Backer Poll: What Next?
about 7 years ago – Thu, Mar 16, 2017 at 03:26:34 PM

Hello again. Small mid-month update here, hoping for some feedback from you.

Since this month is mostly me waiting on the manufacturer for No Honor Among Thieves, I figured I could spend some time working on another project. I've got a number of things I've been cooking up, but to make sure I'm on the right track I wanted to put up a survey to ask people what they'd be interested in seeing from Carpe Omnis Games.

If you've got a moment, I have a Google Forms survey here. In it is a brief list of projects I've been working on, which I'm hoping you'll rate from 0 (no interest) to 5 (very interested), as well as space for offering your own suggestions. Most of these projects will probably get done eventually, but I've reached a point where I'm pretty far along in more than one of them, and I'm trying to figure out which one I should focus on first. I don't want to run a Kickstarter campaign while I'm still working to deliver the final rewards from a previous Kickstarter, so with the major projects I've been working on even if I get two of them at once to a state where I'd feel comfortable running a crowdfunding campaign I'll likely end up doing them one at a time, with a significant number of months in between.

If you have any questions or interesting ideas, let me know.

Thanks,

Adam

February Monthly Update: Design Verification Complete (Almost)
about 7 years ago – Sun, Feb 26, 2017 at 09:09:51 PM

Short summary of this month: things are moving through preproduction now, but we’re kind behind on the overall schedule.

Let’s talk about the schedule thing first, since I feel it’s the most important item on the agenda.

Schedule

It’s now official: the delivery schedule has slipped beyond May. I would have had to be where I am now back in early January in order to have made that date, unfortunately.

Here’s the breakdown of what we still need to do, as Panda has laid it out for me:

Design Verification: This is what we’ve been doing this month.

Pre-Production: 5-6 weeks. This involves creating a physical Pre-Production Copy (PCC) with full-color proofs and component samples, and sending it to me for approval. I’ll get into a Skype meeting with Panda’s project manager and review the PCC piece by piece to make sure that I don’t have any change requests before signing off on it and going to full production.

Mass Production: 10-12 weeks. Panda creates and delivers to me the Mass Production Copy (MPC), which I need to approve. This is the last checkpoint before assembly and shipping. Major changes can’t be made here without delaying things significantly, but it’s good to have that final check.

Final Assembly: 1 week. After the MPC is approved, they finish the final assembly of the games and prepare the game for shipment.

Freight: 2 weeks. The games will be freighted from the factory in China to fulfillment centers in the US and UK.

Shipping: Delivery of the games beyond that point will depend on where people are located. This could be 1-3 weeks, depending on how long it takes to get from a fulfillment center to your door.

So the total time from here, worst case scenario, is 24 weeks. Which is about six months. Which means that people will likely be getting their games in July and August rather than May.

I really want to apologize for the schedule slip. I thought I’d built in enough of a buffer so that this wouldn’t happen -- when I picked May as the delivery date I was even thinking I might be able to deliver early, though obviously that was overly optimistic. My only defense is that this is the first time I’ve published a game, and despite all my research I clearly didn’t understand the time that preproduction takes. I can only beg your patience while I move the final pieces into place.

Now let’s talk about what progress has been made this month.

The Box

I got a lot of feedback on the box design last month, from people in the comments section of the update and from when I posted it on Facebook. I made some iterative changes, sharing the results with people in the comments, and have arrived at this final design.

Thanks to everyone who gave me feedback this month. This version, with the darker border, more subdued corners, and more subtle positioning of the designer's name does look a lot better.

I also have a design for the back of the box…

...which I think looks absolutely grand. Can’t wait to see it in person.

Special thanks to the Board Game Business podcast, for their thorough discussion of what should be on the back of a game box.

Last-Minute Art

As I was preparing the final files for Panda Games Manufacturing this month, I realized that there were a couple of cards that I somehow forgot to get illustrations for. Fortunately, having worked with about ten different artists for this project, I knew who to go to if I wanted to get very fast work done. It only took a day to get those cards illustrated.

Design Verification

Like I said at the top of the post, we’re almost through design verification now. I’ve gone through a couple iterations of cards with the preproduction specialist I’ve been working with at Panda, and fixed the issues that cropped up (in retrospect, this probably would have been a lot faster if I’d hired a graphic designer to help, but unfortunately for the schedule I really do love doing this sort of thing myself). Right now we just need to figure out a weird issue where the Lies icon is green instead of black, and then we’ll be ready to go.

Check This Out: Dusk City

I don’t usually like to talk about other games and Kickstarter campaigns in these updates, since the point of them is supposed to be to update you about this one specific campaign, but I think this is related enough to No Honor Among Thieves to justify it. Rodney Thompson, a veteran board game and tabletop roleplaying designer, is on Kickstarter now to publish Dusk City Outlaws, a fantasy heist tabletop roleplaying game based on stuff like The Lies of Locke Lamora (sound familiar?). The game looks utterly fantastic and deliciously thematic, and for the cherry on top Thompson somehow got Scott Lynch, the author of Locke Lamora, to write a scenario for the boxed set as one of the stretch goals. There’s some serious weight behind this game, and it looks like a hell of a lot of fun even without taking into account the pedigree of the people behind it.

It’s basically No Honor Among Thieves the roleplaying game, except probably with a little less betrayal involved. There’s less than two days left on the Kickstarter, so if that sounds interesting to you now’s a good time to check it out.

Conclusion

We’re behind schedule but still moving forward. Thank you for your patience, and once again thank you for backing the project.

Cheers,

Adam

January Monthly Update: Preproduction
about 7 years ago – Fri, Jan 27, 2017 at 09:55:13 PM

This month has mainly featured a lot of email conversations between myself, various artists, my rulebook layout guy, and the Panda Games Manufacturing pre-production team. Also: a lot of artists getting sick, one artist losing his hard drive to severe flooding, some neat physical stuff from the manufacturer, and my utter inability to get the colors right to the pre-production crew’s satisfaction.

Let’s break it down section by section.

Art

Despite the various setbacks I described in the opening paragraph, we’re actually almost done getting all the art. There are three artists still working on pieces for me, with most of them getting close to finished. It’s taken me longer than I had hoped to get all the illustrations, but I’ve pretty much got them all in hand by now, or at least enough that I’m confident moving forward with the next steps.

Here’s some cool stuff for you to look at.

Design

The rulebook layout isn’t done quite yet--I’ve been told that it should be good to go in early February--and I personally have been working on the box design. If you’re following my Facebook or Twitter feeds, you may have already seen this new concept, based on feedback from the poll that I ran a while back. I’d like to thank everyone who responded to that poll or expressed an opinion in the comments. Your feedback was really helpful, and greatly informed this design.

Preproduction

I spent a large part of the month going back and forth with the pre-production team at Panda Games Manufacturing, trying to get the colors right in the files I was sending them. With any luck, we should have that nailed down and everything ready to go for production early next month.

Unfortunately, next month is February, when I’ve been told the factory in China shuts down for Chinese New Year. So it’s looking like I might be delivering the game a little later than May, which is when I’d promised it. To meet my original deadline I would have had to have the final files ready to go by the second week of January, and at that point I was still waiting on a dozen or so illustrations.

On the plus side, I’ve already gotten a lot of the preproduction stuff sorted out on my end. Panda sent me a sample set of different card materials a while back, so I even know what the final cards are going to feel like.

I’m planning on using 310 GSM ivorycore with a linen finish, to make them feel more like parchment and less plasticky.

All in all, things are looking good going into the final stretch--a little later than expected, but I don’t think anyone will begrudge me a little more time to make sure that the final result is as good as it can possibly be.

Thanks for bearing with me this long.

Cheers, Adam

December Monthly Update: Pretty Much Just Art
over 7 years ago – Fri, Dec 30, 2016 at 07:12:10 PM

Hello again, friend.

I honestly don't have much to update you on this month. I've continued the process of getting art from the various illustrators I've hired, and had a preliminary check done by the manufacturer on my card template files to make sure that there won't be any significant delays when it comes time to print, but that's pretty much it. I've spent the month wrangling artists for the most part, with some holiday things thrown in with my family for good measure.

Since that's most of what I have this month, I figure I ought to show off some more of the art I've been getting.

 As you can see, we've got some minor style variations between different artists, but I'm quite happy with how well I've been able to keep them matching the general theme of the game. Ideally I would have had one artist do everything, and therefore had a consistant style across all the art, but I had over a hundred unique illustrations I needed done, and that would have taken quite a bit longer than this method. I figured getting the game out the door and into your hands was more important.

I've also been thinking about putting some of the sketches from earlier parts of the art process into the rulebook as background art. Something like this...

 ...in the corner of a page feels like it would add some flavor to the document. I'm still experimenting with design ideas for the rules and box, and with my layout guy finally being free to work on them in January I think my next update will have some more progress there.

Enjoy the new year.

Cheers,

Adam

November Monthly Update: Guilders Out, Art Rolls On
over 7 years ago – Mon, Nov 28, 2016 at 11:12:55 PM

Hello, friend. Time to talk about progress in November.

Guilders Out

Everyone who ordered a Guilder (or at least everyone who ordered a Guilder and gave me a legitimate address before November 18th, which is when I pulled the backer data from BackerKit for this) should be getting them in the mail either now or sometime very soon.

When I initially showed off the guilder tokens during the Kickstarter campaign, they were meant to be a promotional thing that I handed out at conventions. After posting a couple pictures of them, enough people asked if they could buy them that I said sure, why not. I figured I'd put them up at a price way beyond what I personally would be willing to pay for one, and maybe sell thirty or so. That few would be easy enough for me to ship out of my house.

We ended up shipping over 300 guilder tokens to 241 backers. It took us four hours to pack them all, and then I stood at the Post Office for another hour and a half making sure all the international ones had the right stamps.

Thank God I'm using a fulfillment service for the actual game itself.

Survey Says...

Last month I posted a survey asking about the colors to use on the box.

Turns out that people like the brown and gold one a bit better than the black one, though not by an overwhelming majority. A significant number of other people had additional ideas, which was fun to read through.

I think I'm going to go with the brown and gold variant, with some refinements to the copy I currently have (which I threw together in twenty minutes--it could definitely use some work). Some of the suggestions people made in the "other" box were really good, and my manufacturer has confirmed that I can get a linen finish on the box to get it a more interesting texture than the glossy sheen that is all my prototyper can give me, so with some additional work I think we can come out the other end of this with a very cool, unique-looking box for the game.

Illustrated Manuscripts

The artists I've hired have gotten back to me with finished versions of the art I posted last time, as well as a lot more. It's taken a while to get all the backer reference images (I just got the last one about an hour ago), but I think things are rolling along nicely on this front.

A lot of people were asking me to post pictures of the Animal Companions when that stretch goal was first announced, and since I finally have those on hand as of this weekend, I figured those would be a good example of progress to show you here.

I also have the Legendary Thieves, Intrigue and Outsider packs done, and a good number of the backer pieces (which are taking more time due to the need for the artists to match faces to the reference images).

Timeline

I'm not sure how likely I am to hit all of my planned milestones exactly when I'm hoping to, but this is what I have planned for upcoming months.

December: More art and design stuff. Lots of art. Hopefully I'll have finished my final editing pass on the rules by this point as well.

January: Hopefully get some stuff to show off from the manufacturer (initial models, possibly a PCC copy if I'm really on top of my game).

February: More art and design, not much progress on the manufacturing front since I've been informed that the factory essentially shuts down for most of the month due to Chinese New Year.

March: Fun stuff from the manufacturer, hopefully some idea of when we'll be shipping.

April: Should definitely know by now if I'm going to be able to ship on time.

May: Games ship out, you get them. I start digging up my list of all the reviewers I promised a final copy to.

I'm not 100% sure if I'm going to be able to make all these milestones when I had initially planned to--Chinese New Year in February means that if I end up delayed by a month now, it ends up actually being two months--but I think we can make a damn good attempt.

Speaking of manufacturing, I talked with my contact at Panda Games Manufacturing today (shout out to Matt, who's been very helpful throughout this whole process) and it looks like I can actually do all the stuff I said I might be able to do during that last part of the campaign when the funding shot up dramatically, which is going to be really cool. Nice cards, nice box, cloth bag for the coins, the whole shebang.

Unless anything super interesting comes up before then, I'll talk to you again at the end of 2016.

Cheers,

Adam