Merci beaucoup pour ta réponse hyper complète !
Je vais suivre ton conseil et aller regarder une vidéo je pense
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A défaut de trouver quelqu’un dans le sud, est-ce que quelqu’un sur Paris a pledgé et pourrait me prendre un add-on « X-Trayz and Y-Trayz Sample Pack » ?
Tu penses qu’il finira localisé mais sans ces extensions ?
Effectivement ça a l’air pas mal pratique! 
Même si ça n’a rien à voir… 
Nouvelle update avec la roadmap pour Forsaken mais aussi pour les projets de 2024 dont une nouvelle campagne pour Forsaken (mais pas avant que celui-ci soit livré)…
Update #42 - May 2023 - First Friday Update
Another fantastic month!
Hey everyone! Mike here with the first Friday update, and the tl;dr is: everything’s still on track and coming along nicely.
We closed our final round of late stage QA testing this past month and dug in to the last set of tasks before we can submit everything to our manufacturer.
So, what’s left? Here’s a summary:
- Editing - Our editors are full steam ahead on taking the final form of the game and touching up the language and writing. They’ve already churned through the rulebook and most of the cards, leaving just the encounter guide.
- Graphics - Final touch-ups to our graphic assets, a few last minute tasks, and final exports.
- Trayz - Noah has humbly requested he be allowed to tinker right up until the very last minute to make sure our inserts are as rad as possible.
The only wild card here is the editorial process for the Encounter Guide. This guide is basically a book, and currently has more than 200 all-text 8.5x11" pages. It will definitely be time-consuming to edit, and we can’t start the graphics team on that document until the text is locked in.
To make up for this, we’re looking to send assets to the manufacturer in waves. We’ll send everything else in the first wave, and then let them know there’s still a 200-page book coming later on. In my experience, this won’t lead to any delays (as long as we can get the files to them before they head to the press, which I don’t expect to be any problem at all).
Hello, welcome to the update intermission, wherein I share a beautiful hand-crafted .png to help everyone remember that the pledge manager isn’t closing any time soon.
Now, back to your regularly-scheduled update.
What’s Next for Game Trayz Lab?
The closer we get to our asset submission date, the more my personal task load has tapered off. Now that I don’t have a huge book to write or a beta test series to run, I finally have a little room to breathe and start looking to the future.
Before I dig in to the next couple of paragraphs, I want to reassure everyone that Game Trayz Lab will not be returning to Kickstarter with anything until after we’ve begun the fulfillment process for Forsaken! I personally don’t like the idea of companies launching new campaigns while other projects haven’t fulfilled yet. While I recognize that it’s impractical to run a company at scale with only one release every X months, I also feel like it’s important for our new studio to prove a solid track record before we even think about going down that road.
With that said, we’re starting to plan out our road map for 2024 and beyond. Here’s a sneak peek!
- To the surprise of probably absolutely nobody, we’re already looking at a campaign for more content for Forsaken. I have zero details yet and therefore will have no answers for anyone, but this is a super robust game system that’s built an audience and I think we’d be silly not to go back to that well.
- Over the last year, we’ve been taking pitches to establish a line of direct-to-retail light strategy games in the Game Trayz Lab brand: $40-$60 MSRP games that use thermoform plastics in a way that’s irreplaceable and central to play. This is a product line that we can put out concurrently with our big-box Kickstarter projects.
We’ll share more details on these concepts in the coming months, but I’d love to hear your thoughts! What kind of content would you like to see added to Forsaken? And what kinds of games are you most excited to see from Game Trayz Lab?
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you again in June with some more spicy updates.
- Mike
A french translation ? 
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Les choses avancent toujours aussi tranquillement… mais sûrement
Update #55 - April 2024 - First Friday Update
Our First Print Samples Have Arrived!
Hey everybody! Mike here, and I’m not even burying the lede this time! Let’s dive right in.
Earlier this year, I mentioned that Noah had a trip to China scheduled to visit our manufacturing partners at Longpack. He just got back from that trip this week, and he brought home plenty of goodies for us!
But first, let’s rewind a bit. After last month’s update, we were still working on our punchboard exports. In January and February, we had received several revision requests regarding our content margins being too close to our die cut lines. We spent entirely too much time durdling over those and fixing problems that shouldn’t have existed in the first place, but we finally got those problems straightened out in early March.
At this stage, I wasn’t feeling great about our timeline. Even though these fixes were in the fine details and most everything else was all ready to go, I knew we’d already burned through all of our spare time. Every email exchange and graphics update was pushing out fulfillment by exactly that many days, and that’s not a situation I like to be in. Worse, I knew that the leap from print proofs to a production proof could take a month or more.
BUT, Longpack really came through for us. Since Noah was visiting Shanghai, they wanted to put together everything they could in time for his visit. During his trip to the factory, Noah saw and approved all of our Trayz and plastics, and he picked up a nice juicy almost-complete set of production samples!
I’m going to share a few (chaotic) pictures here, but they come with a heavy disclaimer: Noah air-mailed the production proof set back to himself at home, and they only just arrived this afternoon. We went over everything on a video call and he sent this bundle of photos, then he had to run off and do real life Noah-things. In a lot of the photos he staged, there are an inexplicable mix of components from the production proof and components from the old old prototype. I’ve asked him for some better photos, but unfortunately he won’t be able to get those to me today. I’ll share more photos as they come in over the next day or two.
In the meantime, the caption for each photo will mention which pieces are new and which ones are old. So, without further adieu:
These are our final punchboards for 4 of the 6 characters in the core box. The Trayz are from the production proof, but the proof’s plastic is just a placeholder black. Our final will be the same shade of gray that you see elsewhere on the KS page and rulebook.Ignore the huge stack of gray Trayz in the top right corner and the Moon Tray in the top left corner! Those are from the old prototype.
A close-up view of the final punchboards and player tray. (Again, note that the proof’s player trayz are black as a placeholder sample–the final plastics for the player trayz will be brown to match with the color palette here).
The final dice tray base!The job cards and tokens slotted into the player tray in the background are from the old prototype.
This is the final punchboard for the Mycoid Verge board, and the final Bounty tray.The arrow tracker attached to the Bounty tray is white in the production proof just as a placeholder to show us the sample, but the final will be red (as shown on the Kickstarter page).The actual Meeb Mayhem Bounty card is from the old prototype, complete with bad vertical alignment and a typo in the text box!
Page 3 of the final rulebook! A nice lil component spread.The Grash board and tray are final, but all the other components slotted into the tray are old (including the job cards, the boost/vision tokens, and the resource cubes).
The spiral-bound encounter guide, dice tower, dice, Mandorax board, Port Ambition moon board, and player tray are all finals. Note that Noah left out two of the punchboard pieces in the dice tower.Old material here include the job cards, all the tokens in the player tray, the resource cubes, and the gray trackers slotted into the player tray. Also, I that Port Ambition moon tray is the old 3D printed version from the ancient prototype.
A totally random picture of some of the sealed card sets in the base game.
Thank you for bearing with me through these pretty chaotic pictures. Normally I’d just wait and share a more clear picture of the production proof, but I wanted to share something concrete in today’s first Friday update.
I’ll be back this week with some better visuals, and also hopefully some cool pictures from inside the actual factory! I can only assume the reason Noah hasn’t shared those pictures already is because he’s in the witness protection program.
The Verdict
As I mentioned, Noah and I ran through the production proof on a video call, and overall I’m very happy with what we’ve seen so far.
My specific notes are:
- Partial Proof - The production sample is just what Longpack was able to put together in time for Noah’s visit. It’s missing a few pieces that we’ll still need to approve as they come in, and the Lab Limited box is still in progress.
- Game Box - The game box sample we received is just a white sample, but the white sample is marvelous. With so many components and storage solutions, our final box size was still up in the air. Now we’re ready to lock in our box specs, which was our last dangling product task in-house.
- Punchboard - The quality and cut on the punchboard looks perfect. I have no notes so far on what I’ve seen, but I’ll still need to go through and do a full inventory once the samples arrive at my house.
- Cards - The card quality and look has exceeded my personal expectations, and I’m very happy with everything I’ve seen so far. The card depth is also consistent down to the hundredth of a millimeter, which means they’ll fit perfectly in our Trayz. I have no notes on these, but again I’ll run an full inventory once I have my hands on the samples.
- Dice - Perfect. No notes.
- Plastics - Perfect. No notes.
- Encounter Guide, Rules Manual - The rules manual looks perfect. The encounter guide looks like the content is hugging the top margin a bit more closely than I expected, but if we decide to act on that then it’ll be an easy fix. Other than that, no notes!
- Dice Tower - This one was a big one. I was sure that making the tower was going to be an iterative process because the physics there are super important. If the dice come out a little too fast or a little too slow, the whole game is thrown out of whack. BUT, all of the copies of the Dice Tower we received in the print sample work beautifully. The punchboard fits together nice and snug, the angles are spot on, and the tests we’re running have perfectly hit our goal for the dice probabilities. Noah and Longpack nailed this in one shot!
I haven’t seen anything yet that makes me feel like we’ll need any revisions, and I’m eager to get my hands on the rest so we can move forward to mass production!
Regarding timeline, we were definitely falling farther and farther behind in January and February as our assets languished in revision hell. However, even this partial production sample represents a solid recovery. As long as we keep up this pace, we can make up for some lost time, but otherwise we’re still looking at fulfillment spilling into Q3.
Until Next Time
Thanks everyone for reading! I’ll be back as soon as I can with a better spread of pictures.
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Nouvelle update… encore
Update #56 - Bonus Update - More Pictures, Plus Some (Good!) Retail News
Hey everyone! Mike here with a quick lil baby update.
In the April First Friday update, I shared some chaotic pictures of our production sample and mentioned I’d be back with some more detailed photos (that didn’t have a mix of old stuff in with the new stuff). Noah sent those over so I have a bit more to share this week, and the production sample is on its way to my mailbox so I can dig in even deeper.
First, let’s check out a video of the dice rolling into the dice tower!
Forsaken - Dice Tower Demo on Vimeo
This is the « white copy » of our base game box, shown to scale in a real life Kallax! The dimensions are right, but the final’s top and bottom sections will be flush at the seam (similar to the Anachrony « Infinity Box, »
The player tray setup, now with all new components! Note that the samples for the vitality tracker, legend loop tracker, fungalyte, and resources are just gray samples to confirm dimensions. The finals of each of those will have different colors and materials.
The final frames on our bounty cards!
Our faction deck card backs. The quality on the cards is exactly what we were aiming for.
SOME of the 63x88 standard size cards and the 42x64mm mini chimera cards in the base game. There is a whoooole lot of stuff in this box!
Noah and Peter visited Shanghai last month and saw this ridiculously cute entryway!
Noah creeps over the shoulder of Peter Vaugh from Cardboard Alchemy as they take a look at one of their other games at the factory.
A sheet of Y-Trayz! Since the Forsaken Reserve system uses Y-Trayz, we were able to piggyback those game components onto the larger order and get a head start on mass production!
Next, we have a video taken from Longpack of the actual « vacuum form » process used to make Game Trayz!
You start with a slab of precursor plastic that’s super thick, dense, and heat resistant. A special machine shapes that down to make the mould based on an STL file, then it drills in a set of little tiny holes. Next, the assembly machine pulls out a sheet of plastic and heats it to the point that it becomes malleable. The heated plastic is pressed onto the mould, then a vacuum sucks out all the air through those little tiny holes, pulling the heated plastic onto the mould to get a perfect shape every time. The finished sheets (like you see in the picture above) are then stacked and cut separately.
The Y-Trayz you see being made in this video are to fill an existing order for Game Trayz, but since our Reserve storage trayz also use some of these same moulds, we were able to get a (tiny) headstart on mass production!
https://youtu.be/lUEq_m6k2Ok?si=9jVBdLNerPIeJPn7
Retail News!
In March, I announced our US retail partnership with GameNerdz. Our goal from the start was to find retailer partnerships that would preserve the value proposition for our kickstarter backers. While I was initially thrilled by the deal we made with GameNerdz, backers were quick to point out that the retailer’s offer of free shipping meant that Kickstarter backers were only getting best value by a $20-$30 margin, and our late pledges were actually getting a worse value.
I’m pleased to announce that GameNerdz has graciously agreed to raise the prices on their retailer pre-orders (+$20 for the base game and +$10 for the all-in). This means that even with their free shipping offer, their pre-order prices are roughly equivalent to what our late pledges paid, and Kickstarter backers have the best value by an even wider margin.
Our full pricing spread, for those interested!
GameNerdz absolutely didn’t have to agree to this, but they acceded just on good faith. They really came through for us here, and it means a lot to us that they appreciate our goals of trying to preserve our backers’ value.
If you’re also feeling a similar warm tingle of gratitude, I highly recommend you take that extra $10 or $20 of value and treat yourself to a nice lil game from GameNerdz. I recommend Jaipur, because it’s only $20 and if you don’t already own it then you absolutely should.
That’s a wrap on this lil baby update. See you in May!
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