July was a relatively quiet month where we did a lot of playtesting of Cyber Pet Quest and preparation for GenCon, as well as wrangle the logistical beast that is shipping and fulfillment for Lunar Rush and Omicron Protocol - Critical Condition Expansion. We are now 2 days away from GenCon 2023 starting, so if you're headed to GenCon, PLEASE come by Booth 2932 to say hi to us and check out the games!
The last week has been surreal... And since we haven’t written a blog post in a while, I thought I'd post this here to share.
Preparing for DunDraCon, GAMA, and JoCo cruise haven’t left me with much free time but I managed to squeeze in a couple hours of painting. Without further ado, here’s Lucky!
The blog has taken a back seat since the end of the Kickstarter campaign. The holidays were busy and we had a lot of logistics to figure out as we finalized our manufacturing plan and got started producing OP. Exciting times! One of the exciting developments is that we produced our first prototypes of the alt sculpt Bolt and Lucky miniatures.
Our schedules are getting hectic as we get closer to summer and our Kickstarter campaign. I say that not just excuse myself for being a day late but also to excuse myself for not have anything very cohesive to write about. There are some projects I have been working on that fit into the WIP Wednesday theme: I have been porting our game to Tabletop Simulator, and I finally started painting our updated Pai sculpt.
We made huge progress last week, in the space of an hour the task of completing this board in time for Adepticon went from seemingly impossible to nearly accomplished. Unfortunately, the picture was a little deceptive, as always the Devil’s in the details. In order for the demo board to be useful we needed to make a bunch of terrain. We got a little head start last week with some 3-hex bushes but we wanted all the terrain required for the scenarios in the rulebook, and we wanted some variety.
Last week we sculpted our foam base and I got a bunch of hexes glued down on the 4 quadrants. This week I worked on our decorative end-cap. We wanted to make the diorama break down into parts for travel, the priority being the actual play surface. We painted some apartment buildings long ago and they always attract people to our table at conventions, this will be the deluxe version. With that in mind, we wanted to make an add-on with buildings and scenery that was optional.
With the 12 initial models painted and photos and video in the works, I finally get to dig in to a project I hoped to have done way back in December - the deluxe demo board. We have had some fun misadventures with this project already, like shopping for materials with a broken foot, finalizing the design on the fly in Lowes 15 minutes before they closed, and Bernie amazingly sawing our huge styrofoam sheet down to size in the parking lot with a pencil.
It’s been a busy couple of weeks for Bernie and myself. Starting on the 9th we did LVO, a BackerKit playtest meetup during the week, and then OrcCon in LA This last weekend. During this week and a half we still met up to work on the game 3 nights, doing some major revisions on the rulebook (stay tuned, playtesters) and working through some difficult balancing issues. How, you ask, did I find time for our favorite Mountie? I’m not even sure, but I did find time - that’s what matters.
I had another very fun painting session on the Epic Duck Studios twitch stream on Sunday. I took some time to catch up on base coating during the week so I was able to get right into really defining volumes on the model. I’ve been focusing on improving my painting in a lot of areas, with special attention on creating greater contrast. With that in mind, I’m pretty happy with how the shadows on the horse and the red jacket are turning out.
I had a really fun time painting last Sunday on the Epic Duck Studios twitch stream. I must have been talking too much because halfway through the show I looked down and realized I had base coated 1/2 the horse, shaded the underside, and blended the brown and white of his hooves. I hadn’t even touched Lance himself by the end of the show! All this after discussing at the top of the show how I usually paint a model in the order it would get dressed: skin, undershirt, pants, jacket, etc…
Just a couple models left to go before we have 2 complete sets: Seeker and Lance. I am working as hard as I can on this second set because they have to be my best photogenic models ever. But I also have to get them done because we need photos sooner than later. We have a date with a photographer February 23rd and we are going to be at LVO the weekend of the 8th and Orccon the next week. That gives me next weekend and whatever time I can scrounge up during the week.
I mentioned last week that non-metallic metals are easier to learn for me on our models because there is very little metal to paint. If I’m painting a belt buckle and it looks wrong it’s a matter of a few seconds to start over and try something new. It takes a little longer for a rifle or a knee pad, but I find these are not too discouraging as well. This week I started on Flash, and Flash has the biggest piece of metal in the game so far - his drone.
