It's been a while since I last posted. Longer than I wanted, really, but activity on the Manaforge front has been progressing very slowly.
The artwork is still crawling along. I've gotten concept sketches for the remaining seven Talent cards. Once those are complete, the Talent deck will be done. That makes two of the game's four decks completed. :D
The updated price quotes are coming along nicely. So far, I've contacted nine game manufacturing companies for quotes. All of the companies have responded in some manner, with six of them giving me quotes. Of those six, four are cheaper than the company I was going to use for my last Kickstarter. That is an encouraging sign; I really need to get my costs down for the relaunch.
And speaking of lowering costs, I've also been chatting with a new shipping company, different that the one I was going to use before. This particular company only directly does fulfillment, meaning that I'm going to need another company to ship the games from China to the warehouse. But the price quotes I've gotten from then so far are very encouraging.
Overall, between getting the artwork budget out of the way, and reducing both the manufacturing and the shipping costs, I'm hoping I'll be able to shave about $5,000 off of my Kickstarter goal. $18k sounds like a somewhat more attainable goal than $23k. :) More specifically, that puts us much closer to the target of being able to offer a $40 game tier instead of a $50 one.
In other news, I've been focusing my playtesting efforts on a different game idea, Suicidal Cabbages. If you haven't heard about it before, it's a card game about heads of cabbage trying to shred themselves into coleslaw. It's meant to be a light, tongue-in-cheek humor game consisting of hand management and action timing. You're trying to get your hit points to zero using implements such as knives, food processors, and dynamite, while filling your hand with 'ingredient' cards that give you points, and at the same time preventing your opponents from doing the same. It's still in early playtesting, and has a lot of balance issues, but at least there is the spark of a game in there somewhere.
And that's about all I have for now. I'm still waiting for a fresh infusion of funds in order to be able to finish up the game's art before the next KS launch; saving up the money for artwork and printing another batch of prototype copies is really the main problem I can see that might delay the relaunch.
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