Man, ever work on something that never seemed to end? Or just when you think you’ve finished something you find that there is more to do…or there’s a bug in the program you wrote but you can’t find the mistake in 10,000 lines of commands? That is precisely what life has been like for 12 to Midnight of late with Weekend Warriors. It’s a GREAT game! Every play-test was fun and everyone has had nothing but awesome comments in relation to it. Unfortunately, it has also seemed to be snakebitten. Every time we think all the problems have been ironed out, we find a new wrinkle. Let me explain…
Originally we designed the adventure to have a few large maps, but as the design grew, so did the maps. We have one of the best map men in the business and he was on a roll. Craig (map man) and Jerry (writer) combined to create 57 maps for the one-shot convention game, Weekend Warriors. We debated and discussed (and cussed) the pros and cons of releasing such an adventure with so many maps. We wanted to release WW before Halloween, but all the extras caused a couple of weeks of delay. We are dedicated to releasing only the best, high quality PDFs and we decided we would rather be late than skimp on quality. As President of 12 to Midnight, that is certainly my mantra.
With this in mind, we decided it would be cool to make more use of the technology available to us. With so many maps, we decided to provide location linking. The idea was that a GM using a computer could click on a location in the adventure and the proper map would pop up. I thought this was an awesome idea for giving you more bang for your buck. It turned out great, but it put yet another speedbump in reaching our delivery date.
We finally released the d20 version on RPG Now. After approximately ten sales, we became aware of a couple of folks who had experienced difficulty opening the map file. We sent out a blanket email statement to all buyers asking if they had experienced any problems opening the map file. Those few who did were able to download and open the files directly from us without incident. While happy we could solve the problems our customers were facing, we were perplexed that only a few customers were experiencing the problem and only when downloading the map file from RPG Now. The RPG Now staff renamed the zip file and suddenly the problem was solved. Yeah, that’s what I said…”OooooooK!”
So we worked for a few weeks converting to the Savage Worlds system (which I highly recommend!), then doing a new layout, map linking, and creating a new printer friendly version. As soon as it was all done, we sent it to RPG Now and were happy to finally have finished it. We have lots of work to do on Bloodlines (our next HUGE release), and were all eager to get back to it. After a couple of days I was again informed of a few customers having difficulties with the map file, this time with the Savage Worlds version. We contacted RPG Now, who told us they were looking into it. We hoped that by simply renaming the map file, as we had done with the d20 version, the problem would be solved. Unfortunately, the heavens didn’t line up as we hoped.
At least 4 to 5 customers experienced difficulty with the maps. Again, we sent out a blanket email and helped everyone who responded by offering a direct download of the map files from our site. Everyone who did so had no problem opening it. How weird! Our file is fine. It’s the same file we sent to RPG Now, but for some reason a few folks couldn’t open that one. I know there are thousands of you techies out there who might know what the problem is, but I’ll be honest…I don’t! The good people at RPG Now were just as confused, as they finally withdrew WW:SW from sale. So, we had a company meeting by phone. The question was: “What do we do about Weekend Warriors?†Here is what was decided:
We decided to cancel the US Army Base Generic Map Pack we planned to release, as obviously such a large number of map files were causing problems with RPG Now. We also needed to find a solution to the map file problem. The solution was to remove the map files from RPG Now and release the adventure with a few basic maps in one file. The remaining 55 or so maps we decided to make free downloads from our website! That’s right folks. We are giving them away! Come and get it! I’ll bet no other company has given away that many quality maps! Whose yer’ Daddy? That’s right! Ultimately we want the game to be played and we don’t want people to have any problems with our products. Hopefully, some folks will see the quality of our maps and then go buy a copy of the game itself. The only drawback is we are asking folks to buy the game and to get the free download from our website. Kinda crappy that you have to go to two separate places to get the full monty, but it’s the best solution we could come up with. So, that’s the deal with Weekend Warriors. I hope you find the game enjoyable. It was a blast to create and play, but has been a booger in regards to selling. Please, check it out and let us know what you think.
Thanks for your support. It really means a lot to us.
Ed Wetterman
President of 12 to Midnight, Inc.
