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Hello fellow Killer Bunnies fans!
Happy Leap Day yesterday: the most unique day of the year because it doesn't exist in 1 out of 4!
DELIVERY
I've been hard at work this month getting Jupiter pieces ready. I want to start off by making sure you know what I am committing to finishing by the time the game arrives at your door in August and what may or may not be finished in time. To remind you, I have the full game split up into 3 sections called Tiers: the Marker Tier, the Ship Tier, and the Sculpture Tier. As you know, the modeling for the Marker Tier is all done, so I will commit to delivering any orders for that entire tier. I wish I could commit the entire Ship Tier ... but I might have to split it up. I can say that I'm hoping I can get the whole thing done in time, but there's a lot to do and I can't be sure. I will commit to getting you the first Ships Starter Package for sure. I'm still working on the two Ship Booster Packages and we'll have to see how quickly they get along. I can say they'll for sure be ready by the end of the year ... but that's all I can commit to as I try to get them ready by August. Another reminder: the Ships packages are a bit more complicated because there is a Deluxe and an Ultra-Deluxe version of each. No matter which version you order, either Starter Ship Package will for sure be ready in time. I do not anticipate the Sculpture Tier will be ready by the end of this year, but it is possible, depending on how the roll-out of my first orders goes.
Okay, that was boring. Now onto the cool stuff.
MARS
Let me start with a question: off the top of your head, how big is Mars compared to Earth? Maybe you answered, "A little smaller than Earth, but still almost the same size." Yeah, that's what I thought too. I even asked my siblings and parents how big they thought Mars was and every single one of them gave a range of between 50% and 95% that of Earth. I was so convinced of this that—after seeing a model of the Solar System while taking my family to see a planetarium this month—when I saw Mars I immediately said the designers were wrong. I did some further research and found a shocking fact: Mars is, in fact, tiny. Its diameter is half that of Earth's, which makes its volume ... wait for it ... 15% that of Earth!! That's like 1/6 the size! I almost literally couldn't believe it. For some reason in my American culture, I have grown up thinking we'd one day colonize Mars because it is close enough to Earth in size and tilt and magnetic field or whatever that it was possible. But nope! VENUS is about the same size as Earth, but is totally uninhabitable because the whole planet is at oven-like temperatures.
Because of this new fact I have learned, I realized my Mars marker had to change. My overall strategy had to pretty much ignore true relative size (for obvious reasons relating to the Gas Giants) but I still followed a Small, Medium, Large approach for representation: Jupiter is Large, its moons are Small, the rest of the planets are Medium, and Pluto is Small. As I looked into it, I discovered that the moon Ganymede (represented on the Jupiter marker) is pretty much the same size as Mars, and if I put that one in the Small category, I clearly can't put Mars in a different category. So even though I know I told you I was done with Mars ... it got a revamped revamp anyway. While I was at it, I made a couple other tweaks. In total, I ...:
Sized it down from Medium to Small.
Exaggerated the topography just a tad more to account for the smaller size.
Refined its ice cap to make it more obvious (thus more clearly showing its true angle in the solar system, which I worked so hard to figure out).
Upgraded the red color. It was a little washed-out before, so I got a richer, more vibrant red plastic to use instead.
And here's what it looks like in comparison to the old Mars and current Earth.
The best surprise I had was that this new size is still just enough for me to be able to keep the weight of the marker the same as the other Planets.
COLORS
Last time I introduced the different versions of Ships I have planned out. I want to show you the biggest differences that I love about the Ultra-Deluxe. First off is the colors. My initial plan was to make each ship one uniform color, but I noticed a couple patterns that would provide a nice upgrade. One pattern was the overall theme of the game. The theme is clearly a parody of well-known sci-fi universes, and one of the things Jonathan did to add to that feel was integrating carrots into the designs of some of the ships. Specifically, the three Blue ships and two of the Specialty ships have this. So for those ships I will be adding Orange details to the print. I am printing the ships on very fine detail which makes extra colors more costly, but that's what the Ultra-Deluxe version is for.
The other color change is to the Aliens. There are 49 ships total in the game and 16 of those are Beyea Aliens. I have put a lot of effort into making them have a different look and feel from the BSSs (Bunny Space Ships) to make reading the board during gameplay more intuitive. One thing that was added was an original design that Jonathan Young himself made specifically for these pieces! His idea was to use this to distinguish better between the Green alien ship and the Green BSSs, which have a similar form. The design change is adding two boosters to the back. I realized that by adding some color, I could make an even clearer difference between Aliens and BSSs. So for all the Ultra-Deluxe Beyea Aliens, I will be changing the color of the dome to match (as close as I can) the color on the cardboard markers. This really makes the Aliens pop out if you're looking for them, which I think is important for board analysis, especially when playing the version where a player is the Beyea Aliens when lots of Alien ships will be on the board.
With 16 Beyea Aliens and 5 carrot-adorned BSSs, that puts the number of extra-colored ships to 21, which is almost half of all ships.
STANDS
Colors
It's time to show you the stands. I'm really proud of these ones. Each stand of a different color is also a different height. This was an idea Jonathan had as a solution to the problem of making the ships big enough to see on the board.
Some background: at first I had the stands all the same height, and in order for ships to sit next to each other they needed to be really small. When we actually used them, we found they were so small that they got lost on the full-sized board during play-testing. Making them bigger required overlap on neighboring hexes, which wasn't conducive for ships to sit next to each other. Jonathan's first genius solution was to angle the ships so they could kind of nest next to each other. It worked really well, and it was after an idea I had to make each color have random heights to make it more likely for ships to be able to sit next to each other, though not a guarantee. Jonathan tweaked that idea to each level of Dice Power progressively higher than the previous level. Jeff LOVED this idea because it showed visually the power dynamic instead of only relying on the colors. This is also better for color-blindness. Using this design, a super powerful ship that can roll the Pink 30-sided die will tower over the low-level ships that can only roll the Violet 6-sided die. Again, it makes analyzing the power dynamic on the board much more intuitive.
A picture is worth a thousand words. This is what I mean:
Weights
After we decided to make every level of ship Power taller than the previous one, I was concerned that the tallest (Pink) wouldn't be stable enough. I ran some tests to see how high I could go and found that in order to have a noticeable difference from one level to the next, I had to sacrifice some stability. I found a max height that fits a good balance but still wanted it to be more stable to further reduce the chance of the ship falling over as much as I possibly could. (Be it from a bump to the table or accidentally knocking a resting ship as a player moves another ship around.) So for the Ultra-Deluxe versions I'm adding weights to the stands. The normal Deluxe versions won't have weights and I have found it to still work well; the weighting is really just a perfectionistic convenience to get that extra finishing touch if you really want it.
Peg Cutouts
Just to make sure it's clear, I wanted to let you know that each stand also has a peg cutout, just like the markers do, to allow for a ship to rest on places such as a Planet or other Random Location.
INSERTS
I want to mention this briefly; I'll say more about it next month. One of the finishing touches I'm adding to all packages is a nice insert. Now, there's a secret to these that I'll keep for now, but suffice it to say that I have started working on it and have just about finished the inserts for all the Marker packages. I needed to get on this ASAP so that I could get a more accurate estimate on how much time it would take me to finish the other ones. I know how long it takes me to design pieces, but designing the inserts is a totally different ball game. Now that I have experience with that under my belt, I can be more sure what I can commit to delivering come August and what I'll need more time on. This next month I'll be pinning down details on other packaging requirements.
That's it for the month, thanks for following.
~Hale-Bent
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