The Final Countdown: Mana Mania Launch Party
The last week is upon us – Mana Mania launches next Monday, September 1st!
This is a nerve-wracking development for us all, so let’s calm some nerves by looking back at our development. Mana Mania has come a long way, so let’s start at the start and recount some lessons learned.
A Name, a Game, a Canal
In Fall of ’22, on a car ride home from a game night, our lead dev was puzzling over elemental magic systems, and as a byproduct, accidentally puzzled together the concept of a game. 24 hours later, a playable prototype was on TTS. The game was about nine elements arranged in a line and the elemental spirits traveling along that line. Only one esoteric name would fit this concept – Stoicheion, the Greek work for element, elemental spirit, and the points along a line.
Now, we can all look back and recognize this as an absolute winner. One of the best names ever devised for any game ever. But the A/B testing just didn’t pan out. So, the hard choice was made later in development to rename Stoicheion to Mana Mania.
Lesson – Clever names don’t make the cut if people can’t pronounce them, even if the game was built ground-up around it.
Let’s Do this Side Thing First…
Diceratops Games was actually in the process preparing a different game for release: Battle 54, a card-suit-themed MTG-inspired card-battler. Feeling comfortable but waiting on some commissioned artwork, we in our naivety thought we could quickly pump out another game as a smaller prelude to warm the waters.
How wrong we were.
Gone, but not forgotten…
After frantically attempting to throw our first campaign together over the course of about 4 months, we realized it just wasn’t possible. Neither of the designs had been polished enough to be acceptable, and audience building? What audience building? Stoicheion wasn’t in fighting shape and Battle 54 had a long way to go too (the game’s systems were hardly inspiring). We took the foot off the gas, ate some losses, and devoted ourselves towards making one game be the best it could be.
It was frustrating because we had been developing Battle 54 for 3 years at that point, and this felt like such a huge setback. But honestly? We had barely stepped into the board game design world. There was a lot yet to be learned, and that could only happen by working with other people.
Lesson – First time designers: you are never as ready as you think you are. Game development is not measured in years passed but in hours spent at the table with other people. Testing, criticizing, getting others to play and getting reviewers to give you the time of day – those all take time.
The Secret to Building an Audience Is…
Time spent caring about other things besides your own game. Really, I mean it. At about every moment where we gained a true ally in our pursuits and made a lasting partnership, it was when we put aside our own goals and gave time towards someone else’s.
It’s answering another server’s @playtesters, even when it’s just you and the dev that show up.
It’s habitually following and liking other pages and posts, because they need a boost to their algorithms as much as you do.
It’s joining a playtest night expressly for testing other people’s games, even when you have a change you’re dying for feedback on.
It’s bookmarking other campaigns and plugging them at launch, because you’d want the same kindness and they remember.
It’s tossing in a dollar towards a Kickstarter on Day 1, even if you would never buy that game yourself.
Lesson - In communities online and off, the value you build is not in the volume of your own person that you put out into the aether, but efforts you donate towards selflessly helping others succeed. It doesn’t just make you a better entrepreneur: it makes you a better person. Because, at the end of the day, you are both.
We haven’t always succeeded in doing this ourselves, but the times we did have ultimately been the most fulfilling.
But we’ve come to collect! Our devilish scheme comes to bear!
If you’ve got a friend in Diceratops, the time is now to contribute. We’re launching the campaign for Mana Mania on Kickstarter on September 1st at 12:30pm CDT (Chicago). Join us in the Diceratops Discord as we celebrate the launch in real-time with the devs. Play games with the community, have questions answered, and get the inside scoop on stretch goals before they go live.
But most importantly: make your Kickstarter account TODAY and follow the preview page. You’ll get email notifications on launch from Kickstarter, but you can also join our mailing list to ensure we reach you in those first 24 hours.
We really appreciate everything everyone has done for us, but we’re not out of the woods yet.
