Panda Game Manufacturing

While Tabletop Simulator is cool, we want to publish a physical game.

Being new to this experience, we were not looking for the cheapest manufacturer nor the nearest nor the quickest. We were looking for someone to partner with to make the game. Panda Game Manufacturing is a Canadian company with their main production facility in China. And they. Are. Amazing. From my first question to our representative, I could tell that they were knowledgeable and kind. Our rep, Sarah, was not only making me feel excited about my own game, but also giving me tips and tricks that I hadn’t (even couldn’t have) known. Working with them is making this process so much easier. I had felt like the missing piece to our design team was the actual knowledge of someone who has published and shipped a physical game. And here they are. they have premade logos for us, they have templates, they gave me tips to tell the artists, they helped us understand how many cards we should shoot for, and the overall price estimates for the game.

Thanks to Panda Game Manufacturing (not a paid advertisement btw), we feel on top of an incredibly complicated process. Will we make mistakes? Sure, everyone does. Do we now have another set of trained eyes on our decisions? Yes.

Finding Our Artists

We knew early on that our theme lent itself to some amazing and fun art! That meant that we needed a great artist. Now, the tricky part. How could we find an artist within our budget that we trusted and knew could reach our vision. Whew.

So we did like we do in many situations - we created a spreadsheet! And on this particular spreadsheet we laid out artists - names, contact info, portfolios, our own personal rating, and then a notes section (Had they done games before? Had they worked with us?). We narrowed the search down and contacted a few artists to see if they were available, interested, and able to do good work within our limited pre-crowdfunding budget.

Luckily, an artist we had used prior to create a piece from our podcast, Goats and Dragons, was interested. Crooked Nose Arts! We had first found them on Facebook and had considered them initially for a TTRPG game design. We hired them to do a piece (that’s friggin’ rad), and they were professional and amazing. And this time around, while there were artists on the list who were more experienced and worked in games, we really enjoyed this person and their style. We pride ourselves at finding talent and just nice genuine people to work with.

We also knew a graphic designer who was amazing and a part of our community already! Meg & Egg! they were so very very kind to give us a bit of a friend discount for their exceptional work. And both of our artists made up the bulk of the visuals you see on the website and in the game. We couldn’t do this (nor should we) without them!

Once Upon a Time

When Galway and I began Helpful Goat Gaming, we were first envisioning this endeavor as a Game Design Firm of some sort. We had this idea that we would stream games, grow an audience, and create games. However, we became so enamored with our own community that Game Design took a back seat to the rigors of running a discord full of amazing people and streaming games and creating podcasts. While Game Design remained a passion of ours, that itch was often scratched by creating Role Playing Campaigns with amazing worlds full of stories. And yet, we’ve been slowly toiling with projects for which we have a great passion (Adam would roll his eyes at my use of syntax here =). Fablefall was just such a product and it was only within the last year that I’d progressed that design to a place where I suddenly realized we had an incredibly fun and engaging game on our hands. And it was time to do something about it.

So I began to build prototypes in Tabletop Simulator. And I subjected my friends to it. And of course, like in all early play testing, I found the game to be fairly broken. However, through all the weird rule clarifications and severely unbalanced powers, we had a blast playing it. The game has since gone through at least 24 iterations of the rules and balancing. And there is still tweaking to do, but WOO, it is fun!

Oddly enough, the game, in my mind, began as a Science Fiction/Futuristic theme. I wanted it to be the next Twilight Imperium! However, the stirring theme of narrative and story felt more … foundational to the experience. Rather than looking ahead at the limits of humans (something sci fi excels at), it felt better to root the theme in our origins (something fantasy excels at). I remember once the mechanics of the game seemed right, I put a poll up in our Helpful Goat Discord. I asked which theme the community thought seemed interesting for a war game whose central idea focused on stories. The choices I gave, if I remember correctly, were 1) Steampunk, 2) Sci Fi, 3) Willy Wonka/Candyland, 4) High Fantasy, etc. And it was my good friend and fellow founder of Helpful Goat that suggested that we make it a dream-like world of imagination which encompassed all of these. And thus the theme of our game, a land of imagination, was born. This was now Fablefall.