We may earn money or products from the companies mentioned in this post.
I’ve spent 11 articles working through the first 5 years of Hex Games. Let’s see if I can condense the next 20 or so into a single article.
Once Print on Demand became available and we got over our hang-ups about PDF, we were able to go back more or less to our original plan of using the money from one book to pay for the next one. We did this mostly by working for free. Writers got royalties based on how well the book sold, artists got paid at an insultingly low rate, and we did everything else. Leighton oversaw product development, Leighton, Stacy, and I did most of the editing, and either Josh or I did the layout.
Thanks in part to a few new writers getting past the almost-uncrossable barriers we put in place (you had to write a 500 word treatment telling us about the entire book you thought you could write) , we started releasing things more regularly most of the time. There were years (like when we were working on Hobomancer) that we only put out a single product. There were other years where we put something out every month–I know there was one year when we released 10 products, and for some reason I think we released 12 one year. We also won an Ennie award for Hobomancer and celebrated our 20th anniversary somewhere in there.
It didn’t take us long to wish we could release a new edition for QAGS. The first issue we ran into was that the system was perfect for kids games, but the rulebook was full of dirty jokes. Later, some of the quirks of the system started to get annoying. We couldn’t think about that, though, because I still had dozens of boxes of QAGS 2E in my house and we needed to sell enough to at least pay Corporate Sugar Daddy back for the print run before we could do anew edition.
[Editor’s Note: Just to be clear, CSD had already basically written this money off–he himself admitted that what we owed them was less than he’s spend on a weekend trip to Vegas–but we were (and still are) determined to pay him back eventually. Anything we make after operating expenses, art, and royalties goes into a bank account that we’ll use to pay him back as soon as we’ve got the money.]
Eventually, we got to the point where QAGS became a tiny fraction of our sales–most people who wanted it already had it. Since the “pay back CD account” wasn’t just getting the profits from Q2E, we decided it might be ok to think about a new edition. The process was sped up when I had ideas for a complete overhaul of the system.
For the next 10-15 years, I worked on QAGS 3E, but then it got to be too different from QAGS to be called QAGS, so I worked on Cinemechanix instead. I’ve probably written at least 8 distinct versions of the system, but none had yet survived playtesting. Part of the reason, I think, is because they end up getting too complicated and feel like a different kind of game–and one that I don’t particularly want to play.
When we wrote Million-Colored Suns, I was both annoyed at all the things I’d come to hate about QAGS, but some of the (mostly minor) changes we made there caused me to realize that I didn’t want to write a new system that was “better” than QAGS. I wanted to fix QAGS. I’ve been working on that for several months now, and it’s going pretty well. What are my problems with QAGS and how am I trying to fix them? In the interest of not adding any more installments to this series, I’ll cover that in another article sometime in the near future.
