Status Report - 2016.10.30 - Manufacturing Wrapping Up. Freight Begins This Week.
over 7 years ago
– Mon, Oct 31, 2016 at 12:04:15 AM
Final assembly taking place this week. Freight is organized. Zeus Editions on their way to Canada for assembly.
Current Work
Manufacturing - We've just did a component check of the game before it goes to final assembly this week. If all goes well, by the end of the week we should be preparing for freight!
Freight - Everything is now lined up for freight. Fingers crossed.
Nearly all components have been received, and all are looking fantastic! We are now waiting for the games to undergo final assembly in China before they are shipped to Canada to undergo Zeusification. The first 200 off the line will be shipped as soon as they are done.
We have slightly pushed the shipping date to November 12.
As always if you have any questions or problems, please email us at [email protected]!
Keep rollin' sixes,
Team Roxley
Status Report - 2016.10.16 - Production Still On Track
over 7 years ago
– Mon, Oct 17, 2016 at 12:24:05 AM
We've spent the last few weeks creating and organizing our freight plan. Not interesting but very important. Production continues at full speed with no further delays. All Zeus Edition components are now in production. No further delays to report at this time.
Current Work
Freight preparation - We have been working on creating our freight plan with GPI for the last week. We should have all freight booked by the end of this week.
Manufacturing - No further delays to report. Still moving along at full speed.
Full resolution photos - A few people requested some high resolution photos of the proof. These can be seen below:
All components are either currently being produced or are already done. We decided to make the story book even larger, so it will now be 11" square.
As always if you have any questions or problems, please email us at [email protected]!
Keep rollin' sixes,
Team Roxley
Status Report - 2016.10.02 - Production Continues
over 7 years ago
– Mon, Oct 03, 2016 at 12:36:09 AM
Production continues at full speed. Zeus Edition components now in production.
Current Work
Manufacturing - Like a good meal, you know everything is great when everyone is quiet. Currently there is minimal chatter between us and GPI, which is a good thing. Production continues at full pace now, which makes us happy. No further delays to report. Fingers crossed.
Convention Appearance - FallCon 2016 - In our home town of Calgary, Alberta, our friends at FallCon 2016 invited us to have booth. The tireless Paul Saxberg did an amazing job of demoing Santorini for tons and tons of gamers all weekend. Orin Bishop, designer of Steampunk Rally also ran a Steampunk Rally tournament. A big thank you to FallCon for hosting us, and to everyone who took the time to stop by our booth!
For more information on FallCon, visit fallcon.com
Ironically, the winner of the Steampunk Rally tournament was dressed like this. Awesome.
Some amazing local businesses we shared the space with
David and Lina have done an amazing job on the artwork for the mini poster, which will also be used as the box liner. We cannot wait to show everyone, but we also feel at this point it would just be better for people to see it when they receive their copy. No spoilers.
The cards have been ordered, and we will be ordering the metal plates this week.
We are still on track for November 10 delivery of these!
As always if you have any questions or problems, please email us at [email protected]!
Keep rollin' sixes,
Team Roxley
Status Report - 2016.09.18 - Press Proofs... Oh. Yes.
over 7 years ago
– Mon, Sep 19, 2016 at 12:46:14 AM
We have received the press proofs from the manufacturer. See below!
Current Work
Timeline - If you didn't catch the last update, we have been delayed. The new mold should be in operation in the next week or so, bringing us to full production speed. Even thought the press proofs look amazing, it is still looking likely we will miss Christmas delivery. Thank you to everyone for your support and we apologize for the delay.
Press Proofs - What is a press proof? Well, it is a copy of the game that the manufacturer has sent us so that we may check on registration, color, etc. Some of the surfaces may not have the correct and final finish on them.
Unboxing the first white box edition press proof was an emotional experience for Gord Hamilton, the designer of Santorini, who has been waiting 30 years for this!
Gavan here - I have done a lot of printing in my days, and am not easy to impress, but I was honestly floored by how well our manufacturer, Grand Prix International, has nailed this production. We will be making a few nit picking adjustments of course, but everything looks absolutely beautiful. The matte finish and color of the cliff pedestal is as near perfect as we could hope for. The cards, the golden fleece box (which has a little window in it to see the Ram figure), the tiles for the expansion gods, the island board (which is extremely thick cardboard). Everything. The biggest change required is that we will be moving to a matte finish on the island board (it is currently glossy), which in the grand scheme of things is not a significant change.
My talented wife, Sharmilla of Sharmilla Jade Photography, has taken some product shots for us, which you can see below!
What next? Well, GPI will have to make the small adjustments requested, which should not take long at all. They will then go into full production mode on all printed matter. Right now, the biggest lead times are on the plastics, so us approving the printed material now keeps us on our new (after Christmas) schedule.
Because the proofs are looking so close to a manufactured state, we are still looking like we are on target (fingers crossed) for a November 10, 2016 delivery. We will speak with the manufacturer again this week to ensure we are on track.
We have a proof of the synthetic cards, which are of course, beautiful. In the next update, we will have a few photos of components, as well as the mini poster (Mr Cuddington are working on the graphics for this week). :)
As always if you have any questions or problems, please email us at [email protected]!
Keep rollin' sixes,
Team Roxley
Status Report - 2016.09.04 - Production Delayed and Beautiful Samples
over 7 years ago
– Mon, Sep 05, 2016 at 12:35:26 AM
There has been a manufacturing delay of 3-4 weeks. We are extremely disappointed in this, and are doing everything we can to mitigate further delay. Please see below for the full story.
We also received components and they look at feel awesome.
Manufacturing Delay
The problem - Santorini contains many building pieces. These building pieces are made from plastic created by a mold. Due to the number of building pieces in Santorini, producing 10,000 games worth of building blocks will take a significant amount of time.
Unfortunately, due to all the other complexities of the game, lead times, sourcing, etc, the manufacturer simply did not consider that we would require a second mold to meet our set November deadline. This was simple, human, error... with unfortunately large fall out.
The solution - Why not create another mold? That is exactly what we are doing right now. However, these molds are complex and require all sorts of machining and testing. So a mold can take 3-4 weeks to complete. Roxley ordered the tooling of a second mold Wednesday last week, the very moment we were informed of this miscalculation. The second mold will be in action as soon as it is complete.
The result - The result of this is a product delay of 3-4 weeks. There is a probability that some games will be delivered January, which is very unfortunate.
We are shipping containers as soon as they are complete. We will be shipping the first container to the USA, for backers in USA and Canada, as those games will take the longest to arrive at the fulfillment agencies. We will then be shipping a container to EU, then to the rest of the world. This will help to ensure that all backers receive their games around the same time.
Our manufacturer has been doing a stellar job. The samples we have so far are simply amazing (see below). Santorini has a lot of strange production challenges, and they have met every one of them head on. They are doing their absolute best, often answering our emails at 9pm on a work nights, all to ensure that Santorini is as good as it can possibly be for you folks. So while this mistake has broad effect, we (Roxley) must recognize that they are also human, and humans are capable of error.
Roxley and the manufacturer will also do whatever possible to try and shave off any excess time in other areas to increase the probability of a best case scenario.
Lesson learned - Ultimately, responsibility rests with Roxley, as this is our first game in which we've done plastics, and did not realize that plastic lead-times would be this much greater than print production, and therefore did not ask if a second mold would be required. In future projects, we will ensure that the manufacturer does a full analysis of plastic lead times to ensure that we tool enough molds to meet the demand set by our timeline.
To say we feel terrible about this event is a gross understatement. It is a bit disheartening when we put this much work into ensuring the product is delivered on time, only to be held up by an oversight. We absolutely apologize for any inconvenience caused by this. Roxley will continue to strive toward raising our bar of professionalism in every aspect of Kickstarter boardgame design, development, and production. Thank you for your continued support.
Current Work
We are very happy that we also received some good news last week. The proofs came and they look incredible.
Proofs - Buildings - All we can say is wow. These came out more amazing than we could have ever hoped for. They look and feel amazing. The etching is so fine that it almost feels simply matte, but they are the exact color and finish that we had hoped they would be. The manufacturer also tapered the lips on the bottom slightly so they can more easily fit into one another than the prototype. Just awesome!
Proofs - Domes - Perfect. They are the the exact texture and color we hoped for. They are also taller than the prototype to allow them to be picked up more easily.
Proofs - Workers - In the end we decided to go with 25mm, due to the feedback we received on them being far more usable. We were concerned the level of detail would be low, at that size, but we are impressed and surprised with how great they look. The colors are also awesome. It was important to us to have 3 attractive colors that didn't clash with the rest of the color palette, but were also usable by people with color deficiency. We chose to go with tan, light grey, and blue. We are so happy with how these have turned out as well.
Proofs - Cliff pedestal - We requested an adjustment on the cliffs to make it slightly darker, and for them to have a nice matte finish to the buildings and domes.
Zeus Editions - We have ordered most of the components for these. We hope to finish this by the end of this week. We have slightly adjusted the timeline, as this delay only affects the rate of creation of the game. We hope to still have these to backers at the beginning of November.
WhiteBox Editions - We decided that we would add some bling to these by stamping the logo in blue foil! This will provide a greater feeling of elegance. We will post photos as soon as we have them.
As always if you have any questions or problems, please email us at [email protected]!
