October Update & Designer Diary
over 2 years ago – Tue, Oct 26, 2021 at 12:57:32 AM

Hi everyone!

I hope this update finds you well, wherever you may be.

Fall has officially arrived here in Minnesota, so that means I’m now wearing sweaters and wool-lined slippers on a daily whereas mere weeks before I was wearing t-shirts and sandals. It also means that I’ve been spending plenty of time indoors, warming myself by the light of my laptop, watching Earthborne Rangers steadily come to life.

Pledge Manager Update

Shortly after I posted last month’s update, we received confirmation from Backerkit that we will be able to charge shipping separately from your product order. That means that we can safely launch the pledge manager before we settle on shipping costs (which is exciting since the current cost of shipping is quite high).

Now, the only thing standing in the way of the pledge manager opening is my desire to improve the product imagery so that it can make the best possible impression.

Evan is currently working on a new graphical treatment for the Legacy of the Ancestors box that we’re extremely excited about. Plus, we're working on near-to-final visuals for the fold-out Valley map and the Art & Lore Book (among some other fun surprises).

If you’re champing at the bit to explore the pledge manager, rest assured that it will be worth the wait. We’ll get it up and running as soon as everything is living up to our (possibly unreasonable) expectations, and it will remain open for several months thereafter.

Sustainability Update

I recently received an updated quote for the core set, and I was happy to see that material prices have held steady since the previous quote. There are now giant asterisks all over it, however, warning us that “Due to the volatility of the market, stock [paper] and chip [puchboard] pricing may need to be adjusted.” As you might imagine, that wasn’t the most comforting thing to read given the fact that the entirety of the core set is made of paper. The warning is due to the supply chain issues that are currently plaguing the manufacturing of all things, but since we’re not on the verge of printing, the situation may improve by the time we’re ready to go to press.

On the bright side, we’re very close to having a fully FSC-compliant product, which is very exciting. Plus, the entire game as quoted should be both fully recyclable and compostable, which is exactly what I was hoping for.

With that, I’ll hand the update off to Andrew Fischer for this month's designer diary. Enjoy!

See you next month!

Much love,

Andrew

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Designer Diary (October) - Planning our Route

At the end of September I went on a multi-day backpacking trip to catch the fall colors on the Superior Hiking Trail, a 300+ mile footpath that follows the shore of Lake Superior.

Even though the Superior Hiking Trail is fairly linear, I still had to carefully plan my route before I left and ask myself some important questions. How much distance/elevation change do I think I can cover each day? Where are the good campsites and water sources? How much food will I need? Where are the fire bans, detours, or bridges out? What spurs or overlooks should I account for?

Having this plan doesn’t mean I was “on-rails” for the entire trip. In fact, I made a lot of changes as I went: I shortened the first day after pulling my calf a bit, I forded a river a mile early based on a tip from other hikers, and I climbed to a couple of bonus overlooks when I found myself with extra time later in the trip. I still had the freedom to improvise and do what I wanted, but my route planning gave me the context and information to better understand the decisions I had to make. I could better see the opportunities and pitfalls of my decisions because of how they altered and evolved the original plan.

Designing a big game like Earthborne Rangers is a lot like planning one of these hikes. As a team, we need a comprehensive plan and vision for what the entire game looks like, but we also need the flexibility to be able to iterate on the design. We need a plan that is specific enough to give context to our decision making, but broad enough to leave room for creativity and improvisation. So, for this month’s update, I wanted to share a couple pieces of what that planning looks like for our team. (And remember, all of this is subject to change as we continue to iterate on the game.)

Mapping the Valley

As an “open-world” game, everything in Earthborne Rangers is given context through its location in the Valley. Because of this, I wanted to make sure we were thinking about each location and character through the lens of where you would be encountering them.

To this end, we’ve made an Indesign document of the Valley map that we can use for reference and collaboration. Each location has its name, summary, and a list of landmark cards on separate layers that can be shown or hidden as needed. Also, each path is a vector object that can be edited with a click, allowing us to quickly move things around or change terrain types based on playtesting.

This map was sketched out based on Andrew and Sam’s world-building work and writing about the locations of the Valley. Then, based on the needs of the game’s design and story flow, some locations and characters were tweaked or moved around, which Sam then folded back into our world-building documents. Similarly, as Brooks continues the design of path cards, certain mechanics inform how we want the path layout to be structured. You can see how this kind of documentation can become critical with even just a few people simultaneously collaborating on an element of the game.

Storylines

The other planning document I thought would be cool to share with you all is our flowchart for the core set’s main story line. A lot of our “side-activities” and stories can be encountered in any order, and thus can be developed in a relative vacuum. However, the main storyline of our campaign has several dependencies to ensure that any branching or interactive narrative sections respond correctly to your actions.

To keep all of this in order, I’ve created a flowchart mapping out the mission structure of our campaign. Each major story beat is represented by a visualization of the number of cards those missions’ mechanics will use, a summary of the story beats we want to hit, and a quick note on which NPCs will play a role in those missions. This doesn’t capture all of the complexity of how missions work, however – each “node” on this flowchart may have multiple missions within it, and there are a lot of small outcomes that are tracked using the journal entries – but it does give a good high-level view of the narrative structure.

One of the other interesting elements of this chart is how it helps us pace the game. Each horizontal “row” in this image represents a section of a players’ time with the game, and each has an area of the map associated with it. Using this, we can match the pacing of the story to the physical space of the Valley, helping us get an optimal flow of content for the average playthrough of the campaign. This ensures that you have a good number of missions at any given time and that you flow naturally through the Valley, hopefully avoiding ever feeling dead-ended or like you’re backtracking. Obviously, some enterprising players will try to sequence-break this “optimal” flow, but that’s the fun of open-world games!

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I hope this glimpse into some of our planning documentation gets you as excited to finally venture into the Valley as I am to share it with you! In a few short weeks we will be starting our first round of external playtesting on some of this content. In next month’s update I hope to be able to share some of our designs and talk about where our planning held true and where we needed to improvise.

Until next time!

--Andrew (Fischer)

September Updates: Pledge Manager, Game Design, and Admin
over 2 years ago – Sat, Sep 18, 2021 at 09:46:45 PM

Hi everyone!

I hope you’re all doing well. Welcome to the first monthly update for Earthborne Rangers!

Thank you all again for making the campaign a success and for your continued support. It’s been deeply gratifying to hear from those of you who’ve reached out to say how inspired you are by either the mission, the game, the artwork, or all of the above, and to see publishers like Stonemaier Games posting publicly about lessening the environmental impact of their products. A significant part of the mission was to raise awareness in the industry, and so far, that seems to be the case, which is awesome.

Since the conclusion of the campaign, I’ve begun the process of requoting the production costs with manufacturers, connecting with fulfillment services, and speaking with accountants. I’m also doing my best to finally take some time off and play some games (which I have!).

I was very inspired by all of you, our conversations during the campaign, and your reactions to the TTS demo and gameplay videos, and as a result, I’ve also spent some time in the past few weeks writing lore and sketching new concepts, like this one!

Joe has been really bringing the heat with his concepts since the campaign began, and he hasn't let up. He's been turning in a lot of really great stuff, like this!

Evan has begun scouting for artists and has begun to build a list of very talented illustrators that compliment his style, so I’m looking forward to having a lot of new finished artwork to share with you all in the months ahead.

He and Fischer also rebuilt all of our card templates and data sources so that we can quickly and easily output cards for testing purposes. It involved a lot of coding, debugging, and teamwork, but the end result will save us countless hours of manual labor as we start external play testing again next month. For a game with as many cards as Earthborne Rangers, that’s a big deal!

Pledge Manager Update

I know that many of you are looking forward to the pledge manager opening. Here’s an update on where it currently stands.

I had hoped to have the pledge manager up and running shortly after the conclusion of the campaign, but as I began the process of setting it up with a DIY service, I soon realized that it was a more monumental task than I had anticipated. As such, I’ve decided to move forward with Backerkit as the pledge manager, as they’ll be able to offer support to any of you who may have questions after the pledge manager opens, and they’ll also be able to support us as we finish setting everything up.

The only hurdle that needs to be cleared before we launch the pledge manager is having a solution in place for shipping charges. As I mentioned on the campaign page, my hope is to wait to charge for shipping until nearer to fulfillment--which can be a tricky proposition for a pledge manager. It sounds like Backerkit has a promising solution, however, so we should be able to do just that (which will allow us to open the pledge manager without having to settle on shipping costs first). If that’s the case, then you should look forward to the pledge manager opening sometime in the next few weeks. If not, then we will wait until we feel confident with the shipping costs before we open the pledge manager. I will keep you posted in either case!

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Design Update by Andrew Fischer

Thank you all for helping make Earthborne Rangers’ kickstarter such a success! It was really exciting to finally share the game with the world and see you all get hyped about the project with us. For me, it was especially exhilarating (and a bit terrifying) to first share the draft rules and TTS demo of our “vertical slice” with you. Most of my career I worked with studios that kept games tight to their chests until release, so sharing unfinished, in-development game content with the public was a bit nerve-wracking. But in the end, I’m so glad we did.

Not only was sharing the vertical slice valuable for all of you to be able to play the game before deciding whether or not to back the project, but it ended up being a valuable resource for our design team in the sheer amount of feedback you all gave us.

After the Kickstarter wrapped, one of the first things I set out to do was to collect and analyze all of the feedback from emails, forums, and the comments section. From this feedback we’ve made a ton of small fixes and tweaks to the existing rules and content. The feedback has also informed a couple directions we are trying out in testing for certain elements of the game system. I can’t get into everything in detail here, but here are a select few high-level takeaways from your feedback:

• The majority of playthroughs were performed solo. While the majority of players said they planned to play two-player.
• Challenge deck distribution and customization was the most-discussed topic. There was wide support for a lack of an “auto-fail” card in the challenge deck, and there was a lot of interest in being able to customize the deck, especially to make challenge icon distribution more asymmetrical.
• The 16 different aspect + approach icon pairings led to some confusion for players in remembering/seeing which test used which pairing.
• Sometimes the optimal move is to rest with energy still left in your pool. This felt frustrating and counterintuitive to players who wanted to feel like they were using all their resources as optimally as possible.
• There was a lot of curiosity about difficulty scaling in the final game and concern about whether or not the weather cards would prove sufficient to provide a big enough challenge.

These (among many others) are some of the pieces of feedback we’re addressing as we’ve been diving back into content design and development over the last few weeks. As we continue to work, we’ll keep you updated on the solutions and changes we settle on in these updates.

We are hoping to start play testing of the core set content later next month (October). Thank you to everyone who has reached out with interest in testing. We probably won't be able to use everyone, but we will be reaching out to a select group in the coming weeks to recruit our initial pool of testers.

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If you have any questions or concerns (or you just want to say hi!) please send me a DM here on Kickstarter or send us an email at [email protected]. If not, we'll see you again next month! Until then!

Much love,

Andrew

Thank you!
over 2 years ago – Wed, Sep 01, 2021 at 04:56:43 PM

Hi everyone!

Thank you all so much for your support and your enthusiasm throughout the campaign. The past three weeks have been incredible. The team and I are extremely grateful to all of you for the energy and effort you've put into its success.

In the final 24 hours, we unlocked regional manufacturing for the U.S., and we made a great push for regional manufacturing in Europe. Even though we fell a short of the goal in Europe, given the large number of $5 backers the project has, I'm reasonably confident that we'll be able to make up ground in the months ahead in the pledge manager. I believe in the many benefits of regional manufacturing, and it's clear from the success of this campaign that you do too. We'll continue to work toward that goal together, and we'll see if we can bring a regional production of Earthborne Rangers to Europe before it's all said and done.

Going forward, you can expect monthly updates on our progress. The updates will focus primarily on our progress toward completing the game, including new details and insights on the rules, cards, campaign, writing, art, and graphic design. We'll also share more details on add-ons as they emerge, including excerpts from the World of Earthborne Rangers art & lore book, deluxe energy and ranger token tooling and casting, playmat and map design, and more. Lastly, we're planning on sharing everything that we learn in the months ahead about sustainability and what it means for the tabletop industry, so that we can all increase our knowledge on the subject and share that knowledge with others.

A couple other items:

• We'll keep the Tabletop Simulator demo up and running for another two weeks, sealing it away at the end of the day on Tuesday, August 31st. If you would like to share your experience with the demo, please email us your feedback at [email protected].
• We will finish setting up the pledge manager in the next couple of days. We'll let you all know as soon as it's live!
• We will be sure to let you know if and when additional localized editions become available between now and fulfillment.

Thank you all again for your kindness and support. I am truly grateful for the opportunity to connect with you all, and I look forward to continuing the journey together in the months and years ahead.

Much love,

Andrew

Design Notes - The Mechanical Ecology
over 2 years ago – Tue, Aug 24, 2021 at 09:13:38 PM

Hi everyone!

Before I hand it off to Brooks Flugaur-Leavitt for our final Design Notes update of the campaign, I want to say how grateful I am to all of you for your continued support. Today's my birthday, and even though I spent most of it in the same place I've spent the last two weeks, thanks to all of you it's been a very, very happy one. Thank you all! I'm going to go eat some cake!

Much love,

Andrew

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Hello Rangers!

I’m Brooks Flugaur-Leavitt, one of the designers on the project.  In today's update I want to share with you how the thematic interactions between the organisms and the natural environments of the world of Earthborne inspired the design of the game’s “mechanical ecology.”

The Valley's "Engine"

When I played Earthborne Rangers for the first time last summer, what immediately captured my imagination was how the environment itself felt like an active participant in the game.  The challenge effects allowed cards in play to spontaneously interact with not just the Rangers, but each other as well, giving the impression of a living world in which the player was not the only agent of change. The basic predator-prey effects in the prototype convinced me that we could create a compelling and challenging experience that didn't depend on every card being inherently hostile to the players.

Predator, Prey, Plant, Terrain

To convey the sense of exploration and discovery at the heart of the setting, it was important for each new location and environment to offer something unique.  At the same time, the game needed enough mechanical consistency for players to be able to strategize.  For that to be the case, each set needed cards that covered certain essential roles that were powered by challenge effects, representing the core interactions players would experience wherever they went in the Valley.

To reinforce and remind myself of these I adopted the mantra of "Predator, Prey, Plant, Terrain" for each new card set. Each fills an important role:

•  Predators are beings that pose a threat to prey, but also to the Rangers. They are almost always a source of danger to the player, but they also hunt prey. When they do, it can meaningfully alter the board-state.
•  Prey are potential targets for predators and in turn will consume the flora in the region.
•  Plants (Flora) are the plant life of the region. As a target for prey, their presence is essential to depicting a living, natural environment, and their specific in-game effects vary widely. Many flora are beneficial and offer helpful effects in certain situations.
•  Terrain represents the topography of the region and sets the scene for your journey.  It is often an obstacle to travel, and occasionally a serious hazard, but it also offers opportunities to interact with and alter the board-state in ways that aren't available elsewhere.
   

Predator, prey, flora, and terrain are far from the only card traits in the game. These four traits, however, are the most prevalent, and are integral to the experience of journeying through the wilderness.

The Ecology in Action

Since these ecological roles are present in every trail set, the more content we created, the more we began to explore abilities powered by the challenge effect "engine."  In the process, each challenge icon took on a general theme, tied to certain game effects that ensured they would be compatible with one another. Giving them each a general theme also helps players know at least a little of what to expect when they see them arrayed on the table.

The crest came to symbolize immediacy and danger. When this icon is revealed, Rangers and the people of the Valley are often attacked or threatened by predators or other hazards.

The mountain often represents the natural life cycle of the wilderness. When this icon is revealed, plants may grow, prey may eat them, predators eat *them*, and other ecological interactions and events may occur.

The sun became associated with weather and the passage of time. When this icon is revealed weather effects often trigger, and there may also be thematic shifts in the activity and behavior of the predators, prey, or flora on the table.

Assigning effects to challenge icons isn't only an exercise in theme.  Categorizing them as part of the design process helps ensure that they interact with each other as intended.  For example, almost all predators have a crest challenge effect that threatens Rangers when they are within reach.  If the common prey challenge effect also triggered on the crest, the queue of effects to resolve would be much more complicated.  Resolving the prey effect on the mountain icon instead keeps these interactions separate, so that they don't conflict with one another.

Similarly, positioning cards either along the way or within reach changes the order in which their challenge effects resolve.  Cards representing humans usually come into play along the way, and they typically have crest challenge effects that trigger only in the presence of danger, usually in the form of a predator within reach of a Ranger. Since challenge effects along the way trigger before challenge effects within reach, predators will attack the friendly people of the Valley before they have a chance to fatigue or injure you--creating a situation that requires you to be proactive about protecting them.

In addition to exhausting or clearing cards to nullify those challenge effects, you can protect the people of the Valley with abilities that move cards to different zones on the table, changing the order and even the timing of their challenge effects.  For example, moving a friendly human to within reach of you to sit alongside a predator will mean that you’ll be able to choose the order in which the crest effects trigger, protecting them from harm while putting yourself at risk!

This flexibility allows us to create a multitude different interactions between cards, both within a given set and across the breadth of the game.  Their entwined interactions create an emergent narrative, and provide organic storytelling opportunities that enhance the hand-crafted moments you’ll read from the campaign log.

So keep your eyes peeled as you travel through the Valley, you never know what you might encounter next!

Until next time!

Brooks Flugaur-Leavitt

Today's Gameplay Livestream is Now Live!
over 2 years ago – Thu, Aug 19, 2021 at 10:05:53 AM

Hi everyone!

It's time to join Zach and Steven of Team Covenant as they continue their search for Quisi Vos! You can watch it right here. If you miss the livestream, you'll be able to watch the archive using the same link once YouTube finishes processing the video. I will also post a link on the campaign page.

Like last week, I'll be in the YouTube live chat to answer any questions you may have.

I hope to see you there!

Also, we're extremely close to unlocking the regional manufacturing stretch goals. As of this writing, we only need a little over a hundred more backers at the $80 pledge level or higher to set the race toward regional manufacturing in motion.

And! We'll be making the demo that Zach and Steven are playing today available on Tabletop Simulator this week on Steam. Stay tuned!

Much love,

Andrew