An Illustrator!
Thank you for "voting" on the game name last month! It was a pretty close vote. I personally like "The Haunting at Bellehaven's End" a bit more, but I'm going with "The Haunting at Cragpoint Manor". The scale was tipped for me when I did Internet searches for copyright/trademark conflicts and found there were a lot of search results for Bellehaven and not much for Cragpoint. I hope using "Cragpoint" will make the game easier to find and market.
After doing some research on how to price my game for retail and be realistic about how many I might sell, I'm cutting the printing and art budget significantly. I'm hoping to be in the $40-45 price range at retail, which means the cost to make the game shouldn't be more than about $10-$12 per unit. That means I'll be doing the manual and box design myself, and maybe even the "kickstarter" video - all of which I was hoping to hire out.
And now on to better news: I'm talking to an artist friend about doing the illustration work for the game and she's started on sketches for the box cover! I don't have anything to show yet, but you can find her work here:
I'm going for a mid-century, hand designed feeling for the game, and I thought her sketching work would be a really good fit for the look I'm going for: https://www.karenlewis.com/sketchbook-from-crete/
Illustration by Karen Lewis
Illustration by Karen Lewis
I think we'll have enough material by the Fall to put together a crowdfunding campaign to attempt to fund the rest of the art and printing.
I still haven't decided how I'm going to distribute it yet, but I need to take this one step at a time.
I'm *still* doing some rule/language/manual refinement. I took it to a friend's house to playtest and one of people had a pretty rough time with die rolls playing as a Spirit. I'm bringing back a mechanic I abandoned (out of the sake of simplicity) to help with this issue.
It also became apparent that I need a "quickstart/one page" sheet for people that just want to start playing (which I assume is most people).