Blood Throne December Update

Hey everyone, sorry for the gap in communications. I was out of the country for an extended trip for my honeymoon and we had some family business to take care of. In one trip we had the honeymoon, a wedding, a funeral, a baptism, some medical issues we had to deal with and more, it was pretty hectic which is why I wasn't posting. However, the team was still working. I wanted to give everyone an update on progress as we are behind schedule and explain why as it is 80% due to improving the quality of the game and 20% just down to inexperience on my part. However, had we not spent so much time increasing the quality we would have hit our production time quite easily. Adding so much art to the game took a long time but I believe is absolutely worth the effort.

We hit some snags in areas I thought would be easy such as the print set up for the physical components which turned out to be massively more challenging than anticipated, but it is a learning experience and we are nearly through the snags we hit.

Current Timeline

I believe we will now be delivering the game in the spring. We are in reality only about 6 weeks behind schedule but this means we will hit Chinese New Year, unfortunately, in which most of the country takes almost a month off to visit family. As our manufacturing partner--Unicool--is in China this means their staff will all be gone.

So, we anticipate realistically getting the game out in late March assuming we hit no other snags. I am very sorry for the delay, I was going as hard as I could on it but I believe the end product will be worth the wait as it will look much better. Also, we now understand some of the mistakes we made in designing the components which I will explain below as it is actually quite interesting (if frustrating in this context) in regards to the process. We now have templates we know work with design and production so in the future this will not be an issue.

Quality Improvement

As stated, the vast majority of the delay was adding lots of art to the game. I posted an update here showing off some of the awesome new art we got.

That is the tip of the iceberg as well, there's loads more. The books ended  up being bigger than we initially planned as we added a lot of lore to them which then required more art, etc. Since the writers and I had time we kept writing and we had a lot of good material we decided to add. The Hero Expansion Book particularly will end up feeling more like a DnD sourcebook than a board game rulebook due to the crazy amount of background material in it. I am actually considering editing some of it out as it feels like it may be a bit too much! However, it really brings the world of Blood Throne to life.

As stated, we also added art to all the cards and there are HUNRDEDS of them, this was no easy task. We had a lot of independent artists that helped and a big shout out especially to Sonderflex, the main studio we work with who are incredibly professional and talented. As I noted in the art update it is very hard to find a good studio to work with so we are happy to be working with them as they are always on time, have fantastic communication and are talented.

I showed off the quality of the improvement in this update a while back but just as a refresher here is the difference between the old cards and new:

So as you can see it is a dramatically better product, just going through that for hundreds of cards was really difficult, Not only getting the art but also changing the layout for the symbols and such to make them as easy to read as possible and still fit the cut sheet for printing which required redoing the cards multiple times. However, all the core box cards are done and the hero expansion cards are 90% done, we had to stop working on them while we sorted out the tokens which turned out to be so much more complex than I had anticipated initially. We have literally been working on getting the tokens correct for months now, lol, I feel somewhat silly for saying that as it seems like it would be easy but I will explain why it was such a marathon for us.

So, for context, we designed our tokens to be color and shape coded to each hero or monster they went with for ease of use as you can see above. We wanted you as the player to simply pop out the tokens for each hero and put it in their color coded tuck box so it is all neat and tidy. We also included the number you may need for each ability for each class and also the code to reference the card the token is associated with. It was a pretty massive task as we ended up with hundreds of tokens but should be quite easy to keep organized and make playing the game relatively quick, as it is annoying to take an hour or more to set up a game. We wanted it to be quick and easy to jump in and get playing. Additionally we had a lot of basic use tokens for tracking stat upgrades, HP, campaign information, weapon upgrades, etc. 

However, this means instead of having all general tokens we have a lot more than we would strictly need as there is some overlap but we felt this made the game better and more easily organized after the initial setup. You just grab the box for the hero and everything they need should be in it. Each of these tokens then must fit into all of the following: the individual Hero Boards you use to play the game, the Campaign Management Board that tracks all relevant data for the campaign and the Initiative Tracker which you use to see which hero or monster is currently active. 

What this means is if you change the size of anything you would have to redesign everything! Why this mattered to us is because we have text on the tokens in addition to symbols to make it easier to use them. However, with the amount of data we put on them we were going past the limitation for printing which requires bleed around the outer edge and a buffer on the inside to allow for a margin of error when printing and cutting the token sheets. We also came to realize we had to remove some of the decorative elements as they could potentially get cut off in printing. That threw us off and required multiple reworks of the tokens after they were all done as you can see above. The tokens are very subtly different than the originals shown above in the article, but it required going in and changing each one individually to fit the parameters which was very time consuming and obviously, having to do this multiple times only compounded the issue.

So, lesson learned here, start the design process with the physical limitations of the printing process in mind before doing the creative process. Designing all of these components to work with one another and show all the relevant data was really complex and took me ages to even just conceptualize how it would all function, so it was quite frustrating after finally getting it all to work for the game mechanics to then realize I had made a fundamental mistake in regards to the actual production process. However, we have been working closely with the factory and we have a solution now (finally)!

Here's another example to illustrate it. We have tokens for weapon upgrades so it is easy for you the gamer to just pop it in over the existing weapon on the Hero Board but getting that data to fit with all of the other considerations was tough to do. However, we built all of the other components and rules assuming it would work so it was a bit of a scramble to get it all to function as we wanted without needing massive redesigns! 

And did I mention we have a LOT of tokens? Lol it was a struggle to fit it all honestly but they are looking fantastic now. The tokens in the red circle are some of the tokens for the Monsters, to make it easy to manage their abilities as well. The tokens with buildings are for tracking the progress of your Siege Camp as you build it up, the bottom tokens are for NPCs in the game (which will be on plastic stands). The larger tokens are terrain tiles to keep the layout for missions interesting. And speaking of which, this was another are we really punched up the quality:

This is a WIP of the scenario section of the core box rulebook, the final actually looks even nicer but we rendered all of the terrain in 3D so that we could show it in an isometric view to make it easier to interpret how to set up each scenario. Additionally once we had the layout we saw we had quite a bit of blank space on the page so we went back and added more flavor text to each scenario to help increase the immersion of the game. All of that took a lot of time to do but we think it really helps elevate the product from good to great!

Ironically in preparation for this project I spent loads of time learning how making miniatures works as that was what I thought would be the hardest part but we finished all the minis months ago exactly on schedule. It was the part of the project I assumed would be easier that ended up being where we hit delays. Getting all of the physical components to reflect the mechanics, and then also having them physically fit with one another and be suitable for printing was far more complex than I had initially thought. However, it is a learning experience and as stated I think the end product is really going to stand out due to the extra effort we have put in. Plus the modular Hero Boards are pretty slick if I do say so myself! They of course have been done before but ours I think really stand out due to making managing heroes in the game and leveling them up relatively simple.

I am away for Christmas starting today but will be working while gone and answering messages. I will resume the in-depth series and podcasts upon returning on the 1st of the new year. Thanks to everyone for the patience and feedback it is genuinely appreciated.