Hi, everyone!

October has been a mixed month for us. We’ve had a number of successes and we’ve had some setbacks. All told, I am quite happy with our outcome and I’m pleased to announce that we are moving along at a steady pace.

TL;DR

• Wins: New Community Champion, Sarah Kilby! Dev community has grown to 30 members
• Challenges: Video production and ongoing community growth remain our top challenges
• Plans: Continue our community growth campaign
• Action items: Join r/mythictable if you haven’t already

Development Progress

We’ve almost finished our very first mock UI video. This month has seen some great progress in this area. A number of our community members have stepped up to help and their contribution has been fantastic. I want to especially thank Edward Austin of Skintag Productions and Jose Bonilla. Their assistance with the audio has been a wonderful surprise. We hope to have something to show off very soon. Stay tuned for that.

Among the features we’re developing, we’ve wanted to build a custom forum. We were extremely lucky to have Dan Eveland join us in the early stages. He has been busy putting together a forum for us using Drupal. So far things are looking good. We’re in the process of centralizing our authentication so we can limit the number of places you will need to log in to use all of our services.

We’ve also managed to do a .NET Core upgrade to version 3 which is important for a number of reasons, not the least of which is security and stability. Staying up to date with software and package releases like this is very important to us and I’d like to thank our community developers for organizing this.

Finally, we’ve been able to rebuild our deployment stage back into our pipeline which had been missing since moving from Skybox to the Open Source project.

All of this work has been done by volunteers that have joined us since the Open Source announcement. I cannot thank them enough and I’m proud to be working with every one of them. If you’re interested in joining us, just reply to this email.

The Numbers

Community Growth continues to be our Critical Number. This has fallen from an average of over 30 a day in September to between 1 and 2 a day in October. Below is a graph of our progress so far.

Chart 1: Newsletter subscriptions over time

Chart 2: Community Growth Trend vs Forecast adjusted for October 2019

Our target is to grow our community (as measured by the number of newsletter subscriptions) by 40 people per day. This will be a hard target to reach, but I’m proud to say that we have the right person for the job now.

Joining us as our Community Champion is Sarah Kilby. Community growth is her primary focus. She will need help. If you’re interested, there are two ways of helping. The first is simply to tell your friends. Let them know how important this is to us. The second is to officially join us and collaborate with our effort and work directly with Sarah. We will need CMs, artists, community leaders and content creators. If you can help in any of these areas, please reply to this email.

Forecast and Trend

The following charts are the same as those reported in previous months, but we are making adjustments to account for our latest discoveries and our forecast and plans have been adapted to accommodate these new realities.

Discoveries:

• Greatly reduced community growth

Adaptation:

• Adjusted for slow community growth and a contractor bill for the animations
• Push the Kickstarter, First Playable Release and Release 0.2 back one month
• Adjusted staffing after Release 0.2 to remain at 1 to minimize loses

Chart 3: Overall forecast vs Trend

As before, the dotted line shows where we need to be and the solid line shows where we are trending. The difference between the two is mainly Community Growth. The red dotted line that begins to spike down around April or May of 2020 accounts for increasing staff for Release 0.2 This staffing increase is delayed in the trending chart and it represents the fact that we need to work slower to account for a lower income.

Here is our October Summary.

• Income: $0
• Expenses: $1,031.10 (Mostly contractor fees for our UI Mockups)
• Balance: -$4,062.39

• Forecasted community size by the end of October: 2394
• Actual community size by the end of October: 1390

• Forecasted Community Growth: 1200/mo
• Adjusted Community Growth: 300/mo

Plans

Very little is changing in our plans so far. Our focus remains to grow the community to a point where it is large enough to support the project. This is and shall remain our Critical Number for the foreseeable future.

With this in mind, we are experimenting with different ways to get our name out there. Sarah will be leading this effort with the support of the entire team. If any of you wish to help, please let me know.

One area that Sarah has already noted that we could use a little improvement is our subreddit. r/mythictable. We have almost 1400 subscribers on our newsletter, but only 40 or so on our subreddit. We are in the process of building a forum, but until then, Reddit will be a great way to engage with everyone. Many of you came from Reddit so it should be easy to get you all to follow us there. We would like to start growing that sub to give everyone a voice.

Thanks for your support and your encouragement. Without it, there would be no Mythic Table.

--Marc
Mythic Table Co-founder and Vision Holder