Every game I've ever played has a suggested age range, e.g., 5+ years old.
Is this good for kids?
Making a Physical Product
21–30 of 134 posts
Re: Making a Physical Product
#22How did you find the company to make the packaging?
Re: Making a Physical Product
#23Have you considered selling these in Target or Walmart, or perhaps specialty stores?
Re: Making a Physical Product
#24"I spent a few hours hacking together a little rails app which would play out 100,000 rolls in a few seconds and tell me the chances of everything coming up. " Why did the author write a rails app to run statistical experiments on what are easy to calculate probabilities? It seems that if you want to make a probability based game you ought to have at least a working knowledge of the basics.
The rules require knowledge of the dice' relative orientations in meatspace and I believe subsequent rolls in a turn exhibit memory (dice are not equivalent), which makes the conditional probabilities substantially more difficult than a Monte Carlo simulation.
Re: Making a Physical Product
#25"I spent a few hours hacking together a little rails app which would play out 100,000 rolls in a few seconds and tell me the chances of everything coming up. " Why did the author write a rails app to run statistical experiments on what are easy to calculate probabilities? It seems that if you want to make a probability based game you ought to have at least a working knowledge of the basics.
Maybe the rules are too complex to work out the probabilities directly. For example, landing on each property in Monopoly. The real question is why write a rails app? How does a web application framework help you roll dice?
I can forgive that - I often accidentally say 'rails' when I mean ruby as well.
Re: Making a Physical Product
#26It's eye-opening to see a breakdown of the process behind conceiving, designing, and manufacturing a product. I think that for many, this process is hidden behind smoke and mirrors, but Jon made it appear doable and worthwhile.
It's also empowering to know that he did this with ~$5000 USD. I have no doubt that small-scale production like this would have been prohibitively difficult (read: annoying/costly) even five years ago.
Re: Making a Physical Product
#27Have you considered selling these in Target or Walmart, or perhaps specialty stores?
Hobbyist stores will probably require keystoning: if the retail price is $20 then the maximum wholesale price they can pay is $10. Note the margins on the product, now wince.
Also, arranging distribution with them is very problematic. (Source: I had delusions of running one, once.)
Re: Making a Physical Product
#28Would love to see a follow-up on what you actually try to do in terms of marketing and distribution - as I'm finishing up my first 7-song album, I'm painfully aware that even after all the songwriting, recording, mixing, mastering, and product design, "release day" means that you are still only half done.
Re: Making a Physical Product
#29"I spent a few hours hacking together a little rails app which would play out 100,000 rolls in a few seconds and tell me the chances of everything coming up. " Why did the author write a rails app to run statistical experiments on what are easy to calculate probabilities? It seems that if you want to make a probability based game you ought to have at least a working knowledge of the basics.
The rules require knowledge of the dice' relative orientations in meatspace and I believe subsequent rolls in a turn exhibit memory (dice are not equivalent), which makes the conditional probabilities substantially more difficult than a Monte Carlo simulation.
Unless the script simulated dice orientation, I don't think it would help any there. Having read the rules of the game I think there's still a pretty good closed-form solution, minus the dice orientation stuff, that wouldn't take a lot of work to find.
Or better yet you could write a script to compute exact probabilities!
Re: Making a Physical Product
#30Did anyone come across some good articles on dealing with suppliers on alibaba (test-runs, QA, IP, shipping, customs, etc.)?
Use a throwaway account when dealing on Alibaba your email is either sold or leaked and you will receive a thousand scam offers per second after sending an inquiry to a vendor.
I did manage to do a test run of 100 custom cellphones there though and it worked out fine. I had a friend who speaks Mandarin actually call the place directly though and didn't deal through Alibaba