Some of you have said that they’d prefer Burning Planets to be a physical game, and not need to be printed.
The truth is, I developed a real version of the game before I created the free printable version you know! But for some reasons that I’m going to explain now, I preferred to create that version and advertise it first.
The first reason is that I really believe in Burning Planet’s potential as a game. This means that for me it’s more important that it spreads and get played than it is to earn anything for it. So, this is why I’ve drawn a new set (based on my game testing set, but drawn completely anew) just to give it for free on my site.
The second reason is that to cast in resin the pieces needed for the game, I need a vacuum chamber, and until I know how much the game is going to spread, there is no point in spending a lot of money in a vacuum chamber that I need only for this game.
The third and last reason is that even if I had a vacuum chamber, to get the “accessory objects” needed the only way to get them at a reasonable price to make the game marketable is to buy them in relatively high amounts. This means that the boxes, for example, have to be bought in at least 1000 pieces, and this means (based on estimates I got from facotories’ websites) about 2000€ of investment just for the boxes. This same problem includes the tiles that make the playing surface, that need at least a 200€ to get a decent price, and the manual, that needs another 2000€ to go down to an acceptable price, and the resin too needs to be bought in bulk. All this means that I would need to invest some thousands of euros to be able to sell the game at a reasonable price, and it’s clearly not a reasonable thing to do when it’s just born.
The best thing to do would be a kickstarter campaign to get those funds, it would give me the ability to craft the game and to know that it won’t be a useless investment, because people is showing that they care for the game. But those campaigns need already active communities around to work, otherwise they never get the needed funds in the limited time span allowed for the campaign, and I don’t think right now there are already enough interested people to fund some thousands of euros for this game.
If you wish to help me a bit even though you don’t want to buy the game, I created a button to donate in the bottom of the ABOUT page. You can give just a few bucks and I’ll use them to buy the vacuum chamber when I have enough, any donations will be used for tools and materials, and this project is the first of the list.
I made some pictures to show you how the game’s pieces look. You’ll notice that many of them have bubbles, and that’s the reason why I need the vacuum chamber to cast the resin, because the resin is much thicker than the (melted) plasteline and will make big bubbles that would completely destroy such small items. The last pictures shows you how small is 1cm wide bases for the buildings: the building is sitting on a 1 eurocent coin, and you can see my finger holding the 5 cents coin that towers the buildings, so, you see they’re very small!
