Spirit Island

Approaching the Island!
over 7 years ago – Wed, Sep 07, 2016 at 12:22:37 AM

Hey, everyone!  

Well, it looks like there’s a light at the end of this tunnel! Check this out!

Playtesters are going over the final components with a fine-toothed comb, and everything should be off to the printer by the end of this month. We’re super excited get this into your hands. It’s been a wait, but it’ll be worth it!

Sculpt renders and news
almost 8 years ago – Tue, Jul 05, 2016 at 10:23:03 PM

Hey, everyone.

It's the first Tuesday of the month, and you know what that means. Progress!

You got to see some sketches of the sculpts last month, but we now have nearly-final renders of the pieces. It really takes on a new life this way. Check it out! Sorry about the lighting on some of these; it's not ideal, but it shows some good stuff.

 We also have a work-in-progress image of the Invader board art!

 You've gotten to see a lot of art through the project. I hope you've enjoyed it. So much of it gets shown through these updates just because there's so much of it from so many different people! In many things, the more people you're managing, the more things can happen. Through this project, we've gone through a few changes with our artists, and it's caused the deadline to slip.

So, here's the news. Unfortunately, we're not going to make the August delivery time. It's not too much further off, though! Right now, we're projecting October. Our printer is ludicrously fast, we're confident that October is when Spirit Island will be going out. We feel awful when delays happen, and we never want to let you down. But it's still coming, and we're going to keep you in the loop. Thank you for being such understanding and wonderful backers!

Minis and Gen Con!
almost 8 years ago – Fri, Jun 10, 2016 at 05:22:51 PM

Hey, islanders!

First of all, I'd like to apologize immensely for your not receiving an update on Tuesday! I wrote one up, hit the button to post it, and then must have jumped the gun on closing the tab before it actually went through.

We're still hard at work getting Spirit Island printer-ready. The immense load of art is nearly finished, and the sculpts are really looking great. I showed you the Explorer last month, but here's a new full view of it!

 We also have some sketches to give you a rough idea of what the Towns, Cities, and Blight will look like. Obviously these are fairly rough, but they're very close to what the final product will be.

 If you’re going to be at Gen Con this year, you can come check it out! We’re running several events in our room, and Spirit Island is among them! Even if you don’t get a chance to play, the room is open for all to visit and observe. We hope to see you there!

New Explorer sculpts, and more!
almost 8 years ago – Tue, May 03, 2016 at 11:36:16 PM

Hey, everyone!

Wow, do we ever have a big post for you today.

First of all, I'm super excited to show you a sketch of the new Explorer sculpts. We've gone back and forth on these a lot, and this still isn't completely final. However, we feel that it meets most of our needs. Take a look!

 We really love the look of this. We'd heard a lot of comments about the previous version we showed during the campaign, and we think this has solved many of its predecessor's issues. Among its main selling points, it skews gender neutral, and it portrays really well how the Invaders may have been seen by the inhabitants of the island. We hope you like this version!

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In addition to sharing new art with you this month, I wanted to give all of you awesome backers a bit more insight into the process of creating Spirit Island. Although playtesting and balancing a cooperative strategy game like Spirit Island was certainly a challenge, by far the biggest challenge we have run into with this game is the sheer number of unique art pieces it requires. We at Greater Than Games believe very strongly, and I am sure you’d all agree, that card games with new, beautiful pieces of art on every unique card look way better than games that reuse art across multiple cards. This was the principle we’ve stuck with for Sentinels of the Multiverse from the very beginning, and I think it has contributed to the excitement so many feel about that game.

When we started in on Spirit Island, we decided to go the same route even though we knew that it would be more of a challenge. With Sentinels of the Multiverse, we are lucky to have Adam as an in-house staff artist, but for Spirit Island, we wanted to go with a more painterly, watercolor look that is very different from Adam’s style. This required commissioning over 200 pieces of art from several dozen different artists. Even though we knew getting this art drawn and managing the artists would be time consuming, we underestimated just how much time it would take. For the majority of these artists, their contracts with us are just a small part of their annual workload, so they have to fit us into their schedule. In addition, a very small number of people started work, and then backed out or stopped contacting us, necessitating a recommissioning of the art assigned to them. All told, the process of getting art has taken nearly two years!

Fortunately, the art for Spirit Island is now 99% complete! The rules and gameplay have been complete for several months, and have just been in the polishing and editing phase while we’ve been waiting for the final art to come in. We are now finally ready to move into the last phase of pre-production, where we polish up all of the graphic design, layout and edit the rule book, and send everything off to the printer. We think that you’ll be just as pleased as we are with the work all of the artists have done on the game, and agree that it is well worth the wait!

~Paul

Surveys are coming this week!
about 8 years ago – Tue, Apr 05, 2016 at 08:09:57 PM

 Hey, everyone. We hope your April has started out right, and that no one pranked you too hard.

Just a couple things in this update. First of all, like the title says, BackerKit surveys are coming very soon! BackerKit is a pledge management system that will allow you to give us your shipping information and keep your pledge entirely up to date. It's very robust and will allow us to handle your pledges very easily, especially in regards to add-ons and the things like that. It has the nice bonus of letting you change your address yourself, in the event that you move somewhere down the line!

We won't be sending out surveys through Kickstarter. So please be sure to fill out your BackerKit as soon as you get it!

Next, we like to keep you current on some of the art that's being developed for this project. This little gem is a really big deal, and a lot of work went into it. That's right, it's the canonical map of the island!

 Thank you all so much! And keep an eye out for the BackerKit announcement!