OK, I thought it could be interesting to track the sales and promo of George's Children in a thread here. It'll be nicely embarrassing if we sell 5 copies, but hey, I'm game.

So, George's Children is a roleplaying game that jim pinto and myself designed. Jim has written the text and laid it out, and I've done all the artwork.

Both of us do this kind of thing freelance as our day jobs - jim has been an art director for AEG, Green Ronin, Triking Games, and a host of indies. He project managed World's Largest Dungeon for AEG, and has written too much stuff to list. He now works as a graphic designer for all sorts of mainstream companies. I'm a freelance artist working for companies such as Wizards of the Coast and Games Workshop.

So George's Children came about after one of our regular ramblng AIM chats about the state of the world and the state of design in gaming. Years back I used to edit a comic sold in aid of children's charities, and its been far too long since I've done anything like that. I worked on a couple of fundraisers for the Tsunami, but I hadn't been really been satisfied with that process. "Enthusiastic amateurs" was really the name of the game, and I personally found it difficult to shut up as part of a team when I knew stuff about production from a professional perspective. So I was ripe for making something.

Jim is very invested in child welfare issues as well as game design, so he was also well into the idea of making a product for charitable ends, that would also let us have our heads creatively.

Very early on in the process, Natascha Kampusch escaped captivity, and that utterly steeled us into making a game about kids, with all proceeds going to kids charities.

So over the last few months we've built the game.

A great deal of the inspiration came from the production of an initial piece of art: Here. This was made at a very early stage and really set the tone for what we wanted - some simple pathos, something evocative I suppose. We talked and talked, and sadly I don't have logs of our chats, so a lot of the decision making process has gone the way of all things. But we bounced ideas around a lot, I was making art as we went, which totally informed the direction the game took as being quite bleak. Here's another early piece which really affected the tone: Click.

It would be nice to be able to say this approach had some radical effect on the design, but I don't really feel it did - both jim and I are visual people, and I think we would always include visual imagery from the get-go. I think it has made a cohesive product - we haven't had to compromise by farming out the artwork outside of the design team, nor to have to accept something limited by budget, so that's been good. We removed a layer of communication which helped keep it tight I think. A narrative arose in the art, which is closely mirrored in the structure of the game.

We put up a couple of threads on The Forge for some feedback, and to promote the game a little in that circle. Nothing agressive at all, but it felt like it helped to get the name on a forum. Some useful stuff definitely came out of that in terms of design.

Jim has been in charge of play testing, and he's run games at several cons, as well as play with his own groups. I freely admit I don't know all the ins and outs of that - by the playtesting stage I was happy to let jim take charge of things, since his expertise is far greater than mine in that area.

We had some delays in finding the time needed to get the thing together, and I withdrew all the finished art at a late stage for another pass, since neither of us were truly happy with what I had made in the time I could find. We're happier now.

Layout was an eleventh hour herculean effort by jim, and we got it on sale for our deadline of May 2nd, Child Safety Day.

We decided to go solely with hard copy sold through lulu. Firstly for ease - whilst we want people to buy the game and play it our time is limited, and other options were too involved. Secondly we wanted to make a book, and have a certain reverence for the physical form of the thing. PDF sales just didn't fit the "premium" model we were going for.

Jim has pretty consistently blogged about the project in his various blogger blogs, which has generated some buzz. ( George's Children Blog

Once the book was on sale I put up threads on rpgnet, a couple of private art forums where I know my chums will buy it, on MySpace, on DevArt, Lulu's own forums and on LJ.

LJ was an interesting one, as friends have reposted my ad in other places on my behalf - in other LJs, and rpg forums. DevArt seemed another interesting place to advertise, as I have just received one of their "Daily Deviations", which is an editorial commendation for artwork that comes with added exposure for your gallery. The community there is VAST, and my "DD" has seen my traffic soar to several thousand views a day. Its an art heavy book, so it seems to fit the market there. Fingers crossed we get some sales that way.

Jim has spread the word on EnWorld and I believe a couple on industry places. I also posted an art sample on Enworld.

The charity angle does allow some more shameless plugging and arm twisting.

I haven't had an update for sales as yet today (day two of sale) but we sold a mighty 3 copies in the first couple of hours. I'm not drawing any conclusions good or bad from that.

I'll endeavour to update our sales here as I get the information, and answer any arising questions!