Archives January 2024

It occurred to me that I had yet to post anything on social media in a way to wrap up our 2023 event schedule. I have to admit, working full time, trying to launch Silverwood Wood Designs and attending to my other responsibilities gives me little time to compile my thoughts. Honestly, I have the time, its just something I probably don’t prioritize if I were to be truthful.

For 2023, we ended up attending 26 shows over the course of the year.

In those 26 shows we visited 6 different states (Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Georgia, and Washington DC — I know, technically not a state) not including our home base of Indiana. We did 2 Sci-Fi/Fantasy Themed based shows, 4 general craft style shows, 6 gaming centric shows, 6 Toy and Collectibles shows and 8 comic conventions. The shows ranged from less than a hundred to more than 70,000 in attendance (actually hit both extremes within 1 week).

We had a lot of fun, met some really nice people, saw a lot of great cosplay, and learned quite a few things about what shows work for us and what shows do not. Sadly, almost without exception, toy and collectible shows were our worst performers. So, as you can imagine, we are not planning on returning to any of them in 2024. Oddly enough, our general craft fairs performed better than the toy and collectible shows, for the most part. That’s not to say we didn’t have dudes in the Comic and even the Gaming Conventions, we sure did, Atlanta Comic Con and Frankfort Comic Con, sorry, not coming back. Con on the Cobb, we couldn’t wait to get out of there.

We did a little over 65% of our total sales in the first 6 months of the year, and we saw steadily declining numbers as the year progressed starting in July. What caused this, we’re not sure, but we felt like the shows themselves (with a few exceptions) struggled to met their attendance goals. All the shows we attended that were repeat shows for us in the second half of 2023 had lower attendance except for MakeVention. I believe that show saw a boost in attendance this year and it showed in our sales numbers. While our hopes for the last few shows of 2023 were not met, our overall sales numbers for the year doubled year over year from 2022.

Our last official show of 2023 was on December 10th. Since then, we’ve been enjoying some time off focusing on new product development, planning for the new season, and trying to figure out new ways to excite our followers. With that we turn our eyes to our 2024 season.

We expanded our reach in 2023. For 2024, we are going to continue that search for new and exciting shows to introduce our products and try to cultivate new followers. As of right now, we are planning on adding two or three new states to our schedule this year, Missouri, Pennsylvania and possibly Illinois. With this expansion, however, we are going to try and stay focused our number one market, gaming. Based upon the results of 2023, we have decided to drop outright 10 of the 26 shows we did last year. Our goal for this year will be to still hit 18-20 shows, but hopefully have them be more successful (quality over quantity).

Yes, you saw that right, we have added GenCon to our list for 2024. I received our acceptance letter for the newly implemented Maker’s Market which takes place in the concourse between the main hall and Lucas Oil Stadium. While we were disappointed that we didn’t make it into the main vendor hall this year, this will still be a fantastic opportunity to get exposure to the largest 4 days in gaming.

Missouri we’re planning on heading out to Oz-Con in West Plains in April, and we’re looking at Geekway to the West out in St. Louis in May. For PA, we’ve been accepted at 3 Rivers Con in Pittsburg in June and I’m hoping to catch up with a buddy of mine while were out there. Illinois has numerous gaming opportunities, including one I recently discovered called Heroicon in Decatur. I’m also trying to get into Adepticon up near Chicago, but they are full already for 2024 — so maybe next year.

Booking shows is not the only thing we’ve been working on. My creative consultant and lead illustrator and I have been busy working on several new products. Right now, we’re hoping to introduce them over the course of the first several shows, with the hope of having most of them available for GenCon including the 10th anniversary edition of the Silverwood Chronicles.

So, thanks for checking us out. We’re looking forward to all of the new and exciting shows lined up for 2024, and we hope to see you at one or more of them!

This is really episode 04, but somehow, I lost 03’s post and the corresponding video. If I find it later, I’ll update this.

To recap what has happened since Episode 02, we were very excited that with just some minor repairs, the MPU (main board) booted to the game. This was very exciting as I have been working on a sister game, Williams Firepower, for several months now, and I still do not have the main board functioning.

The excitement was short lived as I inadvertently plugged the solenoid power incorrectly. I’m sure most of you have heard that within every electronic component, there is some magical black smoke that is used to make it work and when the black smoke is released, the components cease to work. Needless to say, I let loose a bunch of magical black smoke from under the playfield. This mistake was due in part to Williams (for some reason) placing the key pin on the connector as one of the last pins, thereby allowing me to shift the connector by one place which sent voltage to places it shouldn’t have gone.

To the best of my knowledge, I either caused the following, or I eventually discovered the following as a result. We continued to blow a fuse whenever the solenoids were plugged in. After several hours of trial and error, I was able to finally discover that the right kicker solenoid was locking on. I removed it from the power, and as a result, I was actually able to boot into a game and play, reasonably well.

More trial and errors finally allowed me to figure out that I had blown a transistor Q10, and at least IC 7, and possibly IC 6 on the driver board. Fortunately, my local electronics store carried those chips and I was able to switch them out. I also discovered that one of the leaf switches for the kicker had basically disintegrated. So, I ordered and replaced it.

Lastly, the sound board has been rebuilt with new caps all around, and I burned new eproms for the Green Flipper ROMS and the Gorgar code choosing to use a single chip.

Next on the agenda will be cleaning and adjusting switches. New rubber bumpers all around, and replacement of lightbulbs. The flippers will also need to be cleaned and possibly rebuilt, we will see once I get them apart.