Hey there Crewmates!
Now that the dust is settling from our crowdfunding campaign, we are taking stock and testing all the additional content before prepping for the manufacturing phase of the Pandora’s voyage.
TL;DR, things are running to schedule, but it’s early days yet. As any of you who are used to crowdfunding campaigns will know, there are all kinds of things that can disrupt the timeline. We think we’ve factored in most of the big anticipated delays, such as Golden Week, Chinese New Year and the Shanghai Dragon Boat Festival, but things like Dockers disputes in Baltimore and the status of Red Sea shipping lanes are out of our control I’m afraid. So we’ve built in as big a cushion as we can to allow for ‘known unknowns’ in the hope that we’ll be able to deliver before our estimated Delivery Date of June 2025.
Here's what the timeline looks like right now:
Development is going well – more on that in a minute. Once that’s done, we’ll update the Rules for our early delivery backers who went for PnP’s and the Collector’s Editions. These will probably be dispatched before our Pledge Manager goes live, because we want to have a good handle on Shipping Rates before we lock that down – we don’t want to charge you more than we have to for shipping, but I’m sure you’ll understand that our margins are tight. Shipping rates are all over the place at the moment and I suspect they won’t settle down until nearer the end of the year, once we’ve seen how the ructions in the US and the Middle East will affect things.
At that point, we’ll also have a price for you on our Stretch Goal Mini Pack, which we’re working on at the moment.
In the meantime, our artists Kris and James are doing a fabulous job on the imagery.
You’ve already seen James’s great work on Marina’s card art and now he’s started work on the military kit she’s packing in the Cargo Bays.
Meanwhile Kris has been working on the ShipMap, adding extra start icons for Fenn and the Fluffies, and clarifying things like the Movement Costs of the Airlocks
All things being equal, we’ll have all art assets complete and ready for printing before the end of the year, ready to press the button once the Chinese New Year is over in January.
DEV DIARY: Dem Damn Dominoes!
For those of you who are interested, here’s a little insight into what I’ve been doing over the past few weeks.
The Crowdfunder unlocked a whole heap of new content, both planned and unplanned, which I’ve been integrating into the game. Extra Nasties and characters like Keni were pretty simple to integrate, because I’d anticipated and been testing them long before we even brought them to the crowdfunding table.
What I hadn’t banked on was your massively positive response to our Tell Us a Story Competition. We got so many entries with so many good ideas that we simply couldn’t let them get away – and you guys responded by enthusiastically buying-into the Extra Stories Add-On (which you yourselves asked for! 😆)
Thing is: every extra Protocol and every new Agenda brings a whole new set of balancing issues which has to be weighed against all the other moving parts within the game. For example, it’s great having the Purge Protocol which makes it even more dangerously interesting to move around in the Vents; but when you add that to the Lightning Protocol, which electrifies all the floors in the Ship, the Crew suddenly has nowhere to go. Turn out the lights with another Protocol and the number of cards that you actually get to play with starts to drop significantly – especially when you’re wading through a Flurry of Fluffies that are leaching all the air and room for manoeuvre out of a Room…
Let’s just say that the domino effect of all of these interacting stories has been… interesting.
And the whole idea behind this game is to give you an infinitely variable sandbox to play in. We don’t want to restrict the Protocols or Agendas you can use – though you do get a whole lot more interesting ones linked to the back of the Ship in the Deluxe Game, which we simply can’t integrate into the Base Game because the Cargo Bays, Engines and Dark Corridors simply aren’t there. Part of the fun is finding yourself faced with a set of conflicting goals that your hapless Crew has to navigate through. But that only works if it’s fun! And tbh it’s not much fun if the dominoes get in the way of doing cool stuff.
So I’ve been repeatedly tweaking and testing, tweaking and testing, tweaking and testing to get the balance right between what I would call ‘playability’ on the one hand and ‘challenge’ on the other. I don’t want it to be so restrictive that you can’t actually do anything: but I also don’t want it to be so easy that it’s a walk in the park. One of the great things about this game is that it almost invariably ends on a nerve-jangling cliffhanger where you win or you lose by the skin of your teeth. Only this morning I ran a test which ended with Greaseball literally stealing the Widget out from under Marina’s nose and diving into the Escape Pod one step ahead of the ShapeShifter as the entire back of the Ship disintegrated around them. Those are the moments you remember: the moments you play for – and I don’t want to lose them because the dominoes get in the way.
So bear with me while I spend a few more weeks making sure that everything meshes smoothly into place, before I start locking things down and putting the other dominoes in a row to get this game out to you as efficiently as we can.
Now, which dark corner did I leave those Fluffies in…?
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