More Info on the MINIS
over 6 years ago – Wed, Sep 06, 2017 at 08:55:14 PM

Hi All,

Today I want to give you a closer look at how the work on the minis is progressing! Like I mentioned this weekend, the minis are turning out to be far cooler than I originally envisioned them. That's mainly because Forge Prints, the guys producing them, make the minis out of resin and not plastic. Before we delve in, though, I want to mention that Forge Prints just launched their 6th and largest Kickstarter today, called ADVENTURESCAPES. It focuses on locations, with walls, floors, and accessories for 3 different environments. If you're a backer that's into gaming, this Kickstarter may be for you. You can also see a bunch of great shots of their products that show off the level of detailing Forge Prints will be bringing to our minis. Here's a link for you:

Forge Prints ADVENTURESCAPES Kickstarter

Now, back to our "Minis In Progress" tour! Resin, apparently, is a much harder material than plastic, and is capable of capturing much more minute detail.  Our 3D artist Ryan Lesser says resin is also a superior material for gamers & hobbyists, because it is sandable and carvable (so long as you wear a respirator). Resin minis are also easier to paint, since, according to Ryan, "the sculpt does most of the work for you. Most boardgame plastics are blobby and really hard to paint details into".

Now, there is a bit of a learning curve here for the uninitiated among us (and that includes me):

Thing The First: Resin minis sometimes come in a couple of parts that need to be fastened and/or glued together. This is because sometimes there are weird curves or angles that wouldn't come out of the mold successfully, or, there's a negative space created by arms, legs, or weapons that connect. In that case, those problematic parts are created as a separate piece, and then connected to the main form.

Thing The Second: Sometimes, your parts will arrive on a sprue, or one of those connector thingies like old school Revell models have. Luckily, if we need to do this, we're talking like 2 or 3 parts, and not every tiny engine part on the Millennium Falcon.

Now, here's a look at the 3D sculpts in progress for our minis! 

The first one is actually the fourth mini in the set - my own character, Keiko. You might know her from one of the promo images I did that ran in Imagine FX.

 The second is a work in progress, for contest winner Brian Despain's MELIFAUX character.

 Finally, here's a time lapse of Ryan's progress on this latest sculpt!

GREAT NEWS!
over 6 years ago – Sun, Sep 03, 2017 at 04:26:18 PM

Hi All!

Yesterday, I was busy on a deadline during the day, and caught up in holiday weekend family stuff in the evening, so I didn't get a chance to share this with you. Thursday, we had a very exciting flurry of activity and communication on the printing front. And then, Friday evening, I received an email with some truly fantastic news:

WE ARE NOW OFFICIALLY IN PRODUCTION!

Woo hoo! According to Jon, our printing consultant, proofing  should take two weeks or so. He says issues with files that we may not have caught can slow down or hang up the proofing process. But my hope is that, since we've been over and over these files already troubleshooting them for the foil & gloss process, that maybe all that extra QC on the front end may buy us a smoother proofing process. We'll have to see how it all plays out. I believe this means that the inventory should arrive - and fulfillment should begin - somewhere between the middle and the end of October. I'll keep you up to speed with specifics as I have them.

MINIS MEETING

 The Minis Team met this week to discuss how to translate Ryan's 3D modeling ideas into practical model casting solutions. I learned a lot about the process of bringing these minis to life - and also that they're going to be even cooler than I originally thought. I'll have more minis info for you by mid week, where we'll take a closer look at some of Ryan's renders. And, we still need to show off the CIVILIZATIONS expansion, and what it can do for the WORLDS deck.

Talk to you all again later this week!

Clark

The WORLDS Deck Tour
over 6 years ago – Sun, Aug 27, 2017 at 12:58:52 AM

Hi All,

As promised, I've decided to not let annoying (and hopefully brief) printing delays stand in the way of us enjoying taking a long look at all the coolness this campaign is bringing straight to your doorsteps.

And so, Ladies & Gentlemen, meet WORLDS.

First of all, I want to take a moment to acknowledge Nerses' SICK design work here. I absolutely love the tuck box & card back design. In fact, I feel like he knocked it out of the park from beginning to end on this whole deck. 

Worlds takes the Reckless Deck idea genration system and adapts it to creating environments and world building. With it, you can make fresh and exciting environment art, and create new lands & worlds for your storytelling or gaming adventures. 

I've already introduced you to microbiologist Alyson Santoro, with whom I consulted when building this. I want to give a special thanks to another source I turned to while putting WORLDS together, Canadian environment artist Seth Rutledge. Seth and I have done a couple of conventions together now, but at Spectrum Live this past April, I had the chance to talk to him at his booth for a long time about what would be on his wish list for an environments deck. His input was extremely helpful - so thanks, Seth!

In place of the genre symbols from the character decks, we've created 4 symbols representing the SEASONS. You can choose which season you want to incorporate, or, you can use a D4, D6, or D8 to randomize the results. The 4 seasons were individual cards for a long time as I was structuring the deck. But there was a LOT of content I wanted to include, and some of it was seriously inspiring, evocative, & cool. The 4 seasons were frankly just too banal in comparison, and were taking up too much valuable real estate. So, they became the card face symbols they are now.

Worlds breaks down into SIX categroies:

BIOME

Wikipedia says a biome is "a community of plants and animals that have common characteristics for the environment they exist in." BIOME is the first category in the deck, and its essentially the "ecosystems" category. It's also the first category my investigations into earth sciences led me to. Different scientific sources list between 5 and 10 terrestrial biomes. I've utilized my favorites from those sources, and added in several non-earthly, fictional biomes as well. There are 14 BIOME cards in all.

WEATHER

The WEATHER category will give you what's happening in the atmosphere at the moment of your respective creations. In true Reckless Deck fashion, what you get from the weather category may directly clash with what's going on in your BIOME card, or with other categories. To which I say, "Too bad. You sort it out." And, like the BIOME category, many of the cards deal with weather you may be familiar with, but several of the 10 WEATHER cards reach beyond what's possible in the non-fictional world.

TIME OF DAY

The 8 TIME OF DAY cards in this category gives you a selection of different times that are, for the most part, influenced by different possible lighting conditions. 

FEATURES

The FEATURES category gives you either a topographical or a structural element to include in your creation. In some cases, it sets the entire scene, pointing you towards an entire, specific kind of setting. In others, it's an element that can be the primary subject of what you're working on, or just a background element. FEATURES cards can also be used in pairs or groups, from which you can build  primary, secondary, or tertiary elements. FEATURES also acts as the transitional category between the details of the natural world, and the inhabited one. There are a whopping 18 FEATURES cards in all (this was by far the most difficult category to edit).

MATERIALS

The MATERIALS category deals with the primary building materials of a society. If you choose to integrate the MATERIALS category, you know you're dealing with the evidence of a culture of some kind (either past or present). MATERIALS also has the power to give you some fabulous, uncomfortable dissonanace between the structures and the environment. There are total of 12 MATERIALS cards.

ADVANCEMENT

The ADVANCEMENT category gives you the technology level of the culture or society inhabiting your creation. It covers the entire gamut between extremely primitive societies to the most sophisticated and advanced beings in Sci Fi. There are also several cards that address "alternative" forms of technology as well. There are 10 ADVANCEMENT cards in all.

I was going to address the CIVILIZATIONS Expansion here as well, and show how neatly it plugs in to the WORLDS deck to add 2 completely new categories. But this is already a long update, so we'll do that in a separate one. So, that's WORLDS! I hope you enjoyed your first tour of the finished products. Looking forward to hearing your comments on this one.

Cheers,

Clark

Another Progress Update, and NECRONOMICON
over 6 years ago – Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 10:42:20 PM

Hi All,

I promised you some big moments last week, and unfortunately we hit another snag. This time, with the spot gloss templates.

It was frustrating to learn that the printer had identified further issues. But, it led us to being able to ferret out what aI think are the last 2 minor hiccups in our way, (the other is with the Art Card I want to include in the main decks) and to come up with some clear, actionable options as to how to solve them. Instead of dictating to the printer what we want to have happen, we've come up with several options, and asked them to tell us which ones will get us into production the fastest. Since we feel like further delays should be avoided at all costs, the course of action they choose is the one we'll go with.

As some of you may know, I work a lot doing pre-production storyboards for advertising and film production. In that world, deadlines are hellish and super tight,  and everything happens at a breakneck, "we need it yesterday" pace. This project has been an education for me, learning that in the print world, things move at a more deliberate pace. One change on the design end sets off a chain reaction of files behind the scenes, as interconnected  things that are already laid out need to be re-shuffled. I'm trying very hard to channel some patience, and to adjust my own expectations to match the world I'm working in, instead of trying to make the printing industry bend to my will (to which I would say, "good luck with that".) Hopefully, you're all willing to as well, and can hang in there as we nail down the very last remaining details.

NECRONOMICON in Providence

In some fun news, this past weekend, I did the Necronomicon convention here in Providence. Primarily, this is a literary convention, based on H.P. Lovecraft and other weird fiction authors. It was a great show all around -  a fabulous crowd, and an awesome vendors room with lots of cool art, sculpture, and independent writers. Reckless Deck was way out front & center at my display, and I was able to make contact with a part of our demographic I've always felt was hard to  reach: GAMERS. And man, were they PSYCHED to find out about Reckless Deck! It was really cool and hugely validating to see how much they connected with it. I don't think I knew how tight knit people's gaming groups are, and how much people veer away from the pre-packaged adventures and go bold with scripting their own campaigns. Gamers found me pretty quickly, and once they did, word really spread throughout the con. By the middle of day 2, people were coming up to me saying, "I heard about this cool thing you're doing! What's the deal, & how do I get it?" They all seemed to think they can use it in the way our writing fans do - to create worlds and characters to populate their games.

 So, while we await word from the printer about how to cross the finish line in the quickest way possible, let's do that WORLDS deck grand tour I've been promising you for weeks! There's been too much work done, and we have too much extremely cool design work to show off to keep it under wraps any more. Barring any 11th hour panic-fueled weekend jobs getting dropped in my lap (which happens all the time, unfortunately), I'll try to get the big Worlds update done this afternoon, and have it in your inboxes for tomorrow morning. You know, so you can have something to read on a Saturday morning while you sit at the kitchen table eating your Crunch Berries.

Cheers,

Clark

Mini-Update Before the Updates
over 6 years ago – Tue, Aug 15, 2017 at 12:53:27 AM

Hi All,

This is me just attempting to not go radio silent on you for too long. We will have 2 big updates this week - but we're not quite there yet. The first will be announcing that the large print order for all the cards has officially been placed. We had another delay thanks to gold foil related issues, and we had to make some alterations to the files we sent to the printer. 

That is all done now, and the printer has 100% of our files. We are just waiting for the printer to approve one last file, and we will be good to go. I'm hoping to get the green light to place the order either tomorrow tor Wednesday. as soon as I do, I will let you know immediately. Which means we are looking for fulfillment to begin by sometime between the last few days in September to the first/second-ish week of October. 

As soon as I'm able to send out that announcement in an update, I'll kicks off all those fun, exciting updates I promised you - beginning with the grand tour of the WORLDS environments deck! I'm actually beginning to write it tonight, so it will be more or less ready to go as soon as we get the order on its way. I'm really excited to finally clear this hurdle, and to start showing off what all of your patience will be rewarded with.

So, look for my emails as the week progresses!

Clark