Making a Splash!

Launching a Patreon and Fulfilling a Crowdfundr

The Many Sided Newsletter

Jul 04, 2023

We’ve been busy this week…

We launched the My First Dungeon Patreon
Elliot delivered Project ECCO to Crowdfundr backers and released it on itch.io
We premiered Act 1 of our Good Society actual play featuring Carolyn Page, Brian Flaherty, Emma Fyffe, Katie Marovitch, Persephone Valentine, and Nathan Yaffe

Like I said: We’ve been busy.

Diving into Patreon

Making a Splash in The Dice Pool

This week My First Dungeon launched a Patreon!

We’re calling it The Dice Pool (splash!)

Why Launch a Patreon?

We love making My First Dungeon and making each season better than the last by bringing in amazing guests, commissioning original music (like the DIE OST by BE/HOLD), and going ALL-OUT on sound design for our actual plays. Starting a Patreon allows us to pay cast members and musicians and everyone involved with the production.

This is a move we’ve been wanting to make for a while, but we waited until we were sure we could provide real value to anyone who chose to support us.

Tell Us About That Sweet, Sweet Bonus Content!!

Right now we have a single tier in The Dice Pool and it’s just $5/month.

For your support we will give you a whole bunch of good stuff:

A monthly bonus actual play one-shot with Brian Flaherty, Elliot Davis, Shenuque Tissera, and Abby Hepworth (and sometimes a guest or two)
Extended talkbacks for My First Dungeon
Access to exclusive channels on the Many Sided Media Discord server where you can help us pick what games we run
Sporadic fun treats and BTS content whenever we’re feeling spicy

Let’s Celebrate!

To celebrate the launch of our Patreon, we decided July was a perfect month to spend a little bit of extra time cooling off in The Dice Pool, so we PACKED this month with bonus content. This month you’ll get:

Scurry! Actual Play Two-Shot
Scurry! Talkback
Extended Good Society Talkback
Icarus Actual Play One-Shot

That’s a bonus EVERY SINGLE WEEK in July!

Help Build This Community

We want this Patreon to be a space that is built for its patrons and provides them with real value each and every month. So if you like the things we make, want to help us keep making them better, and are excited to get a little bit extra every month, you should head on over to patreon.com/myfirstdungeonpod and jump into The Dice Pool (splash!).

Don’t Forget Your Coin

Project ECCO is now available digitally!

You can officially grab your copy of Project ECCO, my solo time travel game that will take you across the pages of a planner. Grab yours HERE!

A Thrill and a Relief

It’s exciting to release this game, but there is also an element of relief. In these final few weeks of finishing touches I started to feel dread around putting the game out into the world. I wanted to continue perfecting every page with Brian in the comfortable privacy of a shared google drive folder. I didn’t feel ready to let everyone else see it. Not yet.

Then, last Thursday, I was suddenly ready.

It was a gut feeling and I knew I needed to jump on that momentum.

Share this with someone who is working on a game and needs to know that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.

I had originally planned to do separate releases for backers and the wider public, hoping to coordinate more press/marketing for a wide release. In the end, I decided to combine them for a few reasons:

The digital fulfillment through itch.io download keys would help the game with that initial push. Unfortunately, we are all at the whims of promotional algorithms and this was, in part, a decision in favor of playing the itch.io algorithm*.
7/2 @ 12pm is the exact midpoint of the year! Once I realized this, I was hooked on the idea of timing release with that moment. Players could jump forward or backwards, with an even wilderness of time to explore on either side. This excitement had a lot to do with the momentum I described above but, in the end, I ran towards release mostly because of…
Emotional/Mental bandwidth! I knew I would feel better taking the opportunity to do both of these releases at once. After all, I’ve still got physical fulfillment and release to complete. This is a harrowing journey through the mountains of paper weight, packing boxes, spreadsheets, formatting–eh, I mean. A marathon… Yeah, a marathon. Not a sprint.

*At time of writing, we are #2 in Popular Physical Games on Itch. Play those algorithms!

What I Learned

If there’s any advice/learning I would share on the heels of these past few days, it would be this: Don’t underestimate the last mile of the release marathon.

Here are a few things that took much longer than I anticipated:

Building the itch page (Background image sizing on itch is my white whale)
Gathering all of the final digital files (Oh, did you remember to make the digital character sheet fillable? Shit.)
Generating and sending itch download keys for backers (Gmail can’t do mail merge. Did you know that? You do now!)

Every piece of the process takes a bit longer than you estimate. Give yourself more than a few days before deciding on a release date.

Time to Celebrate

All this to say, Project ECCO is out and I couldn’t be more proud of the final product!.

Many kind words have come in from peers and players alike (I owe a great deal to the absolutely kickass layout Brian did for this). It means so much that people are downloading, reading, and playing the game already.

If you pick up Project ECCO and want to share stories from your play-through, or ask me questions, we’ve got a dedicated channel in the Many Sided Media Discord.

I’ve said this before, but celebrate your wins and give yourself a break when you reach a big milestone like this. I’m off to do just that.

UPCOMING SCHEDULE

7/7 - Good Society Actual Play (Act 2)

7/14 - Good Society Cast Talkback*

*But if you subscribe to our Patreon you can hear an EXTENDED version of the talk back TWO DAYS EARLY!