Sacred Backer Time #9 - CAFFEINE + JPOP = WORK
about 4 years ago – Sat, Oct 24, 2020 at 03:13:30 AM

Welcome to our 9th Sacred Backer Time update. This update won’t have any major bells and whistles, massive images or anyone copy editing it.

The last month has thankfully... been less eventful! Which means it was overall much more productive in terms of writing and development. My personal highlight, outside of work was doing a bit of skull painting on the roof with family!

Oh and the Dark Chef created a new stuffed pepper recipe. The smoked paprika really made it special! 

Gamblers Chest

Gamblers Chest is full steam ahead, its all I do besides sleeping occasionally, wrestling the giant rats that have invaded the office and exercising so I can be in top form for my next public appearance, hopefully at Gencon 2021!

I am currently giving the knowledge cards and philosophies their final creative pass based on our feedback and collective team decisions. Meanwhile monsters are being tested and tweaked, art for the philosophies are being arted (I think its like 80 unique illustrations for that!) and the last 3 armor sets are currently being engineered and added to the que for tooling time slots.

My hopeful plan is to have the development side wrapped up, just as the final plastics are tooled, tweaked and earn final approval. 

It’s all happening. Model by model, card by card and page by page.

Wen's "All should be Dust" for the Impermanism Philosophy Book.

NatKay's Outskirts Settlement Location (Scout Stuff!)

Legendary Card Pack

I have formally moved the more fussy bonus content I was trying to sneak in over to the campaigns of death, it made more sense there. We should have this out to the printer by the end of next week. Scope creep, my bad. ITS JUST A CARD PACK POOTS, LET IT GO TO PRINT!

Wave 3 Fulfillment!?

Pinup Collections 1-5 are finished and waiting to board a cargo freight to make their big trip across the ocean. I have been warned that this year is going to be the most insane year for logistics our planet has ever seen. I don't know what that means or how it might effect us yet. But consider yourselves also warned.

I’ll keep us all posted as I get more news.

Campaigns of Death and Wave 4

Work still continues on these, however they have not been my main focus. The campaign generation side of the strain system got a bit of a refinement, so we could ensure the content being made for the Gambler’s Chest was a bit future proofed (using Crimson Croc etc within the strain system).

Sky King Armor for Campaigns of Death (Sunstalker + Dragon King)

True Form Satan - Our must ambitious sculpture ever!

Hard Plastic Showdown Board

We are currently on the 3rd pass of the showdown board and have started to print and test physical samples, which have already revealed a lot about the design and where and how we can further improve detail clarity, variation and surface play feel. If all goes well, I hope to see this going into tooling before CNY (Chinese New Years).

Bonus!

Sacred Backer Time #8 - Faces for your bases!
about 4 years ago – Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 11:45:50 PM

Welcome to our 8th Sacred Backer Time update. This update won’t have any major bells and whistles, massive images or anyone copy editing it. In fact this is our shortest one yet!

With its scope creep now finished, the Stone Face Bases will be shipping with Pinups 1-5, hopefully in November! The box also now includes base bottoms too, a strange oversight but whatever!

We are trying to also get the hard plastic Satan's wrapped up in time for this round of shipping too, I will keep everyone posted.

Annnnnd that's it for today! I plan to be back in the next week or two with more!

Sacred Backer Time #7 - Through the Storm!
over 4 years ago – Mon, Aug 24, 2020 at 01:04:16 AM

Welcome to our 7th Sacred Backer Time update. This update won’t have any major bells and whistles, massive images or anyone copy editing it.

I have decided that I will continue to write Sacred Backer Time updates until the Gambler’s Chest has shipped. I will continue to share the projects progress while keeping spoilers to an absolute minimum.

2020 has been such an insane year. Every time I was extremely sarcastic, the doomspeak I was spouting came true. And then many times when my hubris kicked in, we were knocked right back down. Two Tuesdays ago I boldly declared that I was going to have a good day no matter what...

Then the hurricane hit the city and our neighbor lost their unicorn!

We lost power, and I had to quickly clean the raccoon infested office and ask them nicely to leave for a little while. (I’ve been working with them, they love trash and make a real mess but are so adorable!) Then we all moved into the office.

For dinner we enjoyed some Warehouse Wagyu!

The power outage turned into an over a week long saga, with just a huge mess all over the place. Here is what it looked like outside.

There was a lot of couch cuddling and late night Pokemon watching with our kid. I’ll prob self edit out those moments of blank mental gaps where I just wondered what the hell was wrong with everything.

In regards to the Pandemic, the city continues to do well. We are all bracing for the impact of whatever happens when schools reopen, but I am allowing myself to be optimistic. We have opted for full remote learning, both because it feels safer and also to make more room for the families that really have no other choice. It’s a tough time, but this city is tough. If everyone is vigilant, we might be fine!

I have decided to respect the fear, instead of letting it get the best of me. No longer is this “just a weird time to get thru”, but it is a challenge. How can I make the best use of it? How can the experiences be used to better Kingdom Death and my most important people?

One thing for certain, I will be making a Giant Roach Eggs settlement event, as that’s something I got to deal with once we finally got back into our apartment! Woooo!!!!

THANKFULLY EVERYTHING IS NOW BACK TO NORMAL AND OUR INTERNET HAS NEVER BEEN BETTER! 

Thanks for understanding our two week break

The two weeks let us art, sculpt, engineer and finish several small projects that we can release hopefully towards the end of the year and early next year. Everyone is back to being assigned to Kickstarter tasks again.

Crimson Crocodile Armor Set

This set turned out SOO cool and now we have too much awesome looking gear. The hardest part is deciding what will make it into the set and what will be saved for other projects, like a future Vignette. We just have too many weapons!

Death King Armor Set

This has moved into engineering! If all goes well I expect it to head into tooling in a week or two.

Smog Singer Armor Set

This is our main focus next week! Again I have way too much cool gear to pick and choose from. By the end of the week we should have it at a near final.

Gamblers Chest Campaign

This has been going well. The showdown tracker is proving to be an incredible tool for remote play testing.

If everything goes according to plan, full campaign (from start to finish play testing) should begin late September and this should be heading off to print towards the end of November, so it can be shipped out before Chinese New Year shuts factories down in 2021.

I really wanted to get it out by the end of August, I am sorry that’s not happening.

That sets my current estimated delivery date to… February or March 2021.

Pinups of Death

The factory has told us these should be ready in October! We are having meeting later today to see if we can speed this up. That might mean delivery sometime in November.

Legendary Card Pack

I think this will also land for delivery in November. I scaled some of my scope creep on this down cuz I was once again trying to put too much extra crap into it. This is not the project for scope creep! 

Core Games… nearly Sold out

Soooooo our core games have nearly sold out. Which is kind of amazing. That means there are 30,000 copies of Kingdom Death somewhere out there. (Some with the wolves in Canada when we lost 40 games in a shipping snafu many years ago.)

We are starting up a reprint! I’d rather not run another Kickstarter Campaign while this one is open. I’d like for the reprint to include the same very minor adjustments we are making with the Legendary Card pack, bringing the game to 1.6.

And yes, we will endeavor to get this reprint back into warehouses in the EU.

Bookmarks!

We have working bookmarks now! Woo! 

I will add a note again, as it may seem confusing that we are building such robust tools for internal use only… But that’s just how it is! I need to ensure our play test team as the most authentic KD remote experience possible. I honestly have no idea if this will become public at this time.

Blushing Owl Armor

I also took the 2 weeks to advance some future projects!

A little teaser for the Vignette that was pushed to next year!

Sacred Backer Time #6 - Project delay for a Week
over 4 years ago – Mon, Jul 27, 2020 at 06:08:02 PM

Welcome to our 5th Sacred Backer Time update. This update wont have any major bells and whistles, massive images, or anyone copy editing it.

The Watertable in NYC is very high right now. We’ve had crazy downpour almost everyday and the toilet in our new basement decided it had enough and vomited everywhere. I guess my emergency fix involving zip ties and a Poland spring gallon bottle cut to be a pipe patch is only holding out for so long. A professional is coming later today, hopefully they can sort it out. (While I yell at them from 20 feet away!)

Oh yeah! We installed this new calming waterfall in the warehouse!

Our exciting eats were a homemade Japanese curry! Which was very tasty and changed my mind about Japanese curry. Usually I find it to be way too sweet and closer to candy then curry. This was great and did not at all taste like a pile of doody over rice (which it kinda looks like)!

I am putting the main projects on hold for a week, so I can ensure that our Holiday Figure and Echoes of Death 3 make it to the printers in time for release this year. The lead times are crazy and I need to get them into pre-production now. While this isn’t critical, it is part of our bread and butter. So my apologies. I’ll be back in a week or 2 with more news. This week we didn’t quite finish what I was planning so there isn’t much to share.

Also… we are nearly out of core games again which is both amazing and terrifying. Another reprint... wowy!

Heads up!

Getting the head on the Death King armor to read well at scale has been tricky and is taking longer than I expected. We are still tweaking and printing it to get it right. 

I think she is my favorite from the Croc Set:

Death King Armor, Crimson Crocodile Armor and the Smog Singer armor all have made progress in the fussy tweaky stages before they get sent off to engineering. It'll be a bit more before they can move into engineering. 

Gameplay-wise the Smog Singers have been a guilty pleasure, here is a quick tease:

Campaigns of Death

Some progress on the Sky King or Sun Dragon Armor! (Still on the fence with the name.)

Ahhh summer 2020... I feel this Gothy Twillight Knight pinup has the right attitude for it!

Sorry, I thought I’d have more to share this week. Next SBT will be in a week or 2!

Oh and Nightmare Adam is finally finished, engineered, and waiting to be tooled! It took a while to get it perfect, but I knew we would get there!

Sacred Backer Time #5 - Printed Samples!
over 4 years ago – Sat, Jul 18, 2020 at 01:26:27 AM

Welcome to our 5th Sacred Backer Time update. This update wont have any major bells and whistles, massive images or anyone copy editing it.

NYC is on phase 3 of reopening and is looking towards phase 4. Far as we are concerned here, pretty much all public indoor activity is canceled.  The delivery people around here have gotten much bolder, I fail to understand what’s so hard about “hello, please leave the package by the door. I will pick it up.” I had one mail person actually start to push the door open while I held it, yelling "I have to give you this package!" Insanity! I urge the planet to wear masks and practice good hygiene and for the amazon / usps delivery people to respect the video doorbell and just leave the package for me to pick up!

In way better news..! Last night we had some pretty baller paella! Apparently it took our in manor chef until 5am just to make the stock. I am just kidding, we don’t live in a manor!

Pinups of Death

Yesterday was awesome, we got the printed proofs for all the pinups! It looks like everything is pretty much good to go. Next step is to print, put the plastic into the boxes and then ship it out to you guys. Timeline wise I think they will be ready to ship in September. That however is an estimate.

Smog Singer Armor

Next week we will be pushing this to a finish! Here are some wonderfully slightly derpy heads and an early look some poses with gear.

Death King Armor

We are at the fine refining step on this set. Some of the details are still a bit too soft for hard plastic production and need to be better defined.

Showdown Tracker

We continue to add more features and tools to the in-house version of the Showdown Tracker. It is quickly becoming an invaluable play testing tool! We will however slow down a little bit and get an updated version of the public tracker out for everyone within the next few weeks.

Low Poly Gold Smoke Knight!

I am unsure what we will do with the more in depth, for team KD only, version of the software just yet. Its turned remote play testing into an utter joy and honestly, right now, wave 3 development is the most important thing we can be doing. So I guess we will keep on trucking!

Wave 3 Development

Dark Flower Armor Set!

I’ll talk more about the Gambler’s Chest development next week. This week was extremely productive, but not in the super easy to share / show way.

Legendary Card Pack

Let’s pencil this in for an update next week too. We had to slow it down a little bit, to ensure that the strain card I want to add fits nicely within the more expanded strain system in CoD. We took the week to generate a myriad of a cases and examples to better stress test the system, so we could better understand where this little piece of content fits.

Firefighter Erza!

The whole reason I wanted to make an update today!

Is to show off this! 100mm stone face base insert!