A Chat With Wet Ink Games

Game design is a challenging undertaking that takes a lot of hard work, networking, and no small amount of luck. It also takes a love of games. We checked out Wet Ink Games at GenCon and got a chance to talk with them some at NerdLouvia and was very excited that they agree to share with us their story as well as some insight into the gaming industry. Friendship that combines with game crafting is what led to the inception of Wet Ink Games. Read on to learn more.

GeekPost: How did Wet Ink Games get started? Tell us a bit about the history of the company and its founders.

W.I.G.: Wet Ink Games was started, officially, in 2015 when Brandon Aten and I, Matthew Orr, launched our first crowdfunding campaign.

We are both long-term nerds who have been playing roleplaying games together since middle school when I found out Brandon had a roleplaying ,game about Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. As we came up in the nerdosphere, we both worked as freelance writers for established companies like Palladium Books and Third Eye Games. As early as 2011 we had an idea which didn’t seem like anyone else would want to publish, plus we wanted to start working for ourselves. Wild Skies is an alternate history version of the 1930s with big, gritty technology like flying battleships and lots of mercenaries, plus everyone is a humanoid animal. That project was funded with a lot of help from our friends and family, but we made enough fans that we’ve been able to keep publishing books. Never Going Home came out in 2019, and that’s our flagship game right now. It was inspired by the art of Charlie Ferguson-Avery and is set during the First World War where “Others” from beyond the Veil have been corrupting the soldiers. There’s evil magic and gross mutations and you play as soldiers who are basically trapped in the horrors of war. Since then, we’ve grown from a writing team into a proper publisher. We’ve worked with industry powerhouses like Banana Chan, Sen-Foong Lim, Doug Levandowski, Bridgett Jeffries and John D. Kennedy. We’ve established ourselves as publishers of horror games, games set in specific historical moments, and we are branching out into “colorful and fun” games like Heckin’ Good Doggos, a game of “dogs doing dog stuff”, which came out this past fall.

GeekPost: Tell us about some of the different games Wet Ink Games has produced.

W.I.G.: Never Going Home is set in a horror version of the First World War. In addition to gas and shells and mud there are cultists, zombies, and things with tentacles. You have a hand of cards, and you can play those cards for in-game bonuses, but they represent your memories so every time you discard, you describe what part of yourself you losing to corruption. The game line has seven books currently with more coming in 2023. The core book along with some dice and playing cards is all you need to play the game. In addition, we have books which add more monsters, more magic, and more Missions. Then we have our Campaign Dossier series. Each focus on a single year of the war and gives some new setting rules and six connected Missions which tell a longer story in a specific theater. Currently we have 1915 at Gallipoli, 1916 on the Russian front, and 1917 in a U-boat. We will soon be adding a 1914 Dossier set in the Balkans and a 1918 book about the American involvement in the war.

Into the Cess and Citadel, published in collaboration with Feral Indie Studios, is fulfilling now so it will be available to the general public very soon. This is the second in a series of system agnostic source books created by Charlie Ferguson-Avery and Alex Coggon. Cess and Citadel gives you everything you need to make and explore a terrifying fantasy city. There are all sorts of monsters from the illuminated archivist to the cobblestone crab. There are rules to build webs of influence between the rival factions of the city. You can go “dungeon delving” in the tower mansions of the nobility or explore the sewers. It is simply stuffed with art by Alex and Charlie. It might be our most gorgeous publication yet.

Heckin’ Good Doggos is a roleplaying game of dogs doing dog stuff. You play as a regular four-legged dog and you pal around your neighborhood with your pack chasing squirrels, negotiating with raccoons, sniffing out what happened to your lost stuffies and other important dog things like that. It’s a very low stakes game. It’s designed to be all ages and very accessible. There isn’t combat as in typical RPGs, instead conflicts can be solved by playing enough cards of the right type – either cutes (hearts), friends (spades), paws (clubs), or teeth (diamonds).

GeekPost: If someone wanted to create a game, what advice would you give them?

W.I.G.: The standard advice Matt gives is to start small so you can finish. You won’t finish every design you begin, but if your first project is a 350-page political thriller RPG with a rondel-based character sheet, you’re not likely to ever finish. One-page games are still games! Visit the website for 200 Word RPG Challenge and see how much you can do with only 200 words. Make a game on your lunch break with cut-up note cards. Once you complete a few small designs, if you still like it you can move on to bigger projects. We always say, “ideas are easy, execution is hard.” If you can execute an idea at any scale, congratulations, now you are a game designer. 

If you are looking to go beyond note cards at lunch, it’s good to develop a sense of where in the industry you want to be. Do you want to make community content (read “free”) for games which already exist? Great, write five pages about different fabulous buckets you can find in the world’s most popular roleplaying game and watch the likes on your post roll in. Do you want to make up new rules for dice? Great! You can sell your design to other people who will publish it. Do you want to make a whole game with proper art and layout and publish it? Also, great! There’s always room for more creators in the indie publishing scene. It takes more skills – or at least different skills – at every stage of your development as a designer. Plus, you don’t have to work at only one scale all the time. We still write for other people’s games even though we are also publishers.

Lastly, the games industry is relatively small. It’s so helpful to meet other people. It’s one thing to look at a writing sample. It’s another thing to chat with a person about what excites them. Even a few words at a convention or through an internet community builds a connection that people remember when they think about who they want to work with. Even if I don’t have work for you, I can recommend you to the next person who asks me if I know someone looking to work.

GeekPost: Wet Ink Games has been successful on Kickstarter so far, what advice would you give to someone wanting to Kickstart a new game?

W.I.G.: Our number one piece of advice we give is to ask for enough to make the game you want. A lot of people ask for (for example) $400 when they know they need $4000. Don’t do that. Maybe you’ll reach your goal in one day and maybe you will continue that momentum. But if you are at 500% of your ask, but you still can’t afford the book, you haven’t done yourself any favors. We have found if you are clear about what the money is for and you can show off some of the art you’re buying and the printing you want, and you have a good track record of delivering, you’ll get to the amount you need. We would rather get to 101% on the last day and then make the game like we want it to be, than have that 500% number and still be unhappy with the finished game.

Now, obviously, you must do all your research and planning to come up with your asking price. Have you talked to printing companies to find out how many you need to print to make it worthwhile to print the book at scale? How many backers at the regular level will you need to get to that number? Is that number realistic based on how much of a following you already have? If not, how will you inform those additional people about your project? Is there a premium version for fans and collectors that can help support the cost of the project? How much extra will that cost? Put everything into the budget: art, writing, printing, shipping, advertising, pay yourself a little bit for your own time as well, remember that all crowdfunding platforms take their cut too. That’s your price to take to crowdfunding. If it’s not realistic, you need to make some different plans before you launch. By “different plans” we don’t mean try to negotiate your artists’ prices down! Do some additional pre-promotion or consider changing the size of the print run.

GeekPost: Do you consider yourselves geeks, and what does that mean to you?

W.I.G.: Matt is more comfortable with the term “nerd”. To him, that means someone who is interested in all that pop culture stuff that used to be for “outsiders” – comics, sci-fi movies, fantasy novels, and the like. That’s all so much more mainstream than it used to be, so maybe “nerd” means less than it used to. Nerdy culture is mostly just popular culture now. Geek feels more like a term for anyone obsessed with anything – a deep interest and knowledge. Someone can be a geek about cars or fly fishing or fantasy football or whatever. The only things I really “geek out” about are Tolkien’s lesser-known work and the old Aliens comics – which, to me, are nerdy topics anyway. So, I call myself a nerd.

To Matt’s point, Brandon also considers himself a pretty big nerd. Everything from Board Games, Card Games, RPGs, comics, clutter up various corners of his basement. Learning about how other designers tackle mechanics we’ve all seen before is something that really intrigues me. I love seeing a new take on a pretty standard mechanism and really taking the design to another level. When that clicks with the theme of the game to make a game more immersive, it’s even better.

The Geek Post would like to thank the crew of Wet Ink Games for taking the time to allow us all to get to know more about their fantastic company. Make sure to take some time to check them out and remember to support small game companies any time you can!