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.
We’ve been working furiously to get everything ready for our Kickstarter launch date, May 20. Among the most important things we want to accomplish is our Tabletop Simulator mod so that people can try our game for themselves or playtest with friends and family around the world. The bare minimum is done, which just includes uploading all of our cards, mat, standees, and tokens. Now we want to make the experience of playing as painless as possible.
We have done a lot of thinking over the last few months about what kind of game Omicron Protocol is. We started our journey by standing on the shoulders of giants. We knew we wanted to make a game to rival our favorite games in the genre that brought us together as friends, games like Guild Ball, X-Wing, and Malifaux. We wanted unique characters, small scale skirmish, competitive balance, and most of all a minimum of negative play experiences.
Howdy! Alright, this post is super late, since the JoCo Cruise happened in March, but better late than never right?
As some of you may know, JoCo Cruise is the “Jonathan Coulton” cruise for games, writing, art, crafting, and all sorts of geekdom. When I went for the first time last year, thanks to good friends Geordan and Audrey telling me about it, all I knew about it was that it was a “board game cruise”. Board games for 7 days straight on a boat with unlimited food? YES PLEASE!
Ok, it’s been a LONG while since I wrote a regular blog. Do you guys miss me? ;)
Well, Brendan and I have been crazy busy demoing as well as streamlining any “kinks” in the rules where it causes our demo-ers and playtesters to go “huh?” Since we did so many rounds of playtests at Adepticon, we were able to come up with some pretty neat rules simplification that led to the new PRINT AND PLAY V1.3! After playtesting these rules a little bit, we definitely feel that the game is much smoother and easier to learn and play. We hope you will try it out by downloading it and giving us feedback in the survey links we have in the “READ ME FIRST” PDF file.
https://www.deadalivegames.com/omicronprotocol/print-and-play
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.
The demo board drew a lot of attention at Adepticon. To be honest, I think we would have been overlooked completely if we didn’t have it because every table was exquisitely decked out with terrain. Ours stood out a little bit from the rest because it was the only 3d hex surface to be found outside of the Aristeia! demos in the vendor hall.
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.
