While I was using games to teach creative career classes inside the classroom, I simultaneously began using them to teach Bible Studies at University of Houston after school.
The Bible Study I teach is taught all over the world. It takes a very reasonable scientific approach to some of the weirdest miracles, cross-referencing other similar parts of the Bible, and providing proper historical context. I took one of the introductory lessons and turned it into an adventure card game.
A team in Taiwan decided they would like to create a Chinese version. We collaborated to create some prototypes and were able to collect feedback from a variety of university students.
I estimated that the international churches teaching this Bible Study would provide enough of an audience to crowdfund the first printing of the game. But I wasn’t certain, and I had not committed to fully developing and testing the game, so I created some promotional materials and ran a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter to see if there was enough interest.
I raised just enough for the first print and spent the next 3 months working full time on the development of the game. The educational startup I was working for was not able to attract enough students so they reduced my hours from full time to part time. It was during that time that I produced the Bible study game.
I delivered on my promises and provided a satisfying adventure card game to everyone who financially supported the project. Before launching the project I had created a spreadsheet to estimate what the costs would be and I also made some best case and worst case scenario projections. Due to my under-estimating how much international shipping fees would be, it came out closer to my worst-case scenario. I assessed the risk by asking myself, “How much money would I be willing to lose in order to successfully deliver on my first crowd-sourcing project?” I was comfortable losing up to $1,000 if it meant I would get the opportunity to develop a commercial product and satisfyingly deliver it to paying customers. In the end I raised close to $8,000 and I incurred about $9,000 in printing and shipping costs. The long hours of labor would be considered volunteer work done for the sake of learning.
Customers were happy to receive the product, and happy with the production quality, but most of my audience were not board game enthusiasts. For this reason many of them opened the game, and looked at it, but did not invest the time to learn the rules and play the game. It became more of a collector’s item or something that just sat on the shelf until someone who knew the rules would come along and teach everyone how to play. I designed the game to hold up to the standards of board game enthusiasts, and they gave very positive feedback. Everyone was satisfied as far as I could tell, and I learned a lot, so I consider the project a great success.
