publish a short run of this game and turn around and see Hasbro barrel over and say 'hey people don't want this weird esoteric magic stuff, so we're gonna strip all that art and expression and meaning and intention away and sell your product for you, better, to more people'. The nightmare scenario was that I might one day wake up and see people experiencing Anthromancer and claiming it was just a convoluted version of a game some larger company made better, smaller, faster.

The whole POINT of this project, in my heart and mind, has been as a kind of transformative art piece. It's SUPPOSED to be weird and deep and mysterious and give you a lot to think about and chew on in a lot of ways no matter who you are or what initially draws you to it. It's the closest thing to 'activism' that I've done with my life. Looking at all the bananas bullshit going on in the world today - the post-truth truth, the deepfakes, the political instability and corporate fascism and oligarchy and climate apartheid and unsolved racism and yadda yadda yadda; the spiritual sickness we're all waking up and fighting through every day - it would really break my heart to see the potential impact of this thing blunted by some 'everything I do is so I can make money' dipshit coming along and stealing a part of the essence of what makes this thing so special.

So now, if someone does that, we have some legal recourse.

It feels amazing that we got here at all.

At the start of the patent-seeking process we didn't even know if we had anything we COULD patent. Google around and you'll find there's a lot of folks who don't realize you can patent board game mechanics. I think I even saw a Stonemaier games blog entry where it was suggested that patenting wasn't a real thing. And to be fair, it sounds like it's rare. We met with a brilliant St. Louis toy and game patent attorney who walked us through the process and explained that you've basically got a spectrum of board game patents - with MTG's 'Tap for Mana' mechanic on one side, a purely mechanical concept that they claimed, and the pop-bubble dice roller from Sorry on the other side, a physical device that was invented for a game. He told us that it was rare to find a mechanic that was actually patentable and not just a clever iteration of something that had come before, but when we showed him a quick game of Mercenarium, he told us he thought we had something here.

So we started the process. And I'll be real: hiring a professional patent lawyer to help you do this wasn't the cheapest thing I've ever done! But also: if you're gonna try for a patent, you probably want someone who knows what the hell they're doing.

Our lawyer told us that more often than not patent applications were refused on the first submission, and that the actual process would most likely require several rounds of revisions, each of which could cost us thousands of dollars. And we started that process anyway, figuring that if and when we got down the road and the expenses started racking up, we could make a judgment call and see if it was worth it to continue setting our money on fire and digging deeper into debt (lol).

So imagine the look on my face when I got the news that our application went through on the first round. Felt like Christmas morning. I went ahead and splurged a bit and bought one of them fancy 'you got a patent!' plaques, which is hanging on my living room wall now.

Having it settled now means a couple things for Anthromancer:

1. We're gonna be able to print the US Patent number in the first edition manuals.

2. We're gonna be able to iterate on our mechanic and create some extremely cool variants, expansions, and new games, and might have what we need to start building a long-term successful card/board game enterprise.

3. We can license this mechanic to others to help us grow and give us the financial bedrock we'll need to keep making awesome, beautiful things to share with the world.

I'm just really happy we tried, and feel so grateful things have gone like this.

THAT ALL BEING SAID.

Development of the actual Anthromancer product has been such a thorn in my damn side this year. 2020 is stupid. I know, everyone says 2020 is stupid, but it bears repeating. I am still waiting on final illustrations from the lore artist, Dana, whose last four months have been...comically overwhelming? And the same for Alex who was going to handle typesetting of the manual using a programming language called LaTeX, used in textbook publishing. Not to mention my own constant, low-grade overwhelm with trying to keep my pancake art company from dying due to lack of live events, coupled with my already persistent, unaddressed ADD/executive function disorder.

Lol y'all I wish I was already rich enough to just throw money at this process and it be done for me. Shit must be nice.

Things have definitely been getting better on the Dancakes side; our logistics manager and one of my partners in developing Anthromancer - Hank - has told us that we've had enough success with some of our recent pancake content and been selling enough digital events and preserved pieces that we have some positive momentum and if we can keep that up we'll come out of this better than we went in. Dana is back in town after a family emergency and our schedules are starting to even back out, giving us more dependable time for me to do things like, y'know, type this long-ass backer update. Ben has been tweaking our livestream overlay and website and we're going to be launching a patreon soon, all of which will contribute to me having more time and energy to spend putting the finishing touches on Anthromancer so we can send it out for manufacturing.

Alex has passed the LaTeX typesetting torch to me, and I haven't quite picked it up yet though that's my little task for today - to download the interface and see what I can learn from looking at what he has already put together. Most of the preliminary typesetting has been done already and it's just finalizing the copy and the illustrations that still needs my attention, so in theory I ought to be able to figure it out (Hey man, I had a geocities account back in the day). I been letting my anxiety get the best of me lately, but y'know what they say: It ain't gonna typeset itself. I'll also be following up with Dana as soon as this update goes live and getting a loose timeline for when them pretty pictures gon' be finished.

So. Yeah.

LAST NOTE

Real talk, the psychic energy on earth right now is its own kind of messed up. I have been spending an inordinate amount of my time lately holding space for friends, family and connections who're undergoing a lot of fear, desperation, isolation...so I just wanna leave this by asking: how are YOU doing? It seems to me like now is the time for us to double down on our communities, on practicing vulnerability and authenticity within our own networks...and our networks have this strange superhuman ability to expand across digital communications to all corners of the globe. So let me know if you need someone to talk to, and I'll do what I can to hear you without judgment and share some of my peace with you.

Thanks for reading. You'll hear more as things develop.

Dan

A Long Overdue Update on the Development Status of Anthromancer
over 5 years ago – Wed, Sep 16, 2020 at 04:45:12 PM

Hey, friends, followers, and backers. Dan here, with a long overdue update on the status of the project.

First and foremost - the project is still making progress. 

I've been abstaining from composing this update for as long as I have because some exciting news has been brewing but...I can't share it just yet, and at a certain point I realized that I'd need to say something to break the silence in the meantime. Most likely the next update I'll be able to go into details about this mysterious good news - I'm sorry to tempt your curiosity like this but I suppose it is what it is.

As for the actual, material status of the project, we hit two small snags. I believe the last update I mentioned that the final assets we're piecing together are the typesetting of the manual and the lore illustrations. On both fronts we're still waiting; one of my business associates is dealing with some pernicious medical issues due to the ongoing pandemic (I agreed not to get too specific about this out of consideration for their privacy) and their recovery has become a bit of a full-time job (and their recovery is a higher priority to me than extracting their labor is). We are looking into finding someone we can pay to do this, but as it's an expense we weren't expecting, it may be prohibitive, and I may just have to slap together whatever I happen to be capable of on my own. We'll see. 

As for the illustrations, I took a long walk with the artist, Dana, earlier today and discussed the status of the project with her. She feels she is very close to finishing and for the last several months there have been a lot of unforseen and unavoidable complications that have prevented her from being able to finish the project when she'd last expected. It's a little bit hard to be a hard-ass right now, considering how chaotic and exhausting current events in the US and the world are. My friendship with Dana and my other collaborators has always taken priority over the speedy completion of the project; I continue to tell myself that it is better to finish it slowly and beautifully than to force this out and alienate my potential future collaborators in the process.

Speaking of potential future collaborations - I haven't really stopped developing Anthromancer, though much of what I'm working on now will be more of an after-market support system. The core components of the game are such that I don't think we've even scratched the surface of what it's capable of. I play a lot of Magic: The Gathering and I can see some really interesting deck-building and RPG elements hiding in the Anthromancer system that might be able to produce an experience that really *is* Magic meets Chess. And that's what I'm doing while I wait for my friends to find their balance. Hopefully, by the time you get your hands on Anthromancer, it will be just that much better for the extra time spent here.

I am deeply grateful for you continued support and interest in the project, and I deeply long to get this damn thing into your hands. It has been the core of my passion for half a decade. I wish I could let you into my brain and share in the feelings I have about it, and I hope that you'll continue to have faith in my commitment to bring this thing to market.

If you have any questions, comments, frustrations, suggestions, etc, they would all be appreciated. And I'm sorry this update took so long.

--

Side note: In previous updates I've mentioned how we've been trying to focus on Dancakes to stabilize our main source of income as we pivot away from events and towards more digital events and fine art commissions. For several weeks all of us have been going into our studio for 50-60 hours a week, producing content, trying to build a machine in which we could bank stuff, edit stuff, and start putting out the kinds of interesting and funny video content that might make us into a social media company.

That hasn't really been resulting in the kind of response we're going to need to survive, especially not for the overwhelming amount of work it takes to schedule, film, edit, tweak audio, make thumbnails, schedule, post, and promote stuff. So in recent weeks we've axed about 90% of that and are using our lovely studio to do some focused livestreaming and...it's been a very nice pivot so far. The editing process (which is all on the backend and takes up the vast majority of our time now) has become effectively nonexistent except in very special cases. We've been connecting with our fans and followers in a wonderful new way, selling a lot of art, and we're building a new system that doesn't take nearly the time and energy the previous one did. 

I say all this to let you know that we're going to have a lot more energy to commit to fulfilling Anthromancer going forward. 

So...yeah.

Thank you for reading all of this, and, again, I'm sorry it took so long to get it out there. I appreciate your understanding thus far.

Dan

Anthromancer Development Update / New Modern Magician
over 5 years ago – Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 12:17:02 AM

Hey everyone. I wanted to take some time this evening to compose a backer update to keep the communication open and fill you in on project progress.

We've gone a bit quiet on our social channels now that the campaign is concluded. The George Floyd protests erupted here in the US right around the time our campaign was concluding, the COVID-19 pandemic is continuing to disrupt things, and between my other company, Dancakes, and my mental health, I've just been having a whale of a time balancing things. There's been a little voice in the back of my head, "Anthromancer's backers are gonna think you took the money and ran, you gotta talk!" so in a way I guess this is an accountability update.

If you don't know, I'm one of the core members of a professional pancake art events company called Dancakes - and believe it or not it becomes extremely challenging to run a company that specializes in live events during a global pandemic, especially in a country where we can't even get on the same page about whether or not wearing a mask is the mark of the beast, or whatever. We've lost a lot of business just from the simple uncertainty of it. Every city and state seems to have different rules, different cultural expectations for how to handle this, and so most of our live event clients have thought better of hosting events at all. Perhaps that's a part of my frustration; we're attempting to pivot Dancakes as fast as we can to focus on digital content, livestreams, preserved pancake art, instructional videos, podcasts, ANYthing really, to make up for the enormous hit in income this pandemic took from us, and while this draws my focus away from my other projects (like, y'know, Anthromancer), I'm also watching this ridiculous debate over "pandemic ideology" unfold between people I would've thought I'd be on the same page with. I do try to have that bemused, detached perspective about things I can't control, but this mask thing is just silly. A huge amount of my mental and emotional energy has been going to Dancakes every week, a lot more than in the 6 years since we founded it, and that's a big part of why I've been less attentive to Anthromancer's social media. So there's that.

That isn't to say that nothing is happening on Anthromancer. I'm still finding time on evenings and weekends to churn through assets and get everything ready for manufacturing. They look awesome - finally got around to making some tiny design tweaks that have been nagging at me for a while, like bolder orientation lines and deeper colors on the board geometry. Alex has the bulk of the edited manual copy at his disposal for typesetting (which he's juggling with a few other work projects), and Dana is 90% done with the final illustrations of the mythology. Dana is a co-owner of Dancakes with me so she has also been 'all hands on deck' at the Dancakes studio, too, but she's sending me illustration updates as they become available and once she's finished that we can set those illustrations in the manual and send our assets off to the manufacturers.

I suppose it's just...more of the same, really. The whole development of Anthromancer has been me chomping at the bit to get this awesome idea of mine out into the world, and the world saying "hey dude it's gonna take time." Patience has been a tricky thing to learn. But right now I know that if we don't get Dancakes operating in a new way I'm gonna be essentially SOL financially, and, lol, that's not a great place to be when it comes to delivering on backer rewards. If it really comes down to it I'll go get a "real job" I guess? 

Just gonna throw this out there, take it or leave it: It would be extremely smart to adopt a UBI right about now.

Anyway. Anthromancer is still coming, and we should still basically be on schedule. I just wanted to be as open with everyone as I can about what's going on in my life and what's soaking up my energy. I still think early spring 2021 is a realistic goal for delivery here. You'll continue to hear news from me as news becomes available.

IN THE MEANTIME: Here is a Modern Magician video recently published through Anthromancer's youtube that I managed to research, film, and put together between all this. Watch if you feel so inclined, and otherwise, you'll next hear from me when there's something worth hearing. Thanks for your time.

Dan