Attack From Space: The RPG - Deluxe Edition!

The Ditto Editions and Pledge Manager News
10 months ago – Sun, Mar 17, 2024 at 07:52:38 AM

Greetings, Knights! 

This update has some important notes and dates in it, so PLEASE READ it! 

First up: a change to the printed DITTO EDITIONS:

This applies to the Attack From Space Ditto edition AND the Mörk Borg Ditto Edition of the printed books.

After some back and forth with DriveThru and crunching add-on numbers in Backerkit, we've decided to have the printed books of the ditto edition printed professionally instead of POD. DTRPG's books turn out great and I'm confident that these, with their limited palette, will look excellent, but their turnaround on print approvals is running long right now. In the interest of expediency with getting rewards shipped, I decided to have Mixam print the ditto editions for rewards. For backers, this is largely all good news. It will cost me more, but the end result will be a much nicer book. The changes:

• The books will be printed on higher quality 80lb satin finish paper in full color.
• The cover will now be saddle-stitched and have full-color printed interior covers. This will help it feel even more like it fits the "world" of the handmade game and saddle-stitched books are easier to read than square-bound for smaller books. 
• The cover paper will now be 100lb satin finish cover stock.
• They are scheduled to arrive more than two weeks faster than the DTRPG prints would have.
• No barcodes on the back page or cover. (This is a tiny aesthetic thing, obviously.) 
• The overall cost for printing has gone up, but the add-on price in the pledge manager will not change. Retail for the Ditto Edition will likely be $15+ after the project ends. 
• After reward fulfillment, the remaining stock of this print run will likely only be available at in-person shows.

Pledge Manager Deadlines and Update:

After a lot of back and forth with Backerkit and our postage providers, it does look like the current postage/VAT/tax amounts as they appear on Backerkit are as accurate as we can get them. We are taking a hit on packaging/handling for some of the countries and we have adjusted the rest to be as low as we can. Backerkit does have a beta option for some projects to manually adjust the VAT percentage on every item in their rewards, but it's a program that hasn't rolled out yet and according to them, we would not be a good candidate for access to the program. 

This is the first time we've used Backerkit and honestly, I will likely not be using them again. They are a robust pledge manager, but frankly, too robust for smaller book-based projects like this. In aiming to cover every project potential, they've made it less intuitive for something like AFS and brought virtually nothing to the table in terms of late pledges for what they charge. I thought it would be the right thing to do for our first professionally printed book project, but in the future we will probably stick with more game-forward PMs like Gamefound. I've spent more time in the last few months working on the Pledge Manager than I have the game and this is a game where I've manually filled out over a thousand stickers with a sharpie...

Anyway - I know this isn't what a few of you were hoping to hear and I apologize profusely to you international backers. If you are struggling with the shipping/VAT fees, reach out to me via PM and we can see if there is a better option for you. Our options are limited now that digital rewards have gone out and printing is complete, but I will do everything I can to help out those few of you that this affects. Please double-check the rates on Backerkit as well - they have gone down for most backers - especially if you had any add-ons. 

ON FRIDAY, MARCH 22nd, we will lock the Backerkit orders. They will give you 48 hours to make any adjustments needed before it locks down (And should send out an email reminder about that). Once that is complete, we will charge cards. If you miss the deadline, it is my understanding that I can unlock your survey and get you access to it after that date, but obviously, it is ideal if you can make sure to lock in your survey by Friday!

Once surveys have been locked, adjusted, and charged, shipping will begin in the first week or two of April. 

Kris

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Shipping Charge Changes & Backerkit Cutoff!
10 months ago – Wed, Mar 13, 2024 at 06:30:08 AM

Greetings, Knights! 

ITEM UPDATES:

First up - our bookmark stickers have arrived and they turned out GREAT. We used Sticker Robot for them, so they're vivid screenprinted vinyl with a back print that pays tribute to the Garbage Pail Kids as well. I love em. 

Now that our pledge manager add-on orders are mostly complete and this last bookmark is here, I can order the ditto copies of the game books from DriveThru and start shipping. If your order does include the ditto copies, it may be a bit of a delay while I wait for the books to arrive, but DriveThru is running at a reasonable printing speed lately. 

Shipping Updates:

I messed up. When I made the Backerkit for the project, I assumed the weight-based shipping profiles I set up took both pledges and add-ons into account, but it turns out I set each category as separate shipping profiles. This means the pledge has a weight-based charge and the add-ons have a separate shipping charge, rather than being added to the original shipping. This has resulted in shipping costs almost doubling in some circumstances for backers that selected add-ons. They've been great to work with, but this is my first Backerkit experience on the creator side, and I've struggled a lot more with their system than I anticipated! 

The good news is that shipping charges haven't been charged yet, and once they are updated, most folks will see a decrease in shipping charges and no one should see an increase of any sort! (If you do for some reason, let me know!) I have messaged Backerkit to get me access to the shipping adjustment and once I do, I will get all of the add-on shipping charges adjusted. The hope is to have that completed in the next few days and on FRIDAY, MARCH 22nd, we will close the Backerkit orders and charge for shipping. Shipping rewards will start immediately after Backerkit sends us the shipping funds! If you have NOT filled out your Backerkit survey, please be sure to do so by that date. 

In other news:

I attended GAMEFACE CON in Baltimore this weekend and had a great time. I got to meet a whole group of other RPG creators in person that I'd been friends with online for ages and sell some of my games in person for the first time too. This was the first year for the show and it was a ton of fun. Pinball, indie RPGs, beer, burgers and tons of games. They're doing it again next year and if you are in the area, it's worth checking out. I had a few copies of Attack From Space with me to show people and I am excited to say that talks are underway for Exalted Funeral to carry the game once fulfillment is complete! For those that don't know, Exalted Funeral is one of the larger online Indie RPG shops and I think Attack From Space will fit in perfectly there.

-Kris

International Shipping and Backerkit
11 months ago – Wed, Feb 14, 2024 at 12:49:37 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Pledge Manager and production updates!
11 months ago – Fri, Feb 09, 2024 at 06:55:13 AM

Hey everyone - sorry about the delay. Beyond book stuff, we had an incredibly difficult birth with the puppies - Without going into detail, we lost five and had to rush Aspen to the emergency vet two hours away at three am in a snowstorm. Happily, the three that did survive and the mother are doing well now, but it took an incredible emotional toll on us. Then we were snowed in for three weeks by a storm which obviously helped matters immensely. (Sarcasm) 

On the Attack From Space front:

PLEDGE MANAGER: Backerkit is FINALLY finished, smoke tests have been sent and surveys will go out to everyone Monday. If you did get one of the survey invites, please fill it out and let me know if you have any questions! This is the first time I've used Backerkit and, while I'm sure the wealth of tools available are great for larger projects, it proved more challenging to get all of our options correct and accounted for than I'd anticipated. 

EXTRAS: Unfortunately, this has been a continuing thorn in my side. One box of stickers was left by a non-functioning side door that was not covered by my cameras in the storm and was utterly destroyed by the snow and ice. (We live in a former roadhouse and it has...7 external doors, but we only use three.) Those have been re-ordered and are due to arrive tomorrow. Another set of stickers arrived and look GREAT. The freebie holographic sticker with Carly AF's art is particularly rad. Some of the stickers were printed so large that I genuinely can't figure out how they thought it was correct. A half-inch circle printed at one inch with an 1/8" white border... I re-ordered those and they were still wrong, so I said screw it, embraced the DIY aesthetic of the book, and hand-wrote ALL of the stickers for those. (Around 3500 of them) The bookmark arrived and looked great, but their margins for variance on the kiss-cut for the sticker were so out of whack, that I ended up refusing the order entirely and have re-ordered the entire run from a different company. The plus side of that is that they will now be screenprinted vinyl, have a GPK-inspired back print, and should be amazing, but I did have to make some small concessions on the art - giving it a larger bleed for the cut. Those should be here in about a week and a half. 

By the time they arrive, everything else should be here, checked, sorted and ready to pack and shipping will get underway. I had scheduled a convention in Utah, but we cancelled it so that I could stay here and make sure everything gets out as soon as possible. I'll also be filming a "How to mutate your book" video for the Mörk Borg kit once I get the last stickers for it.

I truly appreciate your patience with this - the post-campaign, post-printing stuff has been a much larger issue than I could have expected. 

Lastly, I did the art, Kickstarter page and some of the solo rules work for Squid Ink's newest game book - SCI-FI-V - a 5e hack that is focused on culling the chaff from the rules and developing a solid foundation for sci-fi roleplaying and solo adventures. I've been using the beta rules to run a solo Mothership campaign and I've really liked it for that too, if you don't like the 5e aspect. ;) It's over 150 pages and the PDF is only five bucks! Back it HERE.

~Kris

Books have landed!
about 1 year ago – Sun, Dec 10, 2023 at 07:30:38 PM

Good news, everyone! Apart from a box that is still stranded in customs, ATTACK FROM SPACE has arrived at Cryptid Hollow! I'm pretty happy with how it turned out - The paper is perfect - I really wanted paper stock that captured the feel and weight of old-school textbooks and magazines and I think it nailed that - the color printing on it pops and really makes all of the ephemera look hand-applied to the pages. The endsheets have a little deeper glue trough than I'd hoped, (An unfortunate side effect of the paper stock, shorter book length and cover issues) but overall, I think they turned out awesome. 

Now that they've arrived, I can officially finish shipping rates and finalize the design sizes for the Mork Bork Mutation kit. I'll get them ordered in the next week and get the pledge manager launched so everyone can finalize shipping. 

Rewards will go out in January. We had planned to start shipping this month, but considering the delays and package damage we've already seen from holiday shipping, even if the peripherals get here when they are supposed to, we feel like it'd be a better idea to wait until after the Christmas shipping logjam. (Our dogs are also having puppies in the next week or so and that's likely gonna be a crazy time that would have thrown off the schedule too.)  

I'll be back with an update once the pledge manager is live! 

Kris