The limitations of a solo developer

Hello, everyone, it's been a while since I last wrote one of these, and I thought it would be interesting for you to give you a sneak peek into how I work with Blackoath, and the limitations I have doing so. This is basically an open reply to all those of you who ask me "why isn't X game on Foundry?" or "why aren't you releasing more expansions for X game?"

So as most of you know, Blackoath Entertainment is literally just me. My wife helps me when I have a lot of books to ship, but that's it, the rest of the time it's me dealing with marketing, design, layout, writing, customer service, accounting, everything. This has resulted in me working seven days a week, a minimum of ten hours a day. And before anyone thinks I'm complaining, I'm really not: I'm living the dream. I've spent years working for others on crappy, meaningless jobs, so to be able to do what I love for a living is an absolute privilege, even if it means I must make sacrifices. Furthermore, since the success of Ker Nethalas, the business is doing well, which has allowed me to rely less on Kickstarter and be able to release things directly to retail, something I much more prefer.

Right now I have about 3K Euros monthly I invest back into Blackoath. This is an average, some months I spend less, others, much more (February was particularly expensive, for example, and I spent 6K). This goes mostly into art (you guys know I'm a sucker for good art, and the more Blackoath makes, the more I invest into art and find better artists for my games), but lately I've been relying quite often on Richard Kelly's expertise, who is an incredible RPG author (he's the person behind Over War, and dozens of other games) so that I can produce content faster, and quite honestly, offload aspects of RPG writing that I enjoy less (such as coming up with results for random tables; what can I say, I'm a mechanics and big lore picture guy). This is no secret, though, he's always credited (and paid, of course) for his work, there's no ghost writing here.

Still, despite having some occasional writing help, and having all art done by professional illustrators, it's just me handling everything. So despite what I'd like to do, at the end of the day I need to decide what is the best way to spend my money and time, and that means having to make some tough choices. Like for example, focusing on the games that sell well (not a complain, I fucking love Ker Nethalas and I'm never sick of working on it, it's an obsession), and not spending a large chunk of my limited budget on porting this or that game to this or that VTT platform. Sure, I could hire someone to do it, but since I have no idea about VTTs, that would mean this isn't a one-time payment; no, it would need maintenance and support, otherwise it's just not worth doing. And I can't really afford having someone on the payroll to maintain VTT platforms, I'm really not there yet, I'm afraid.

What's worse is that I can't release content for all my games, as much as I would love to. I have ideas for additional material for basically all my games, and eventually I'm sure I'll get to them, but like I said, I need to focus on what works, and try to run this as a business and not just as a passion project, because otherwise it will not work. Sure, I still do stuff like spending a stupid amount of cash on a project like Machine Gods of the Noxian Expanse just cause I think it's an awesome setting and that it would be great to reward all those of you who support me via this Patreon, fully knowing there's just no way I'd ever recoup what I invested into the game, but when I started working on Blackoath I promised myself that I would only work on things that I enjoy, because turning this into yet another gray corporate job is really not worth it. So while I try to run this like a business, you'll see me making a lot of stupid, passion driven decisions, and I'm fully aware of that. I might repent some day, but so far it's working, you guys seem to enjoy what I put out, and I enjoy working on it, so it's a win-win.

I think this is enough rambling for today, all I wanted to say is this: I'm aware there are a million ways to improve Blackoath and to give better support to my games, but I am limited by budget and time. If Blackoath keeps growing my goal is to hire people so I can slowly but surely expand this and release even more stuff, but I'm taking it really slow, since I'm in no rush. So be patient with me if you think I'm not releasing a promised expansion for this or that game (I'm looking at you, Warlord Ascendant), or if you think that X game would really, really benefit from having Foundry support. Keep supporting my work and eventually I'll get to all that!

Thanks for reading!

-Alex