A Beginning in the End.

WE DID IT! We made a whole board game in less than a month!

We handed it off to others to play today...it sounded like they enjoyed it.

50 points for whoever can recognize Phillip and Hannah in this pic!

But this isn't the end for our team, or for Iron Tyrant. Coming soon...find us on Kickstarter!

And the pieces fall in to place!

We met last night to paint, to refine, to finish. And so we did.

The rules were set and formatted for booklet printing. Buildings and tyrants were painted, repainted, detailed, and sealed.

The biggest beast to conquer was the assembly of the box. We discovered two things: paper cement doesn't work well for smooth card stock on cardboard, and everyone should own a hot glue gun. At one point we did have to send someone out to get another piece of cardboard because the top of the box was measured incorrectly.

Other than that, the night (and this morning) went smoothly. The board was set in, dividers placed, small bits separated to individual baggies, and over 200 building pieces were set, tangram style, into layers in the box.

We are now at about 30 minutes until turn in...wish us luck!

It's the final countdown...

Tomorrow it's due. And we're gonna make it.

The cards got done, they just need printing. The magnets are cut, and they look awesome. The rules are ready to go.

All that was left, was the 200something buildings, power cores, and tyrant characters.

It's a messy process...

Phillip and I saw another 5:00am, and we cast quite literally until the sun came up. Painting and box assembly coming up!

And then came the Crunch...

Here we are at the most nerve wracking, most stressful, most exhausting...and yet most exciting part of the game experience: Crunch time. We find ourselves in the last weekend before submission, and we have LOTS to do.

We all planned to meet at Phillip's house for construction. We still needed to finish designing, printing, and cutting cards and magnetic doll pieces. The board and box were designed and printed but needed assembly, rules still needed editing and formatting, and while models and molds were complete, we still needed to cast and paint over 200 plastic game bits.

We were in for a long night...but that was okay. We ordered pizza, put on some How I Met Your Mother, and worked. This team gets along well, so it was as much a party as it was work. Macauley even made a theme song: "Ain't no party like a board game party 'cause a board game party is...MANDATORY."

For the most part, everything went well...except. Our buildings were just too big. We cast a few sets of them, but soon realized it would take a prohibitive amount of material to finish!

We would need to redesign the buildings, and so we did, but it was disappointing. The big buildings we made looked great, and felt right on the board, but it just wasn't possible to follow through with the rest of them.

It was shortly after this revelation, and somewhere around 5:00am, that the night (or morning) devolved to scotch and brownies.

Cheers! To board games and crunch time!

We think we can, we think we can!

Today will be a short post because well...today was the day for pushing through the work. No discussion, and few words were exchanged today as we all hunkered down and pumped out progress.

I worked on the art for the board, Mariel designed the cards' front and back layouts, Macauley wrote flavor text, and Phillip refined rules.

The one screen may look like Facebook, but he swears he was being productive on the other!

The deadline for the final board approaches on Tuesday, so the coming weekend will see the start of our crunch period...wish us luck!

Revelations

 Today saw one ideas and two revelations!

Mariel has been slaving away making art for all of the weapons and utilities to use on our magnetic doll cards, but some how we all forgot about board and box art. Our first revelation...was that we needed these.

A sneak peek at the art for our favorite utility: the "Filching Falcon"

Since Mariel was pretty tied up, I decided to work on the art for the board. Obviously, we wanted it to represent the city your mechs were running around and destroying. Here's our second revelation: cities tend NOT to look like crossword puzzles, so making our current board look like a city was going to be difficult.

So, Phillip set to work on a new board that would be easier to lay a city theme on top of.

Check it:

That finger represents Phillip's blog photo debut.

The brilliant idea from today came for Professor Jack Mamais, who came into the room and announced that he had a title for our game! Are you ready for this?

IRON TYRANT

The plot thickens...

We had an evening meeting today to continue work on the physical aspects of the board.

Previously, we decided that instead of using wooden pieces to make buildings, we could instead model one of each type of building in clay, and then cast it in cheap plastic - just like the pros! Though potentially more expensive (instead of just wood blocks and glue, this process requires clay, acrylic, silicon mold material, and polyurethane material), we would be able to make buildings more consistent, sturdier, and ultimately more professional looking.

They be jealous of my clay modeling.

I began this process today, as  Macauley and Phillip started drafting the first version of the rule set, discussing missing details, refining vague points, and addressing differing understandings of mechanics.

Mariel brought in some of the artwork she's been working on for weapons and armors bit to use in the paper dolls - we were blown away by the amount of work she got done, and by the quality.

This was an interesting meeting for us. We had seen our gameplay in action, and gathered that others found the play engaging, and the right level of challenge. Now however, we are beginning to see how the game will LOOK.

The picture is coming together...and it is lookin' purdy.