Munchkin Shakespeare: In Medias Res
Andrew Hackard, Munchkin Line Editor
The Munchkin Shakespeare Kickstarter project ended almost three weeks ago, with 5,280 backers pledging a smidge over $295,100. (Shakespeare trivia: he was the first writer to use the term “smidge” as a synonym for nine dollars.)
Since that time, we’ve been working diligently to make the darn thing. Darn things, really, since by the end of the project we had committed to making Munchkin Shakespeare Deluxe, the Kickstarter-exclusive expansion Munchkin Shakespeare: Limited Engagement, the Munchkin Shakespeare Staged Demo booster pack, and an assortment of other items including blank cards, pawns, dice, even a coloring book (which isn’t even that crazy, considering our Munchkin Alphabet Coloring Book). It’s been a very busy month, and we wanted to give y’all an update (you can find previous Medium Shakespeare articles here and here).
Words, Words, Words
Writing the text for about 250 cards is roughly 60% harder than just writing for a single core Munchkin game. However, as we generated dozens of card ideas, then hundreds, the hard part became choosing among the cards we loved to put into the various sets. Usually, we end up with a few titles or effects or funny art suggestions that just don’t fit. Usually. With all of Shakespeare to draw from, though, “a few” turned into “lots.” In fact, we have almost enough unused ideas to make a second expansion. If Shakespeare does well, who knows what might happen?
The first-draft text for all the cards was completed at the end of February and has gone to our talented layout team. (Minus a couple of cards that we replaced late in the process — one on Tuesday, in fact. This is normal for Munchkin development.) At that time, we also sent the last illustration specifications, the “art specs,” to our primary artist, John Kovalic, and our guest artist on the Staged Demo and stand-alone Shakespeare Kill-O-Meter, Lar deSouza.
Getting all the cards done was an important milestone, but by no means the end of the writing on this project. We had rules and cover copy and ad text to get written as well. All the interior text is written and being laid out now and we’re just about done with the rest. Special thanks to our marketing team for their help on the ads and covers.
A Picture is Worth 1,000 Gold Pieces
As of this writing, John has illustrated over 5,500 Munchkin cards. This occasionally lets us use some shorthand, such as John’s most favorite art note: “You know what to do here.”
But for Munchkin Shakespeare, we wanted to make sure we were honoring the Bard’s prose, so many of the art specifications were more detailed than usual. Some even included cites to the source text! Don’t get me wrong, we still had lots of very stupid jokes — and John supplied plenty of humor we didn’t expect in his art, as is his wont. We didn’t forget that this is a Munchkin game.
As a consequence, John was able to work more quickly than usual, since we weren’t asking for our usual unreasonable quota of mind-reading, and accordingly we’re on track to have all of his art in hand and ready to color by the end of this week. This isn’t the most, um, ambitious schedule we’ve ever given John (ask him about Munchkin Oz at a signing), but it was up there. It was also the single largest art order we’ve ever given him, over 240 distinct illustrations; the previous record-holder was Munchkin Apocalypse, with around 180, and he had more time on that one.
What I’m trying to say is that John hit a grand slam this time. Thanks!
I should also mention Lar deSouza and his guest work. We asked him to illustrate the cards for our Staged Demo booster (similar to Munchkin Marked for Death) and Kill-O-Meter, and as we expected he did a fantastic, funny job. Getting to work with such talented people is absolutely one of my favorite parts of the Munchkin development process!
What Now?
Last weekend, Kickstarter released the pledged money (minus their cut). We’re working on setting up the BackerKit survey so all the backers can tell us what add-ons they requested, give us their addresses, and pay shipping fees for the items they’re receiving. I expect this to go live very soon; watch your email!
This survey is important because it will give us the final count of pledged games and add-ons that we’ll use to create our print orders — we don’t want to print too many and we definitely don’t want to print too few!
While we’re collecting this information, we’ll be doing the final work on all the Shakespeare projects. All of them will go to prepress when they are completed and approved internally. In prepress, someone who hasn’t been involved with the project to date (currently, Miranda Horner for most of our projects) goes through a series of checklists, looking for bad text flow, missing art, and a bunch of esoteric stuff too nitpicky to get into here. It’s tedious, demanding, and utterly vital, so we’re lucky to have Miranda on the job. She’s very good at it.
When Miranda believes the files are ready, we will schedule a premortem meeting. Despite the ominous name, it’s actually a very good process that we instituted as standard procedure a couple of years ago. (Steve wrote a Daily Illuminator post about it at the time, if you’re curious.) All the stakeholders in a project — line editor, production manager, Miranda, Steve, and a rotating cast of other people — get together in our conference room with sheaves of printouts and go through them, together, looking for problems and places to make the things better. And we find them, even at this late stage, because we’re all perfectionists. (We also overlook things, even with all our eyes on the files. Errare humanum. We learn and improve.) Often, this is the first time many people have seen the complete game, so there’s a real positive sense of accomplishment that makes these meetings fun even as we are picking things apart one last time.
Munchkin Shakespeare presents extra challenges. Ideally, we would like to have one premortem to go over all nine games and accessories resulting from the Kickstarter. That will be a long meeting, probably with several breaks to recharge so we don’t miss problems because of mental and physical fatigue, so figure an entire work day when it’s all said and done. Scheduling that will be a challenge in and around all the other work we’re doing right now, so we may end up doing this on a couple of afternoons instead. Also, all of the prepress work has to go through Miranda, who is talented but only one person; we may have to space things out so she doesn’t combust spontaneously.
All that said, our goal is to have all the work done about the time the BackerKit survey closes in mid-April. If everything comes together, we’ll know how many games to order at the same time we’re satisfied that the games are ready to go to print. Assuming that happens, we’ll be on track to deliver backers’ rewards in September, as we projected when we launched the Munchkin Shakespeare Kickstarter.
And then we all get to take a short nap before the next big challenge comes along. To sleep, perchance to dream . . .
Andrew Hackard is the Munchkin Line Editor. He wants to thank all his colleagues at Steve Jackson Games who worked tirelessly on all phases of the Shakespeare überproject and had to put up with him the whole time. Go, team!
