Makiavelia Online
First of all, I got to apologize for not writing sooner. I've had a blog started elsewhere about a year ago, then I got super busy and didn't get back to writing. What's more, I'm not really marketing oriented: like most creative people, I can easily embark on a creative process, but I have little intuition on how to "sell" the output. So reaching out for public communication requires a serious effort on my part. I hope you can forgive me this.
But hopefully this is going to be the start of sustained outward communication on my part. This past weekend, I began by migrating my previous blog to this site, and though Makiavelia is still the home page, the "news" section leads to this blog. I hope to give some regular updates here, and auto-share to Facebook, etc. also because I want to spend less time on social media. I've cut most of them to focus on production. However, as some of you may know, social-media presence is critical to board game publishing.
This said, for those of you who have not yet been connected, I would like to let you know that Makiavelia is making progress.
I am currently working with an agent, based in the US, who has a number of interesting leads. This means we could potentially find a publisher for Makiavelia for 2021.
Makiavelia is going online! And that's the main message of this post.
Since about a year now, I started working on Bubble, a no-code platform, fiddling with the app to build an online version of Makiavelia. It was first just to test the potential of the platform, but the more I got into it, the more I kept developing. And now we're almost a year ahead and I am nearly done!
As you can notice with the above screencast, it starts looking like something! The design is not quite ready yet, and I focus mostly on making it work, upgrading the design later on.
At the current pace of things, I hope to completing the alpha by mid-november 2020 and release the Makiavelia Online for a closed beta. This means you--early adopters--could also get to be the early online players!
With Makiavelia online, I am definitely not sure how big this can grow--and how far I want it to grow. But it's definitely going to be a good promotion tool, for the agent to continue his work with publishers, and to get new fans on board. It's also going to keep future buyers and perhaps backers (if going through the Kickstarter route) satisfied until they get the physical copy of the game.
Still though, I have a couple of ideas which can be implemented on Makiavelia online, helping to build a community of players, which would otherwise be limited by geographical distancing. Some of the ideas I have in mind are:
Global scoring, where players will get a score that needs to be regularly updated. The top player also gets to be the Emperor / Empress of Makiavelia as long as they keep their monthly score at the top!
Personalization, through creation of character avatar and flags (I have no idea if that's even feasible on the platform I am using, but it's quite exciting to think about it.
All in all, I am quite happy about Makiavelia online--at least as far as the experience of making the digital version goes. I sure hope you guys will also like it.
Anyway, I hope to post more update soon as well as share with you some existing features and game updates. See ya.