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Good evening, backers! Happy Friday and Happy New Year!
We wanted to check in today and let you know how things are going over here.
We spent the holidays working long hours to hit our goal of completing the final development pass of Acts 2 + 3 and we got it done. From a design and development perspective, Act 2 + 3 are both finally finished. It feels weird to say that.
The heavy lifting is now in the hands of our graphic designer and our 5 groups of playtesters who are working diligently to balance the game and find any issues.
To be clear, these playtest groups are not volunteers playing when they get the time. They are dedicated groups on payroll who are putting vast amounts of their time into making sure this game is great.
We say all this to let you know that we’re making a lot of progress here, but we know at this point in the lifecycle of the campaign, everyone just wants to know when this will all be delivered.
To avoid any more Update Packs, product revisions, or other potential headaches that only frustrate both you and us, we’re being extra thorough with our playtesting. We’re requiring our playtest groups to get through at least 2 Encounters per week.
Acts 2 + 3 have a total of 40 Encounters, so at that rate, and with the progress we've already made, we will honestly be playtesting Acts 2 + 3 up until about April.
After that, we tighten up the layout and package everything for print.
Our goal is still to fulfill Acts 2 + 3 by July / August of this year.
The final frontier of this campaign is Pirates. A relic passed down from our very first campaign in 2015.
Well, the good news is that it's designed already and we’re deep in the dev pass of Pirates right now. It’s a crunchy expansion. By itself, it’s bigger than most other standalone dungeon-crawlers. It’s got 18 Encounters, tons of new tiles, a ridiculous amount of new items and Combatants. Not to mention all the miniatures… anyway, the point is, our goal is to get Pirates into playtesting by the middle of February and be ready for print at the same time that Act 2 + 3 is.
You can expect a lot of juicy details regarding Pirates of Elenia in the coming months.
Orders are now shipping in the USA and Canada.
This means:
This also means that any items warehoused only in the US have begun shipping worldwide.
These US-warehoused items include:
Fury of Nature was a wholly separate shipment coming from China that has finally been received by all of our warehouses, except for our EU warehouse, which will be received on Monday.
We expect Fury of Nature to ship out to you within the next two weeks.
Once all the orders for this are fulfilled, we’ll be throwing any extra we still have up on to the webstore to purchase.
We understand that some of you have anxiety around the progress of this project and when things will be delivered. We’ve seen discussions about how we’ve communicated and shared the progress of our products in the past, our delays, and our constant product bloat.
Truth is, a lot of the criticism isn’t without merit. Our project is massive, and the original undertaking was far beyond what we were capable of when we took it on. Our team was small, and our journey from artists to businessmen was still just beginning.
But even our passion for games and art could only take us so far. The staggering size of the game required us to grow. In fact, we'd like to add to the criticism we've read online about our project by sharing what we believe is our biggest hindrance. The delays on this project have been caused by ourselves (Alex and Brooklynn)—our ability as owners of the company to manage, communicate, and work internally with a cohesive team has been what has cost us more delays than anything.
We read that some think that our prior progress indicators were incorrect, or even lies. We felt they were accurate at the time, and looking back, in most cases they were. The truth is, taking a project that is almost complete to being complete has been hard for us, and the last few percentage points required has taken us as owners longer than it should have because of our inability to build and support a team to help us make it happen.
The path to delivery has not been linear, and through our tenacity we’ve been chipping away at the workload one design at a time. Through the ups and downs at Succubus, it took us (the owners) way longer than we thought to find the right team. But that hasn’t been the case for months now. The team we have now is amazing. Thanks to them, we’ve made more progress in the last six months than we’d made in the previous two years.
Now that we’re here, the path to delivering this monstrosity of a project is more real than ever.
The following items are 100% complete on our end. They are in production and all we do now is wait.
We estimate fulfillment starting in April / May of this year for these.
The plastics for the above products, and the upcoming Act 2 + 3 print, have been in production for about a month. Getting this month of production time before Chinese New Year will really help us hit our projected delivery dates.
Here are some pictures from the factory:
This next group of items are in various stages of completion. The majority are 100% complete but require Act 2 + 3 to use, so would not be playable if we delivered them sooner.
We’re estimating everything here will be delivered in July / August of this year.
Act 2 + 3 is completely designed, all the artwork is done, the rulebook is complete, and we’ve finished our final development pass on it. Our internal team is moving on from this one, we’re done.
This expansion is now being playtested by 5 separate groups, playing through 2 Encounters per week.
Playtesting is the final step to completing Acts 2 + 3 before we do a final pass on layout and then package the files for proofing and mass-production.
Pirates is fully designed and all the artwork is complete. Our second designer Kris, is running his final dev pass on this bad boy and will be done by mid-February at the latest. This expansion is gigantic.
Once the dev pass is complete, we’ll be recruiting more playtesters to run through it. We’ll expedite the playtesting as best we can. Our plan is to have Pirates ready to print with Acts 2 + 3.
The Collector is designed, developed, and has been in playtesting for quite some time. We’ve received enough playtesting feedback on it to call it good. For all intents and purposes, The Collector is ready to package and send off for proofing with the factory.
The Collector is an Epic Bounty and thus requires the cards and tiles in Act 2 + 3 to play.
Vile Variations is completely designed and developed and the majority of it has been playtested and approved for print.
Because it includes tons of Variations of Combatants included in Acts 2 + 3, we haven’t fully completed playtesting. Vile Variations will complete playtesting and go into print at the same time as Act 2 +3.
Art Book, Vol. 2 doesn’t require Acts 2 + 3 to use, but contains all the art included in it. It felt better to deliver this with Acts 2 + 3. On top of that, we’re still laying it all out for print.
It’s looking awesome though! it’s all killer, no filler!
For a little sneak peak, the legendary Genzoman has wrapped up his commissions for our alternate art cards that are included in the Art Book Vol. 2.
Check ‘em out!
These items were introduced on our “Conclusion” preorder last October. They’re re-releases of our resin kits, but manufactured in plastic instead.
The files for these are 100% complete in all aspects. The molds for these still need to be produced.
We plan on delivering these with Act 2 + 3 and the rest.
We appreciate you taking the time to read through our update.
We’ll make sure to keep them rolling until this project is delivered. Thanks for your patience and support through all of our ups-and-downs.
If there’s anything specific you’d like to see or know about that you feel isn't being conveyed in our updates, let us know and we’ll do our best to answer them.
Have a great weekend and we’ll see ya soon!
