Think Like A Game Designer - SolForge Fusion Shadows Over Solis

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

CHECK OUT SHADOWS OVER SOLIS TODAY ON GAMEFOUND5 Quick Lessons About Crowdfinding* Crowdfunding has changed: You need to bring your own audience and community. Success now requires months of preparation, including playtesting, reviews, and pre-launch marketing.* De-risk your campaign: Validate your product ahead of time (e.g., with digital play), use scalable local manufacturing, and print to order to reduce financial risk.* Offer meaningful, manageable exclusives: Make backers feel special with unique experiences or digital rewards that don’t overcomplicate fulfillment or inflate costs.* Lead with gratitude and humility: Crowdfunding is hard and full of uncertainty. Transparency, community connection, and willingness to own mistakes are vital for long-term support.* Build and contribute to community: Share not just your products, but your journey, learnings, and stories. That’s how you create lasting relationships and grow a global community around your games. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit justingarydesign.substack.com/subscribe

Today's episode is a special episode to announce the launch of the latest crowdfund for SoulForge Fusion Shadows Over Solis live on GameFound now. I am excited to bring this to GameFound. It's the first time that we brought SoulForge Fusion to GameFound. But SoulForge Fusion has been a crowdfunded project since day one. And I'm going to use this short podcast episode to talk a little bit about the lessons learned from crowdfunding. I'll tell you a little bit about the campaign. And if you're excited and want to back it or share this, it's much appreciated, but hopefully you get some value out of the lessons that come from doing these kinds of crowd funds.

Lesson number one is that crowdfunding has changed a lot over the last 15 years. I joked back when we did these crowd funds on Kickstarter that it should have been called kick finisher and not Kickstarter. You can't come to a project like this and not have a fair amount of preparation to be able to show off your game, to be able to be able to, build your community. People don't just discover you on crowd funds like they used to back in the day. Now, in general, you have to bring your audience with you. What that means practically is that you should be able to have reviews for your game, prototypes that people can play and see, ideally a community that has already played the game and is already your advocates for it. This is something you can build if you don't have an audience already by posting for free on sites like

board game geek, participating in design challenges and things like. un-pub, going to events, being able to generally get your game tested, get your game in front of people. And my advice is whenever you do, collect emails, collect socials, get people to follow you so that you can start to build a group and a audience ahead of time. In addition, you can pre-launch your campaign, start collecting followers. And I recommend that you do that at least three months before you launch a campaign so that you can start to build up a follower base so that your day one numbers look good. Lesson number two is to de-risk your campaign as much as possible.

It is a very difficult time to make games. There's a lot of uncertainty in the market, whether it be tariffs or the economy. There's a lot of competition out there so that even great games sometimes are not successful. And so when you're creating a campaign, you want to find ways to validate the campaign and de-risk it for yourself. SoulForge Fusion is able to do this in a couple ways that are pretty impressive and unique to SoulForge Fusion. One, for Shadows over Salas, we actually launched the set digitally first, and you can play it completely for free in the app right now. What that means is we are able to test it, get validation from our audience, get people excited about it, and have a pre-built community that can come and now back the campaign to get the physical version of this set released. In addition, because we have our own algorithmically generated digital printing technology, we are able to print this set entirely in the USA.

So we'll print in the USA and ship from the USA. So where our largest customer base lives, we don't have to worry as much about tariffs and shipping, and we're able to reduce the risk of creating a physical game like this. In addition, digital printing allows us to print at whatever volume that we want to be able to print and don't have quite the same levels of minimum requirements as other print runs. And what that means is we're going to print this one to order.

So if you back this campaign, you will get access to the physical version of Shadows Over Salas, and once we run out of stock, we will not print it again. And so that creates, in turns, one of our constraints, which is we're not sure how much we're going to print into an advantage, into an opportunity, because those that do purchase and do back the campaign will get an exciting collectible and will have one of the only chances to be able to get access to the set in the physical form.

Lesson number three for crowd fund success is find ways to give cool exclusives that make these people, your backers, feel special and feel connected to you as a creator. Anybody can buy product in the store. And somebody that's going to back your crowd fund is giving you money before they receive your product to help support you as a creator. And so you need to find ways to make them feel special

and to make this campaign feel special. So with the Shadows Over Solace campaign, not only are we allowing there to be specialty tiers that only people from the campaign can get where you could become a character in our game, become a forgeborn, get access to incredible deals on back catalog products that nobody else gets. We are also able to offer exclusives with the digital game,

like cool exclusive cosmetics and playmats and limited run items. Now, the key with all of these things is make sure that when you offer these exclusives, that you don't overcomplicate your production run. I will tell you that we have run campaigns in the past, in particular when we did our first version of Ascension tactics, where we offered far too many different variations and unique skews and varieties and sub-pacts and the process of fulfilling all of that ended up costing us way more

than we'd anticipated. And sometimes you will have very successful, quote unquote, crowd funds that can lose you tons of money. So when possible, give exclusives that are exclusive experiences or easily replicatable items. For example, everybody in this campaign, depending upon the stretch goals and how we do

for the Shadows over Sol's campaign, we're going to be giving away bonus digital decks to everyone that participates. And one of the great things about SoulFortrusion is because it's a hybrid deck game, your collection lives in the physical world and the digital world. And so we can give out these exclusive codes, which make it an incredible deal to backers,

but is easy enough for us to fulfill because we're just giving out digital goods. So it doesn't increase our shipping costs. It doesn't increase our risks. And, you know, I'm being very transparent about this stuff because we built the most exciting campaign that we could come up with. We love this product.

We love being able to create not just the digital version and the physical version, but a world that lives together. Richard Garfield and I are so excited about this. We also offered a special tier where you can work with Richard and me directly to design a card. We'll get on a call together.

We'll work through it. We'll build it all together. And there's some really cool stuff that comes out of that because it lets us personally connect to our audience. And it doesn't cost any more other than our time and attention.

And honestly, it's the kind of stuff that we love to do. So the feedback that we're able to get from our audience in these campaigns allows us to make better products for you. It allows us to build better relationships with the community. It allows us to learn the things

that you want to have and to continue to give us more cool, unique ideas. that are the core backers that are there. And this brings me to lesson number four, which is gratitude and humility. And the truth is that making games is hard, even for people like Richard and I

who have succeeded in making games that people love and have been doing this for decades. Every single time we want to launch a new product, every single time we want to launch a new release, it's risky, it's scary, it's difficult, the market may or may not accept it, it may change, the cost of production may change. And so what a,

allows us to survive, not just market conditions, but also mistakes. Because we made plenty of mistakes over the years, whether it be a product that wasn't up to standards or something that the community wasn't happy with or a decision that may be controversial, like when we brought in the Web 3 aspects of the game and allowed people to have $100,000 worth of prizes and token rewards and things like that. Some people didn't love it. But because we connect with the community, because I share my gratitude with the community, because I'm willing to admit when it's mistakes and have those conversations, I believe it's had a massive impact on the community's willingness to come along for the ride. And it's one of the things that I love about this podcast is being

able to share the stories and the mistakes and the trials and the tribulations and the winds and all of the things that go on behind the scenes so that you can not only hopefully make this process easier for you, for those you out there that are creating, but that also hopefully you'll continue to support me and Stoneblade Entertainment's games and the projects that we make together so that we can join and learn as we go and make fun experience. and build a global community. And that's one of the things I'm most excited about. If you can back the campaign on GameFound for Soul Fort,

Trusion Shadows Over Solish or share this with other friends, it's much appreciated. But whether you do or don't, I am grateful to you as a listener. We have been able to do this podcast over many, many years. And I've had incredible guests and incredible conversations. And I've heard from so many of you, especially those that have joined on the substack. Justin Gary Designs.com can take you right to the substack, where I'm not only sharing these podcasts,

these podcasts, but sharing articles and able to build a community of people that are all trying to create together. They're trying to build incredible games that are trying to join and find ways to connect better, to learn how to be creative more, to learn how to connect with the people that they care about. And so I'm grateful to you as a community. I am incredibly humbled by the support that we have gotten for the games, the audience that has grown over these many, many years. And I will continue to do my best to add value to you, both in the game. that I make and in the podcast episodes and the guests that we have coming, I've got a lot more exciting guests coming down the road over the next coming months.

I can't wait to share with you. But in the meantime, thank you so much for your support. And if you can, go check out the Soulforge Fusion, Shadows Over Salas, crowdfund on Gamefound.