Video is Hard - Making Cards is Easy (in comparison)

We redid our video tonight. Well the first part of it. Our first attempt was good, but even edited down we had 19 minutes of material, some of which needed to be broken into short tutorials on features of our decks. I'll post some out-takes when we've gotten a chance to put that together. The other problem with our first attempt was Richard's sunburn. He looked like a lobster. He's still a bit red, but not near as bad.

In our new video we focus on what we need funding for and what you get for funding our project.

Why we need funding:

• great art costs money, and we want great art on these cards.
• production and shipping are our biggest expenses. By having pre-paid pre-orders (essentially what Kickstarter gives us) we can deal with a printer who specializes in card printing and use the savings to add more cards and more perks!
• playtesting costs money. We've printed several iterations of our cards now, and distributed them at our own expense. We need to do this to make sure our product is awesome.

What you can get from funding this project:

• for $1 you get on the mailing list so that you can follow our project and show your support. This option also gets you in for certain add-ons later.
• for $10 you get everything we produce (cards and adventure seeds) in PDF. We call it the no-BS PDF plan. 
• and we'll have early bird buy-ins for great deals on the card decks - in lots of combinations so you get exactly the cards you want. 
• we'll also have shirts (I'm going to put up some images of the shirts we have planned - very cool).
• we'll have opportunities for you to help playtest our decks as well as create your own cards by working with our design teams
• we are hoping to hit the stretch goals that let us go ahead with developing an app version of our decks for your mobile devices.
• and finally we'll have opportunities to get some custom art from great local artists.

There are really lots of great options we want to put out there.

Each of these options adds a bit of complexity to the project. But we think it is worth it, and that is why we are not rushing to Kickstart the project until we have all the details worked out.

It's going to be awesome!

Final Video Shoot

Spent the evening shooting video for our campaign. Both Richard and I have had a tonne of work and life stuff lately, so this has been a long time coming. I'm hoping he'll have the editing done in a week or so. We decided that August is probably the best time to run our campaign. We'll be back from vacations and all that good stuff. We want to make sure we carve out the whole campaign time because we have a tonne of stretch goals we want to add.

Soon as I get some images from the video I'll post them for you to see.

One other really fun thing we have been working on is designing a t-shirt for the campaign. We are probably going to have two designs - both with the monster coming right off the card! The mock ups looked awesome and we'll try to put up the designs when we have them close to final. So much to do, but this campaign is going to be awesome!

Mailing List

We are getting closer!

One of the things that makes a kickstarter campaign exciting is being able to offer some really kick-ass early adopter deals. I'll post some of the details here soon. But you will want to make sure that when we launch you know right away. 

So here is what you should do. 

We've set up encountercards @ gmail.com as a dedicated email addy for the cards. Simply send us an email saying you want to know when we launch and as soon as the campaign goes live we'll fire an email right back at you. This list will be used once, and only once, to inform you that we've gone live. In fact I'll delete the list right after (sending the email as a blind carbon copy to each of you) it is sent. After that your support of the campaign and this blog will be your points of contact to see how things are progressing - with no pestering from us. 

Next post will include several of our support levels to give you a good sense of what kind of savings we hope to pass on to you via kickstarter. Note that we are likely using a print-on-demand as a way to make these cards available after the campaign - that means the price will probably double when our stock is depleted. Print-on-demand means we don't have tonnes of stock in our basements, you can still get beautiful cards, but it comes at a premium. 

BTW I just showed off the cards to folks in St. Catherines and friends from Cambridge (ON) and the response was enthusiastic! We can't wait to get these cards in your hands improving your gaming experience. 

Soon.