logo

Behind the Scenes 2022: Recap + What’s Next

Alright, y’all. Another year’s closing out and in the grand and vaunted tradition–that we just made up last year–we’re digging through our stats to deliver unto you in this festive holiday season all of the firm figures on the state of A Couple of Drakes. Overall it was a busy year with a lot of hitches and changes and retooling and labor and things that were not explicitly related to writing weird games fast, but we’ll get into that. Let’s dig into the actual numbers, and then we can dicker further about what the future holds, square?

A Couple of Drakes 2022 Recap

Game Releases: Two (and a half).
No God’s Country and Disaster/WING (Also the expanded, extended, lavishly illustrated and Itchfunded version of Skyworthy).

Supplement and Pamphlet Game Releases: Two.
HORDE (The second HEDGE Expansion), and The Court of Blades Companion Zine.

Fandom Releases: Two.
The Hour of Smoke (Unofficial Smugglers Score Pack for Blades in the Dark), and Deeper We Go (An alternate character sheet and advancement system for Down We Go)

Pages Written: 147 (published), 284 (awaiting publication)

Words Written: +/- 107, 750

Podcast Appearances: 2
Third Floor Wars, Insider Insights (Craig let us come back?)
The City that Never Dies (Clever Corvids) Actual Play for Court of Blades

Stream Appearances: 4
Third Floor Wars, Actual Play for Desperation by Bully Pulpit Games
Holy Happy Hour Batman, talking TTRPGs and publishing
Balsamic Games playing Children of Midnight
Plus One Exp, Actual Play for Dead Belt

Community Copies Given Out: 546

Charity Copies Donated: 39, 466 (if you bought a charity bundle on Itch.io this year, you probably have First Dig 2 Graves or the Dead Belt ashcan)

Project Page Views: 51,927

Project Downloads: 10,444

Reviews Received: 173

Distance Moved: 1569 mi (2525.06 km)

Printers Bought: 4

Zines Printed in our Printshop: 886

Total Amount of Postage Bought: $9,788.49

Fun Facts:

  • Our most popular One-Page Score for Blades in the Dark continues to be The Gallowman’s Daughter which continues makes Shawn sing the shanty for the remainder of the day anytime he sees someone download it.
  • Deeper We Go was our biggest disappointment of the year. We think Down We Go is exceptionally cool, and wanted to take a crack at making a more modular character builder for the game. It’s neat, and it works, but 50 of the original 100 community copies remain and no one’s taking me up on my offer to run it for them…yet.
  • No God’s Country was the hardest project to write this year. It turns out mechanizing your anger and frustration about the political climate in a way that’s not just abjectly bleak and impossible to enjoy is a lot harder than it sounds. There’s neat tech in that early ashcan that we’ll probably be revisiting to clean and expand upon.
  • DISASTER/WING was the easiest project to write this year. The bones went down in about an hour and a half, because the changes from DISASTER/PEACE were largely reframing, reworking, and naturally apparent. The fiction and bestiary took a while to get right, but that’s nothing new for us.
  • Our Witch, a game of community building, potion crafting, and wilderness exploration, working on a rejiggered Dead Belt engine is the work in progress that got closest to completion before being shelved this year. We’re still working on the tech for prompts to keep it from feeling samey in the long-run. It’ll get there. The potion system’s too cool to lose.
  • Our most “haunted” project continues to be Court of Blades. Fulfillment has proven to be a process that just never ends. The post office hates us despite our bribes of coffee and donuts. We are slowly eating the elephant despite repeated personal tragedies, and these books will eventually get out of our house.
  • Our Patreon Pitchtober event yielded no less than 7 game pitches that we’ve moved to the “to-do” pile which is both awesome and terrifying.
  • Closing out the year, the Drakes’ “Dev Notes of Doom” doc is old news, having been moved over to a Trello board that we share with our Patrons. We’ve got 14 games in various stages of outlining and development. Also notes on other exciting avenues of content delivery for 2023 and beyond!

We’ve seen a lot of growth and a lot of challenges over the course of the year. Between a cross-country move, plague, and several headaches with printing and distribution, we’ve had our fair share of setbacks. But this year’s also come with its share of cool ideas, awesome opportunities, and great gaming experiences. All in all, perhaps not as wildly productive as we might’ve hoped, but that’ll just make it all the sweeter next year.

The outlook for 2023 is more HEDGE, a couple more Solo Games, and (dare we dream?) a proper DISASTER/SRD as soon as DISASTER/QUEST comes together. And that’s just the parts of the road we can see ahead of us. We also have a YouTube that we desperately need to populate with cool stuff. Navi’s giving TikTok the eyeball. I’ve got a podcast to get back to dropping episodes for.

There’s a lot more Drakes to come, y’all. Thank you for sticking with us, and we’ll see you here after the timeskip.



Comments are closed.