Remaining Pledge Manager Surveys Go Live Today as well as the Pre-Order Store
over 2 years ago
– Wed, Nov 17, 2021 at 11:36:02 PM
Hello all,
Thank you again for your patience. We have received 59% of the initial Pledge Manager Surveys and only had a few minor questions come up. At this time, we feel comfortable opening up the rest of the surveys.
One thing we noticed during this test we want people to be aware of:
- If you did not fill out the Kickstarter Survey, your shipping price may not be correct while you are on the "Add-On" screen. Proceed to the shipping page to update your address, and on the next screen, it should reflect the correct shipping rate. If not, reach out to us, but please get to that last screen first to make sure it knows the correct address first.
Beyond that, we haven't had any other reported issues so we feel it is time to open up the Surveys for everyone; additionally, we are now opening the preorder store for everyone who did not back the project while it was live on Kickstarter.
Payments & Survey Durations
It appears if you pay with PayPal, you will be paying immediately with the funds being transferred upon completion of your survey. For those paying with credit card, the payments are not charged to your card until later in the schedule; I believe we will charge cards shortly before the freight arrives at their destinations port so probably February/March. More on this in a future update.
You will be able to change your order (add/remove add-ons) and update your address until late December/early January. We will make another update when we are about 1~2 weeks from closing the Surveys and locking the orders. Addresses can usually still be updated after this point, but it will require you to directly message us so we can update it. Addresses will be locked once they leave the dock and head to the fulfillment centers.
FLGS: You will need to reach out to us to update your orders. Feel free to message us when you would like to finalize your orders, and we will work with you to ensure your amounts are correct.
Pre-Order Store is Live
For anyone who is not already a backer of this game, there is now the opportunity to order copies via our Pre-Order Store. Again, this is not for backers who will be finalizing their orders via the Pledge Manager survey. We have limited quantities available so once we have sold them all, that is all we will have until we do a second print run.
Final Thoughts
We hope everything goes smoothly for everyone with the surveys. Let us know if you run into any issues or have any questions.
Jon and Brian
Usiak Games and Designs
Mass Production Approved and Pledge Manager Opening Shortly!
over 2 years ago
– Fri, Nov 12, 2021 at 09:47:35 PM
Hello everyone!
We have a few updates we wanted to share with you today. Thank you for your patience. With this being our first project, the communication with the manufacturer, freight forwarders, and fulfillment partners has taken a little longer to get all sorted out. We are pleased to announce we have green lit mass production to begin, worked out the final details with the fulfillment company selection, and the Pledge Manager surveys will be going out over the next week (initially to 5% of backers today). Our shipping month (April 2022) is still possible, but the schedule slack I had built in is almost all used so production ending by the end of January will be the most important milestone at this point. We will keep you updated as we move forward.
If you like your updates short, those are the highlights of this update and you can pop down to the last section "Final Thoughts"; the following is the expanded details for those who prefer knowing a lot more about the inner workings of Kickstarter projects:
Pledge Manager Surveys (and Pre-order store) Will Open Up This Week
We finally have the shipping/freight all worked out (details in the next section), and we were able to finish the Pledge Manager survey details. For those not familiar, before Pledge Managers can be sent out, you have fill out all of the shipping rates locked in.
For those who haven’t had to do this before, it is a lot of work because you have to collect all of the rates from each fulfillment center you opt to use, create shipping rates for each location to be shipped to, and insert them in four places for BackerKit (for our project at least). You have to insert the rates for each Pledge Tier (two in our case that had physical items), a section for existing backer to purchase extra copies, and a section for new customers rates. To keep the rates as low as possible for those buying additional copies, we went through the weight ranges (2, 4, 6, etc. #KG) to provide the most accurate rates.
While we tried to fill out for every major region, we may missed a few. While you are filling out the survey, if you have shipping price of $999.99, that means we did not create a shipping profile for you location. You will need to direct message our Kickstarter page, and we will create a new profile so you get accurate rates. We have a survey question also alerting you about this as well.
As such, we will be sending out the initial batch of Pledge Manager surveys today (to roughly 5% of backers). This “smoke test” will allow those 5% to pay for their shipping and select add-ons; we expect there will be a few issues that could pop up during this initial batch of surveys and hope to work these out before sending out to all of the backers. We imagine we will be sending out the rest of the surveys mid-late next week (17~20th).
You will still have until likely late December/early January to change your mind about add-ons and finalize shipping payments. We will be closing these surveys about 2~3 weeks prior to manufacturing wrapping up so we can provide the final shipping data to the manufacturer with packaging instructions as well as our freight forwarders.
Shipping Freight Updates
We finally got all of the shipping prices finalized for the EU/UK, which is what had held up this progress. As you may recall, we originally had planned to use a single fulfillment company for this project, but in July as our project was wrapping up on Kickstarter, they had announced due to the changes within the EU/UK, they were no longer serving those region. We had to spend the last few months chatting with potential alternatives. We finally settled on the following: QML for the Americas and ShipQuest for most of the rest of the world. This combination allowed us to keep the shipping rates for backers the same as we had originally planned during the Kickstarter. So, there will be no increases to your shipping rates.
Our freight will be higher than originally budgeted for, which anyone who has been tracking the current state of shipping will know. We decided we will absorb this cost to keep our estimates to our customers in place. That means we will not earn any profits from this project, but we decided since this is mostly a two-person team and we each have jobs, that is fine for this game. As a new business, we obviously want to have some profit, but we see this game as our start in the industry and want to maintain a good relationship with our customers. All we ask is please understand we have kept the shipping as low as we feasibly can without having to pay out of our own pockets to get the games to you.
Mass Production Approved to Begin
We have officially signed off on the mass production files. The manufacturer took a little while (3~4 weeks) to go over all of the files and provide update comments. Jon was very quick to turn around the modified files the same day they provided the comments. Mostly minor things to double check like bleed lines and to make sure they were using the latest files and not files from the sample print.
Now that we have approved of the files, it can be added into their print queue. This doesn’t necessarily mean it will begin next week, but it should start this month. As we know more on this, we will update you all.
Overall Schedule
As I had originally planned about 2 months of slack into the schedule, we are getting very close to that slack being all used. One major piece that delayed everything was getting the production sample. I think it took roughly 4-6 weeks from the time we requested the sample before we received it. Our previous sample in 2019 took about 2 weeks to arrive, which is what we expected for this one.
As of right now with the durations our partners have told us will be needed for their work, we still have a chance at being on time for April shipping, but I will know more once we near the end of the manufacturing. Freight, of course, is the wild card; we should be avoiding the freight from the holidays so that will work very well in our favor.
My hope is we can have the games on a boat by the Chinese New Year (first half of February) to avoid any additional slowdowns. That will essentially be what determines if we still have a chance of getting the games shipped out from our fulfillment companies in April as planned. Obviously, once it is on the boat, it should reach the fulfillment country on time, but how long it takes for the boat to be able to dock and unload is the major unknown as we have seen with other projects. We hope early 2022 will be much better in this respect.
Again, as we monitor our schedule, we will provide you with more details. Once manufacturing actually begins, I will work with Jon to create an updated Schedule graphic to provide a better idea of what our current project timeline looks like.
Final Thoughts
Thank you again for supporting our first project. I plan to do a video unboxing of our production sample in the next couple weeks. I had planned to have it done sooner, but we wanted to get everything else wrapped up first.
As we are getting to the point with this project where we have less direct control of things for a while, Jon and I will be resuming our development of our next two projects. We don’t have a lot of details to provide now, but one will be a direct expansion for SKEPTICS while the other is in the same universe but will be a separate card game. We look forward to revealing more next year after the current game is in your hands.
Let us know if you have any questions or comments. Feel free to publicly share them in the project comments or direct message us. Have a great weekend!
Jon and Brian
Usiak Games and Designs
The Sample Package Has Arrived!!!
over 2 years ago
– Mon, Oct 11, 2021 at 02:58:02 AM
Hello Everybody!
The sample game copy of SKEPTICS has finally come! The manufacturer was a bit delayed, but it is here!
So now that I have it in my hands, I will be looking over everything and making sure there is nothing printed wrong, typos, etc. I must say everything looks fantastic so far!
Minor things:
The dice are still an Olive Color, where it should be a lighter green, but our manufacturer told us because it was a sample copy, that we would be finalizing the color during production.
Also, there is a 2mm discrepancy in the insert tray that holds the Magnifying Glass tokens, leaving 1 of the 5 not able to fit. This is a very minor concern, and if it costs more just to push it down 2mm, we are going to leave it be. The Tray is beautifully designed, so I don't want to sacrifice depth in other places where we need it, just to appease one small token.
Other than that, the sample came out wonderful, as expected. See the images attached for the unboxing (I didn't make a video this time, but tried to present it nicely).
PRE-ORDER STORE
On another note, we are almost ready with the Pre-Order store. Still waiting on more forms to fill out, and waiting on one last update from BackerKit to help adjust some things in Pledge Manager. We were hoping to have it open in September, but things were delayed. Brian recently wrote up a long update about that.
Thank you everyone! We will keep you updated!
Jon Usiak
Usiak Games and Design
