I just wanted to say, before continuing with more ks updates, that in reading some of the posts on ENWorld, that there are a lot of deep thinking people here. The discussion about business decisions on kickstarters, the changes in the gaming industry/rpgs and the intricacies of fantasy itself.
I guess what I'm getting at is, you probably want to know a little more about us than just us posting about our latest upcoming kickstarter content. So, here goes!
The world of Dungeon Crawler started a very long time ago based on my perception of what a fantasy world should be as a teen (I'm pushing 40 now). It was meant to be an electronic game but I was not able to get it off the ground. A card game version, however, was totally doable. I wanted a real adventuring kind of feel to the game, wanted to be able to play it as a solitaire game, with some complexity so it could be replayed without being boring. So I pulled together some talent, some funds and got to work.
Two years later we "released" our game at GenCon 2010 (my first time there in fact). We had a great deal of stumbling blocks and a real trial-by-fire kind of start with our printers that did everything wrong, but we made changes and persevered. We still struggle with the industry, but we're making headway. One of those changes was to make it an ECG rather than a CCG. Collectible had become a dirty word in the industry, and Expandable was the way to go (no randomization).
Going back a little, I'd been playing D&D since I was a teen, and when I saw WotC put out PPMs I was more than ecstatic. I was in love. I always liked metal miniatures and plastic miniatures (looks over at his shelf of HeroQuest x3, Warhammer Quest, pile o MageKnight, Dark World...), but I was never any good at painting, disliked assembly, the weight of metal and its fragility - so PPMs were a blessing!
Then WotC stopped producing them. I'd been tracking them for years on PlastiCrypt (formerly ddmspoilers) and really didn't want them to disappear. So, I found some investors and began investigating in making my own line. It was a very long process, not quite the trial by fire we experienced with the cards, but certainly challenging. We went to the market with a meagre offering of 4 minis all themed around tentacles... turns out there's some connotations to that, BUT none-the-less, they were meant as a proof of concept, the easiest to sculpt and hopefully useful for RPGers.
We're still doing the card game, we've expanded to a webcomic and miniatures of our own, all based on that singular fantasy concept that I've been developing throughout the years. There are many that condemn us for trying something odd (like tentacles), but we do our best to stay away from things that have been done to death in PPM. It can take us a long time to get product done, but we
will get it done, and sometimes that governs our decisions on what gets made. IF there's a good chance that a larger company will make something before we can get it done, we will try to avoid it. But, once something is set in motion, we're kind of committed (we lose literally months if we make changes at certain stages, and we don't have the funding to chuck out sculpts).
We are a truly fledgling company making its way in the industry as
an actual start-up the very thing kickstarter was designed to help with. It really is just me and my wife running the show, and our small-time investors that helped us get started are pretty much just fans of fantasy as well. We like that sometimes we get mistaken for big business, which is cool, but we're happiest when we see new fans we've never met before post their love our stuff.
There's a bunch more, but this is a thread for discussion, and hopefully this will spark some of that.
