I also toyed with calling this column "Revenge of the Firefly," but I'm not sure just who or what I'm supposed to be avenging.

Hi there! A few years back, I wrote a series of RPGnet columns called Behind the Curtain talking about founding Firefly Games and the production of our first game, Monster Island. A lot has changed since the last column appeared in September 2002, and it seems like a good time to bring things up to date.

The short version – we had a couple of rocky years, and then a couple of better years, even as things got worse for the rest of the industry, and now we are eagerly awaiting the debut of Faery's Tale – also our first roleplaying game. The early response from fans and industry peers has been extremely positive, so the PDF release this week and print release at GenCon Indy ought to make quite a splash.

Now, the details.

When last we chatted in 2002, I'd released Monster Island and had the first expansion, or sequel as I called it, Escape from Monster Island, heading to release.

Then one of the freelancers working on Escape, well, escaped. The deadline passed with no turnover of work, no warning, and no sign of the freelancer.

The expansion had been set for a September 2002 release, but as a result of having to find someone new to do the work, then giving the person time to do it, Escape didn't come out until early 2003. Aside from the aggravation of having to replace someone at the last minute and delay a product, this slip in release dates had a few other effects. First, it diminished the momentum of the Monster Island product line – by the time the expansion came out, some folks had already gotten tired of playing the basic game and put it aside. Second, it cost Firefly Games some credibility with retailers and distributors, who at the time would place pre-orders for games based on the release dates. Miss too many release dates, and folks stopped pre-ordering, since they figured you didn't really mean it anyway. (This paradigm has changed entirely in the past couple of years – now almost no one pre-orders regardless of your credibility). Finally, the release slipped from the promising pre-Christmas ordering window to the dead after-Christmas ordering window.

I could have delayed Escape even longer, until the once-again-promising summer con season, but that would only exacerbate the first and second problems. Sometimes you have to just do the best you can and go on to the next project.

Which, for Firefly Games, happened to be CyborGladiators. Now, there's a story.

Before I go into the various problems with CyborGladiators, let me first say that I think it's a great game. Critics and fans give it high marks, and almost everyone with whom I've played the game seems to enjoy it. In fact, I like the game so much I'm writing a second edition whenever I have a few minutes to spare. (Perhaps unwisely, but I'm having a ball working on it).

Also, everything I'm going to talk about here is my own fault. David Pulver, Marc A. Vezina, Scott Bennie, Richard Cox, Bart Willard, Dan Zillion, and everyone else who worked on CyborGladiators did a great job. The flaws in the concept and publishing process are entirely my doing.

CyborGladiators, for those of you whom I can tell by my sales receipts are unfamiliar with it, is a game of futuristic arena combat. You play a human or one of three alien races captured by a decadent alien empire and turned into cyborgs to battle for their amusement. It uses the same basic rules as Monster Island.

Along with 30+ cybernetic implants and armaments ranging from chainsaws to laser pistols, CyborGladiators offers all sorts of arena hazards, like, say, flamethrowers, to liven things up. It's kind of like a tabletop video game of what I call cheerful brutality. There's even a rule for using dismembered limbs as clubs.

After spending much of 2003 in production hell, CyborGladiators released in early 2004 – right into a disastrous industry-wide sales slump.

My pre-orders were so bad – in today's market, they'd be average or even good, but back then they came as quite a shock – that I cut my print run to the point where I'd only turn a profit if the entire run sold. And then, well, it didn't. Not even close. Everyone who does buy the game seems to like it a lot, but distribution and direct sales on CyborGladiators in print are just dismal.

So, where did I go wrong? Two big things. First, the simple one. I gave the same freelancer who'd burned me on Escape from Monster Island a second chance. Yeah, me am big dummy. But he'd had a personal crisis, and I really did want to work with him. The resulting delay when he vanished for the second, and final, time had a lot to do with the side trip to production hell.

Aside from the problems I mentioned earlier with missing release dates, this also created one gigantic problem for me – one that nearly killed the company. I'd spent a fair amount of money promoting CyborGladiators. Not just the kind of guerrila marketing I'd done with Monster Island, but actually buying magazine ads and so forth. I'm not going to pretend I invested thousands of dollars in it – maybe a thousand. Still, it took pretty much all my operating cash. And then, at the end of the marketing campaign, I had no game to sell people because of the production problems. Not only had I spent a good chunk of my budget promoting a whole lot of nothing, until CyborGladiators actually did come out, I had no way to replenish my operating funds beyond the slow but steady direct orders on Monster Island. Ouch.

The tougher one – I learned the wrong lesson from Monster Island and backed a bad horse. People rave about the rules of Monster Island, and I mistook that to mean they might be interested in the same rules in a different genre.

Wrong. People like the rules, but they buy the game because they love giant monster movies. The selling point isn't the rules, it's the genre. Who loves cyborgs fighting in deadly futuristic arenas? Well, besides me and a few others, not too many people, it seems.

Here's the big lesson: You can't tap genres that don't exist. You can twist, mix, or deconstruct genres – even fold, spindle, or mutilate them, if you like. But, bottom line, folks want to play games about things in which they already are interested. If you pick a fringe genre for your game, barring some wild fluke, you're going to get fringe sales.

Someone's going to say, but what about indie games? They often are about very offbeat genres, like Mormon vigilantes in the Old West, and yet some still sell well. Yes, but does Dogs in the Vineyard sell because people are itching to play Mormon vigilantes in the Old West, or because it has some amazing game design behind it? The real market for indie games isn't people who like sorcerers or vigilantes or assistants to mad scientists – it's people who enjoy theorizing, experimenting, and talking about game design. (Nothing pejorative there. I write games about giant monsters and cyborgs – who am I to make fun of someone else's niche? Besides, I do a lot of thinking about game design, too, as it happens.)

Now, it took me awhile to learn this lesson. I even produced a sourcebook for CyborGladiators, called Invincible, in hopes of jolting some life into the line. Just to show that I'm not completely mad, I will point out that I did scale my expenses on that project way, way back – writing nearly all of it myself, buying minimal artwork, and releasing it on PDF and a small print-on-demand run for GenCon Indy 2005. And, as I say, I'm working on a second edition, but I'm going to keep an even tighter rein on costs and I'm not going to count on it selling strongly. Mostly, it's something I'm doing because I still think it's a cool game, I enjoy working on it, and it's a good, low-risk way to try out some ideas for a second edition of Monster Island.

It took me, and Firefly Games, a painfully long time to recover from CyborGladiators. I had a lot of debts to pay, and very little sales money coming in. I couldn't even afford a traditional print run to do a new product in hopes of bringing in some new sales revenue – besides, doing new products in hopes of paying off the debts on your last product is a classic death spiral for gaming companies.

So Firefly Games hunkered down to ride out the storm, and I spent the downtime coming up with a new strategy for a changed marketplace.

The tumult in the hobby game industry had kicked our butts. It was time to return the favor.

But that's another column. See you in two weeks.