Hello and happy New Year everyone! I hope you had a fantastic set of holidays, and you’re ready to hear allllllll about our progress on Forsaken! First things first, our project overview:
The Forsaken Pledge Manager Opens on Friday the 13th!
At long last, we have a date for the launch of our pledge manager! For those unfamiliar, the pledge manager is a third party service commonly used after crowdfunding campaigns where you can log in and…well… manage your pledge. It lets you update your personal and shipping information, make late pledges, and even add or remove items from your pledge.
The pledge manager will remain open for as long as we can keep it: likely until we need to finalize our order quantity with the manufacturer this summer. It’s critically important for every backer to log in to the pledge manager before it closes and lock in their pledge, or else you may end up receiving a refund instead of your game! Don’t worry though—we’ll send out billions of reminders.
We’ll be blasting that link this coming Friday, January the 13th on every channel we have, including through another kickstarter update. And before you take your first look at the PM, I want to give you a heads up on a few things to expect: some good, and some bad.
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An exciting lineup of supplemental products will be available for purchase! - Hey, let’s start with the good news! We’ve handpicked a few additional Game Trayz products that we’re going to make available through the pledge manager, and this may be the first time they’re available to (affordably) ship to your country. This includes a few of the standard Trayz that are available through our main website, but it also includes a special set of custom sleeves in quantities and sizes that we can guarantee will fit both the cards and the storage.
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We’ve updated our shipping rates - Now for the bad news. Over the last few months, we’ve been honing in on more exact product weight and dimensions and getting more detailed quotes. We’ve adjusted our rates for some shipping zones to reflect the best and most up-to-date information we have available.
Specifically, here’s what you can expect to see on those shipping rates. (Refer to the main KS page to determine your country’s shipping zone).
On a personal note, I hate this, and I was deeply hoping it wouldn’t be necessary. We even considered just eating more of the shipping costs to avoid rocking the boat, and to maintain our good relationship with our followers. Even though this rate increase hasn’t departed from the promises we made to you during the campaign, shipping is already uncomfortably expensive for everyone, and I realize this is not going to create any good feelings.
We agonized over this decision, but ultimately landed here because we know the stakes. I’m familiar enough with the process to recognize these numbers as an existential threat, and I’ve known too many earnest creators that have ended up in the red on amazing projects because of avoidable shipping fiascos, If I’m being honest, I’m absolutely terrified of that happening to us. I love you all for backing Forsaken, and I want to spare you any discomfort that I possibly can, but I also love to make games, and I want to have the option of continuing to do that.
I hope that you want us to keep making games as well. This is how we get there.
In particular, I’d like to apologize to our backers in New Zealand. Some of you asked why shipping to NZ was relatively low in the comments, and I realized after our launch that we listed NZ in the wrong zone. We’re sticking to our promise not to increase rates beyond 20% of what we showed in the Kickstarter, but we did push it all the way to the limit there.
Development and QA Update
Hey, you’re probably here to read about more than shipping rates and pledge managers. Let’s talk about our progress on the game itself!
Overall, our pace of work has been excellent—especially considering the holidays. Travis and I have been grinding away. There’s a point in a big project like this where the team starts to get very good not just at designing, but designing that project, and that’s where we’re at right now. We’ve gotten very good at making Forsaken, and the result of that is that we’ve become effective in finding all the squeaky wheels and applying the right fixes.
Our original goal was to complete all development for the new content by the end of December. While we’re virtually there, we still have a few of the characters and modules that are under-tested, and I’m not comfortable checking this off until we’ve locked those in.
Since we can’t run our final QA series until this is finished, that means the time we spend here is pushing the timeline. I think we can expect the built-in padding in our timeline to absorb this, but we won’t know the full impact for sure until later this summer.
Writing, Now with Voice and Tone!
One of the benefits of this extra development time is that it’s created a pocket for some rewrites. In testing, we found that some of the characters just felt more alive than others. For example, take this introduction to Killquick Quipsallak’s story (Note that these card images are not final):
Now, compare it to this introduction to Nyne’s story:
The first one is kinda fun to read, and it shows you who Killquick is. The second one is kinda dry, and it tells you who Nyne is.
Well, Nyne is a whole and complete person (with a chainsaw arm), and she deserves better than that. She’s one of the characters we’re aiming to rewrite with a better and more personalized tone. For a game that’s so driven by its weird and unique characters, that’s super important to us.
This set of rewrites is using the same window of time as the development extension, so we don’t expect it to have any further impact on the timeline.
For the rest of the writing, we’re pleased to report that things are coming along very nicely. In testing, we’ve been focusing heavily on the newest encounters and stories, and this final batch of content has been honestly unhinged in all the best ways. In a single session of Forsaken, you can:
- Shrink an alien down, store him inside your body, and smuggle him into the clinic for a heist.
- Marry a Marriage Pod, who has found themselves stranded on Thyrria after their spouse met with an untimely decapitation.
- Impersonate a cruel deity before the simple-minded Boffle Treefolk, ushering in a new age of blood and pain.
- Get a very bad tattoo.
- Adopt a Chitterwig named Chonky.
- Help an ex-pit-fighter named Gog run for mayor, and maybe even help him find a shirt to wear.
- Play an exhilarating round of Six Dice Yum Yum.
- Sign a record deal with Jagga Rawk, keytarist extraordinaire.
- …and more!
It’s been a lot of fun watching players navigate their way through these weird and memorable situations, and I’m excited for y’all to experience that!
A Promo and a FREE BOUNTY!
The Dice Tower is hosting their annual fundraising Kickstarter soon, and Game Trayz Lab is going to be part of it! Backers that support the Dice Tower Kickstarter at the « Promo Pack Archer » tier will receive a Bounty card featuring infamous intergalactic villain Vom Tasel! We just lined this up this week, and illustrator Naomi Robinson has already shared an awesome draft of the art. I can’t stop laughing at the fact that his alien head is hat-shaped.
But here’s some good news for everyone: if you don’t back the Dice Tower kickstarter, don’t worry about missing Forsaken game content. We thought it might rub backers the wrong way if we gave away Forsaken content that all-in backers would need to track down elsewhere, so we’ll be adding one additional bounty card to every copy of Forsaken above and beyond the components outlined in the Kickstarter campaign. The « Vom Tasel » promo will just be an alternate art version of this new bounty card.
That’s all I have to share for now, but I’ll be back again next week with a reminder about the pledge manager. Thanks for reading!
- Mike and the Forsaken team
