An update! Gameplay Enhancements, BackerKit Target Date (January), BGG + PAX Unplugged
over 4 years ago – Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 10:37:42 PM

Greetings, citizens of the Kickstarter realm! We are getting packed and ready for BGGCon this week, and then Thanksgiving, and then PAX Unplugged, which is...a pretty bonkers three weeks. 

Gameplay Updates

As we continue to develop the narrative structures for 1001 Odysseys, we've discovered a couple things that had room for improvement. First, we're adding a new section to the Passport called Events. In this section, the Information Officer records things on the Chapter Sheet that have happened this specific playthrough. The Storybook may ask you about these Events later in the Chapter. Now you only have to look in one place to find them!

This change also gives us the freedom to upgrade the DISC system. The colored chips were pretty, but they were tied to a single Location, were difficult to see, and couldn't tell the whole story at a glance (Also, Ivy could attack them. Tsk tsk). We've replaced them with Numbered DISCs that correspond to the active Mission numbers. Now, any time you visit a Location, the Navigator places one of these DISCs there. You can tell which choices you have yet to explore just by looking over the Map, even if you have to walk away from the table and come back later. The Storybook will tell you when it's time to clear out DISCs so you can revisit Locations and make new discoveries. 

These changes make the game easier to play and create a more balanced profile for the crew roles. We're excited to keep writing our Stories with this improved functionality!

Since the new DISCs are bigger, we have reworked the Location Card graphics to make space for the components. Here we have some samples from Avallonis, the capital planet of the Federation, where the unique and peculiar cultures of Insula come together side by side.

BackerKit Opening: January 7

It was initially our plan to have the BackerKit open during the year to take pre-orders alongside address management, but for a number of logistical and geopolitical reasons, that didn't work out! We will be officially opening the BackerKit on January 7, the first Tuesday after New Years, and it will remain open until the game completes production. We'll give everyone ample warning, once we hit print-ready next year.

At that point, we'll be able to include stores as well. So if you're a game store rep waiting to get on board, it won't be much longer! 

PAX Unplugged + BGGCon

Hurray conventions! We will be at BGG, just attending, and at PAX Unplugged, with a booth full of ADVENTURE!  We will be showing off our demo episode of 1001 Odysseys, One Deck Galaxy, and an upcoming card game featuring the art of Cari and Amanda called All the Goodest Puppers. 

We will also have a very fancy new Pinny Arcade pin for sale, which will be revealed soon. It's cute. You want it! 

End of Summer Update!
over 4 years ago – Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 07:50:47 PM

Hello and greetings, future Odyssey crew members! We have completed our summer travel circuit, and are back at home for a whole 8 weeks before BGGCon and PAX Unplugged later this Fall. 

Convention Demo / Print and Play

As mentioned in the last update, we've made a special demo chapter called The Admiral's Request, for use at conventions. It's designed to be shorter than a normal chapter, and people have been loving it! We're very excited by the response we've seen at both Gen Con and XOXO, and in various private demos we've run elsewhere. If you can't make it to a con but still want to see what's in the demo, worry not - we'll be making this mini-chapter available as a Print and Play set of PDFs later this year. 

We even got to play it outside on picnic tables at XOXO, before rain came along and spoiled the fun:

Avallonis looks pretty awesome, and it should. It's the Federation capital, after all!

Gameplay Updates

We have slightly refined the Action portion of the Action + Mission + Location paradigm for choosing a paragraph in the Story Book. Before, players were choosing what they wanted to do first. This often worked well, but sometimes it got repetitive or unpredictable.  Now players will choose to Focus on a feature of the location instead. This will let you read a bit more about what is going on in a location before you decide exactly how you want to act.

The Focus card simply replaces the Action card, so it's no more complicated than the previous arrangement. We've reshuffled the choices behind the scenes, so you get what you expect, and the number of results remains the same. People have responded well to this change, and it's more intuitive to choose what features of locations to focus on instead of whether to Talk or Look or Study (because you almost always wound up talking anyways!)

As you can see, the Focus card looks very similar to the Action cards from past versions. To give an example, if you chose to Focus on the View icon at the Capitol Bulbs, you could wind up looking at the beautiful landscape before you. The paragraph might then have a choice to inspect the orderly arranged bushes, or talk to the landscape painter nearby. Focusing on the Government icon there might send you to the administrative building, and so forth.

Playtests with this tweak have been going well, and it's helped improve the variety of the stories that we're writing. Now we can focus more on the features of the many locales we visit, which is fun. 

BackerKit

We've been putting off opening the BackerKit in the hopes that we'd have some concrete idea of how tariff situations and Brexit would go, but it seems like that's simply impossible, so we're working on it now. 1001 Odysseys will be printed and assembled in the US, but a few of its bits will be sourced elsewhere. (Plushies, notably!)

Our goal is to have pre-orders available in the next few weeks.

Gen Con this week! Full update + BackerKit after Gen Con
over 4 years ago – Tue, Jul 30, 2019 at 01:04:17 AM

We're prepping for Gen Con this week, but wanted to give everyone a quick update on things before we head out. We'll be doing a full update after we get back, at which point we'll be opening up the BackerKit!  

We will be in Booth #2455, and we'll be showing off our fancy new demo episode of 1001 Odysseys - designed specifically for conventions. Up until now, we'd been using a modified version of the first chapter of Blast from the Chloroplast at cons. Now we'll have a mini-story that completes in a 15-30 minute session. If you're at Gen Con, come check it out! We will also be showing off One Deck Galaxy and Phoenix Syndicate, and selling a short run of copies of Aegean Sea, by Carl Chudyk.

Art Update!

But what you're all actually here for...is pretty art. So here's the mostly-done version of the  map of Avallonis :)

When we open up the BackerKit, we'll start shipping out canvases as well!

May + June Update: We are writing ALL THE THINGS!
almost 5 years ago – Sat, Jun 29, 2019 at 01:52:53 AM

Greetings and welcome to Summer, everyone! (For those of you on the southern side of that Equator thing, welcome to Winter!) 

Database

One of the toughest things about creating this game is organizing all of our writing, both for collaborative purposes for editing + discussion, but also for exporting so that we can actually make a book out of thousands of disconnected paragraphs! (imagine a bulletin board with pins, yarn, and 1000 post-it-notes, detective style.) So, to manage our work on this game, and on the expansions that will surely follow, we (I) have been working on a custom database + web front-end to manage it all. It's nearly operational, and will make our lives much easier. Until now, we've been working in a mishmash of Google Docs and InDesign files. Hurray for thousands of lines of code!

Story 2 Progress

As mentioned in the previous update, we've been working on the second of the four books that will be part of the base game. Why did we start with books 4 and 2? MYSTERIES!  All of the chapter parameters, missions, and game-flow have been completed, what will follow next is the writing + editing of the rest of the paragraph blurbs. And some cute art. Once we're done with that, it'll be on to books 1 and 3.

We also have been working on designing + backstorying all of the locations you'll visit in book 2, and the one or more worlds that those locations belong to! Worldbuilding is incredibly fun, and some of our best meeting discussions are throwing random ideas out there and seeing what sticks. We hope you have as much fun visiting these places as we've had creating them :)

Art Progress

Spring is busy convention season, so not as much art has been created, but the painting for Avallonis is happening very soon.  Lots of our focus has been on the almanac images for the various races. For example, this Zibzab:

You may have heard that Zibzab are gruff, but this fine fellow just wants to fix your spaceship! 

Gen Con (New Demo!)

We will indeed be at Gen Con this year - booth (#2455) in the expo hall, and we will be showing off a demo mission of 1001 Odysseys and the beta of One Deck Galaxy. This is a new demo mission we've created just for cons, so even if you've played before, come check it out!

Tariffs

You may have heard all the concern about tariffs and their impact on the board game industry. Not going to lie, the tariffs would hurt things A LOT, and they're foolish for a thousand reasons I won't go into here. Even if they do go into effect, they should not impact 1001 Odysseys. We're planning on printing the majority of the components in the US, and the things that will be impacted (pins, plushie) shouldn't be too bad. 

BackerKit + Pre-orders

We'll be taking pre-orders starting in August, so for people that missed out, that'll be your chance to join :)

Ivy

Currently, Ivy has declared that it is Too Hot Outside, and will be napping soon:

April Update: Write write writing!
about 5 years ago – Wed, Apr 10, 2019 at 09:41:03 PM

Hello, and happy Spring!

Are there spoilers in the updates?

Some of the best parts of the 1001 Odysseys adventures are the parts when you encounter new worlds, meet new friends, and encounter wacky adventures. We enjoy writing those parts too! If this were another game, we'd be blabbing about the brilliant new character we just invented, showing off our lovely narrative tree, and maybe even livestreaming a writing meeting or two. But in this game, spoilers would have a big negative impact on the effect of the final prose. You wouldn't get to feel those jolts of discovery and wonder as you travel through Insula. But we've devised a balanced solution that will keep you up to date on our progress without ruining your future play. We'll be talking about the kinds of things we're working on, without using specifics from the narrative.

Our demo chapter is of course already out in the wild, and we may do additional demos or playtests of other chapters at conventions in the future, but we're not going to post spoilers here on our Kickstarter page, or on social media, or on Plumplim.com.

What have we been up to?

Sleeping! And after that, getting to work. Since the campaign ended, we've outlined and scheduled everything we're doing for the next year. We're taking the basic ideas for books 1, 2, and 3 that we developed during the campaign and we're building those ideas into sturdy story scaffolding. In Book 2, codenamed [REDACTED, BUT IT'S AN AWESOME PUN TRUST ME], we have mapped out concepts for all the chapters, and we're now writing introduction and conclusion prose, defining player mission trees, and designing all sorts of fun characters who will [MYSTERY] with you during the [INTRIGUE] and [BANANA] spectacular. It's going well, and we're having a lot of enjoyable writer-meetings talking about the adventures.

Last week, we brought our earlier prototype to PAX East, where we ran a couple dozen demos for attendees, and it was great to see peoples' eyes light up reading paragraphs, interacting with the components, and generally having a great time. I cannot overstate how satisfying it is to see people enjoy our stories, and thanks again to all the backers helping us make this game possible.

The other big task ahead of us is art. Above is part of Amanda's fabulous construction of Avallonis, the Federation capital world. We'll share more pictures as the painting process proceeds!

Canvases

We're going to have canvases start shipping later this month, we'll be sending a note to backers who pledged for them asking whether they want to choose one of the already-complete paintings or wait to see the rest before deciding. Expect that in two weeks.

BackerKit

The BackerKit is going to come in two stages. Stage one is pre-orders, for folks that missed the KS campaign. Those will begin late this month, available for US-only. Stage two will be collection of addresses and add-ons and pre-orders for non-US people. That will happen this fall.

What's Next?

Writing! Writing forever!

It's fun though, we're excited to be creating for you all. Until next time!