Minis, Artwork and Packaging, Oh My!
over 1 year ago – Sun, Sep 04, 2022 at 01:47:16 PM

Howdy y'all!

As expansions production plods along, we've finally got some things to show and information to dish.

For starters, I want to quickly go back to the minis that came in a little over a month ago. While almost all of them were flawless, the Bandero Blondes came a bit blemished. Specifically, I noticed while painting them that the shotgun blondes looked like one of Henry's Wolfhounds took a bite out of their arm. 

While it may have made for a cool zombie rendition, I couldn't let that slide into mass production. I confirmed both minis shared the same flaw before going back to the factory. They took a deep-dive and found the issue. It's been resolved, as shown in their photo below.

While I was waiting on some proofs to come back from the factory on packaging, I went back to the drawing board on the Marketplace Expansions shelves. Their artwork did the job, but I was never fully satisfied with it going far enough. I'm big on story-telling and I wanted each shelf to tell a story about what it is and where it comes from and what one can find within them, even when the cards they hold are all gone.

Our resident artist Mikel has come such a long way from where we began and this became another opportunity to show off his unique skill to bring the High Noon world to life. This was also the very first time we worked together on "3-Dimensional" art pieces, which - as I've laid out in other updates - will become commonplace within the High Noon brand.

I'm really happy with the final result, which you can see Before and After here...

I'm now working on the packaging for this expansion, now that I have the final artwork of the assets to put on the back. Hoping to have that to the factory real soon.

And speaking of packaging, here's where I'm really excited! I just got this video from the factory last night and I couldn't wait to share it with you!

That's the samples for the packaging right there and they look sooooooo gooooooooood! I have instructed the factory to put minis and cards, etc. anywhere they'll be seen so it'll give the actual shelf presence. This will go a long way in promoting the game not just to the general public, but to retailers and distributors at trade shows where they can really see what this brand will look like with its own section of marketplace real-estate.

By the way, if you're a retailer or distributor and you like what you see and want to get in on the pre-orders before we hit the big red button, reach out to us and let's get a dialog going!

I'm really hoping this month is the month of samples, with the marketplace prototypes and these packages to show you guys more in depth so keep your fingers crossed and your prayers loud.

That's all for now folks.

'Til next time!

Back In The Saddle
almost 2 years ago – Sat, Aug 06, 2022 at 09:31:52 PM

Howdy strangers!

I know it’s been a while since the last update. While I have been dropping updates in our Facebook group and Discord server, I haven’t made a dedicated post here in a few months. There’s a reason for that and I’m sharing it with you because – for better or worse – I am committed to this being the most transparent campaign on Kickstarter (I want that imaginary Nobel Prize, dagnabbit!). So this may make me and the campaign look bad, but it’s the truth:

For context, on the cancelled campaign, I wrote a pretty open-doors update toward the end, laying out why I created High Noon in the first place, what the inspiration was and more to the point, what I was going through in my personal life at the time.

Since then, things have been something of a rollercoaster. But for your sake, I’ll keep it brief. By the grace of God, I have been (at least to some degree) reunited with my son. We have been able to build an amazing relationship together and I have been blessed with the opportunity to create and share many special memories with him. Thankfully, I’m on the other side of that dark place that fueled the creation of this board game.

If you’re a father, you know these times don’t create themselves. We have to make that time for our children. We have to deliberately choose to carve out portions of our life, set things aside and reprioritize our list to put our children first. And truth be told, that’s precisely what I did here. After not having my son for 2 years, to then fighting with everything I had to get 2 weeks a month with him, I was granted the entire Summer vacation, and I deliberately spent the entire Summer with him. I worked from home, I kept him by my side, we played in the pool, I taught him to swim and to dive, I took him to Disney World for the first time and then to Universal Studios for the first time. We played games by day and watched movies by night and took every opportunity to make every memory we could. The last 3 months were entirely prioritized to him.

That’s not to say work hasn’t been getting done on the game. Every other week, we’ve had progress toward production and fulfillment. But it did mean I wasn’t taking a day to write an update here. That was a deliberate decision I made. That said, I should have given you guys a heads up about it. It didn’t cross my mind because I was posting updates in the Facebook Group and Discord (because it would just take seconds to do from my phone while I was with my son) , but I could have posted something here like “Hey guys, I’m not going to be around for a while because I have my son but things are still happening” and I do believe you all would have been fine with that. In hindsight, that would have been an easy thing to do and I should have done it and I didn’t, so I apologize for that. I promise to be better about things like that and to get back into the habit of regular updates here for you all.

Whew! OK, now that’s out of the way, on to the actual update!

Miniatures

We received the sample miniatures for approval with just enough time to paint them up for display at Southern Fried Gaming Expo, and they are absolutely gorgeous. None of the detail was lost on them in manufacturing. After painting them, even more of the detail came out and they’re just perfect. I call them “Atlas proof” because they can’t break! I’m no longer nervous about people picking them up and dropping them and watching them shatter into a thousand pieces, and neither will you be! I know it may seem like a simple thing, but after spending 3 years in a constant state of anxiety that a single split-second mistake would eradicate hours of detail painting, there’s no words to describe the feeling.  Even more, holding them in my hand, having them displayed on a table for people to see, these aren’t custom prints, these are factory produced miniatures, cements the realization that this is actually happening. High Noon expansions are actually happening.

Here are some side-by-side shots of my resin printed prototypes next to the Factory-produced PVC miniatures.

Game Tiles

You guys can all see the video the factory sent me of the game tiles in the last update. Needless to say, I was super excited to get them in my hands and show them all off to you. Unfortunately, when I received them, I found that the color of the tiles did not match what was shown on screen. I’m going to blame camera phones for that one. The coloring had a strong pink tint to everything and it was hard to see some of the borders around some objects and loot crate squares.

After some back-and-forth with the factory, they sent me two other versions of each tile, so I had 3 samples from them for all tiles. They really wanted to get it right. But again, they just couldn’t stick the landing.

So I bit the bullet and sent them my prototypes to color-match. That wasn’t cheap, but you can’t put a price on perfection.

Recently, they sent me a side-by-side of my samples with their color-matched tiles and I gotta say it’s definitely a marked improvement.

“Perfect is the enemy of good enough” - Somebody, probably

I’m happy with how these turned out. I hope you will be, too. I’m pushing them forward for production.

Packaging

With the cards, miniatures and game tiles completed, that has just left us with the packaging. I’ve submitted all of the updated artwork for every package but the Marketplace Expansion. I’m having Mikel do a complete overhaul on their design and I think you’re going to love their table presence. I’ll save that for another update when I get the prototypes in, probably next month some time.

The Marketplace Expansion packaging is the simplest of all of them, so I ordered samples of the rest without it. I just approved the sample cut files, so I should be receiving the samples in about 3 weeks.

Fulfillment

Things are moving pretty fast, now that the molds are done and the COVID scare seems to be lifting overseas. I set an objective of pre-Christmas fulfillment and I feel pretty confident we’ll hit that goal.

Conventions

One of the ways we could light a fire under the production and delivery is to generate more cashflow to cover current added and potentially more expenses from all of the industry changes. Right now, that’s all anticipated to come out-of-pocket but with more pre-orders, we can put that extra margin to work on getting everything over the finish line.

To achieve this, we’ve been attending various conventions around our area, while lining up future conventions around the country. Would be cool to get across the ocean to see some of you guys but I’m not sure that’s in the cards yet.

I’ve added a new page to the website where I’ll be putting all of our convention appearances at. You can see where we’re going and where we’ve been and check out media at those events as I can get to adding them.

These events have been a boon for High Noon in terms of awareness and have even generated a few sales to offset the cost of attendance, so we are excited to get our wagons rolling. So come out and play with us!

That’s it for this month’s update, y’all. Thank you again for your continued patience and support. I look forward to sharing exciting news more regularly with you all now that I’ve got time to myself again!

Giddy-up!

The Mother of All Updates (A Mothers Day Update)
almost 2 years ago – Mon, May 09, 2022 at 11:53:58 AM

Alright, so I admit the title is clickbait. This isn’t particularly a content-heavy update like posts in the past. It’s actually on the lighter side in that regard. But it’s still a pretty big update. Why? I’ll tell you!

But first…a little context.

We’ve been getting quite a few messages from backers noting the lack of updates. We hear you. In all honesty, it’s just really difficult to write an update on things that haven’t changed.

“Hey everyone! Update time! Water is still wet and the sky is still above us!”

Why have things been so quiet? Why hasn’t there been anything to update? Well, this whole COVID thing has done a number on the city where our factory is. Because of Government mandates, they were forced into a vicious cycle of repeated closures. I’d be speaking to them one week and then radio silence the next and then they would pop back up “hey, sorry, they shut us down again,” and then a week later *poof!*

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone and I’m just thankful they’re not located in the heart of Shanghai.

Logistically, this had the biggest hit on our timetable for the production of the molds for the miniatures. Everything else was pretty easy to prototype out. We’ve actually had a video of the samples for the expansion game tiles for a while now, but I was holding off to put them in an update with the miniatures. I did, however, post the video in our Facebook Group a while back. But since we’re here….

Look at those beeyutes!

I know a lot of you guys don’t do social medias, and I don’t blame you, but that group is where a lot of updates actually drip out in micro-doses. So if you’re really itching for some noise in all the silence, that’s definitely something I’d consider for you all to join.

“Wait…you said you were waiting to show this until you had pictures of the minis…does…does that mean…?”

So glad you asked, myself! Behold!

These were obviously taken with my factory contact’s phone. I’ll be getting these in the mail hopefully soon to take better ones and then I can’t wait to throw paint on them! Still waiting on the Bandero Blonde 1 and 2 minis and Father Franklin, who had to be re-waxed (the process before creating the mold). Once those are done, they’ll send them all to me along with the game tiles for inspection and approval.

So does this mean we’ll be getting our expansions soon?!

Eh….not quite. I mean, maybe. But I’m definitely not ready to say so. And here’s why:

We’ve also been getting some feedback from folks concerning the timeline of delivery. Some have mentioned how they already received Kickstarter games that launched before ours and they’ve used that as kind of a barometer of when they should expect to receive other games.

Look, I totally understand where those of you in that mindset are coming from. I can see how it might make sense to gauge expectations on what has been done already. But let me put another perspective spin on things.

• I have no idea what projects these are, what kind of games they are or what went into producing them. Furthermore, I have no idea what stage of production they were in when they launched. When we launched, we had the 5,000 starter sets on the last stage of production. The only thing that stalled those was the shipping crisis. So I can’t speak to these other projects and as much as it might look good on paper to compare them to other projects, it’ll probably only end in more disappointment on future projects in the long run. 
• While I don’t know about the campaigns that have been fulfilled, I can tell you about two pretty huge campaigns I backed, one that launched before High Noon, and also haven’t been fulfilled. Scarface 1920 and Zombicide: Undead or Alive are both still in development phase. That’s not a call-out on either campaign, mind you. Scarface seems to be on target for their 13-month delivery and I can’t wait to get my hands on it and of course Zombicide looks amazing. I don’t regret backing either game. But these campaigns raised between $1,000,000 to $3,300,000 respectively and we are keeping nearly in line with them with a fraction of those budgets. We also took a massive hit to our finances with the quadruple increase in shipping costs to get the starter sets to everyone by Christmas and we didn’t pass any of that cost down to any of you, which is something I’m hearing we won’t be seeing with Zombicide, so please pray for my wallet. Haha!😅
• In short, it’s best to treat every campaign as its own thing. Treat every creator as their own thing. Assume that every creator and every campaign is facing their own unique set of incredible challenges to overcome, because that’s the reality of it. We’re all going to get our stuff to you and we can’t wait to do so. 

On the positive side, this time has given us some great opportunities to capitalize on. It’s allowed us to make improvements to the game with the incredible new artwork of the game tiles. It’s allowed us to come up with new and better solutions to the rules and some of the expansions, including the fire-cone tool for Father Franklin, a completely new additional asset to that expansion that we didn’t increase the price to our backers for. It’s also allowed the current shipping crisis to somewhat level out, though it still has a long way to go.

Not gonna lie. After seeing this interview from the Dice Tower, I’m still nervous as to what this will ultimately cost us to get to all of you. But that’s a burden for us to worry about and a bridge to cross when we get there.

That said, selling through our current stock of Starter Sets will certainly go a great distance to help cover that cost, so please consider petitioning your local retailers to reach out to us to order games for their stock. It helps to raise the funds and also clears our inventory we pay monthly storage to keep around in our fulfillment centers.

We’re also on Amazon through our incredible Amazon distribution partners, so shooting off a link to our game, telling your friends and family how to get a copy there and just spreading the word goes a long way to support our cause.

That’s it for now, guys.

Happy Mothers Day!

We Have A Lot to Talk About (And a Lot to Look At!)
about 2 years ago – Tue, Mar 08, 2022 at 09:44:12 AM

It’s been a year since the incredible success of our Kickstarter launch and a lot has transpired. We’ve overcome everything from the global shipping crisis to an absolute disaster with fulfillment vendors and almost everyone has gotten their starter sets, save for a few that slipped through the cracks that we are actively sorting out.

Overall, the response from you guys has been tremendous and that is a humbling thing. We are so grateful to all of you for your continued support and we love seeing you all loving the game, especially the pictures of the painted miniatures that flood our Facebook group!

(new) Rules of the Game

One of the biggest global complaints/criticisms/critiques to come out of all of this – even as far back as feedback from our initial reviewers from our first, cancelled Kickstarter, has been the rulebook. And I’m not going to lie, all of it was warranted as that rulebook is red hot flaming garbage. It’s so bad that it’s inspired a multi-series Western Epic narrative drama about just how garbage it is (and you gotta see it!) by the talented and thorough Board Game Hackers. But hey, it’s my first rulebook, what’s a guy to do?

After a lot of feedback gathering and answering tons of rules questions, putting my nose to the grindstone again, I’ve finally come out with a revised 2nd edition of the High Noon Rulebook that is now available for download on the High Noon Website! From now on, the rules will be hosted on the site for easy access and any changes or updates will be updated there so you're never without the latest version of the High Noon rules. This will also be the rulebook going into print with future productions of the game. So, if anything else, that terrible book you currently have in your possession is now a collectors’ item!

Expansions Update

A lot of folks have been asking about the expansions, and I’ve been giving updates on them as I can. We ran into some issues with the miniatures that I hadn’t anticipated. Some of the files were wrong, resulting in some of our wax samples coming out too big. We had to get several miniatures remodeled to prepare for the mold process. The molding process is officially underway and we'll hopefully soon have sexy pictures of those minis!

Several of the expansion posses also underwent some redesigns to alter their balance and playability issues we discovered through our intensive playtesting in house and with you guys in our Discord server. One of those posses was Father Franklin, whom we modified his base to show the 4 squares his deployed miniature covers. We also added a nifty tool to mark his firing cone.

Right now, the prototype from The Game Crafter is acrylic, but we’ll probably have it made in something thinner and more durable. This has been a major development for High Noon because it’s the first time we’re adding a tool to help with the Line of Sight of a character. This was always the plan for future expansions, but the change with Father Franklin forced our hand to push the development sooner with his posse. And that’s good because it gets our feet wet for expansions to come.

About the Packaging

Speaking of Father Franklin, I’m pleased to show you what his packaging will look like on the retail shelves. I’m showing you this not just to wet your appetite but to also show how we will be introducing expansions in the future. 

See that little QR code? That scannable code will take customers to the page exclusively for that expansion, which – just like the posses currently on the website – will give players the character backgrounds and stories of who they are, as well as videos on how to play them, etc.

A Whole New Look

Along the way of all this development, something has been itching me and I had to make a decision on where High Noon was going and – more to the point – what it would ultimately look like, literally.

At its core, High Noon has always been a Game System. I’m very big on games needing to be more than miniatures and art and gimmicks. They need to be a game first and foremost. High Noon is my first official game and I just wanted to focus on mechanics over everything else to see if I even had the chops for this industry. Everything else was second to that. And that’s pretty much been the stance of my inner circle of friends and family who playtest the game ad nauseum with me. The folks in the Discord also seem to have the same perspective. Nobody’s really complained about the look and feel of High Noon. And while, deep down, I never felt the game’s looks were where they needed to be by any stretch of the imagination, if it wasn’t broken, there were bigger fish to fry.

But ultimately, if the game was going to look any different than it does now, that look needed to come with the expansions, not after. It just wouldn’t be right to have everyone invested in all these expansions, only to then make everyone buy new artwork just to keep up with the future of the game (except for the Ride or Die posse, of course).

Don’t get me wrong. Our initial artist did an incredible job making the art we have, and we wouldn’t be here with out him and I hope he doesn’t go anywhere any time soon because we still have a LOT to do yet. But I’ve focused him in another area of the game now and he is excelling at it. Meanwhile, I took a 2nd pair of eyes to the board tiles of the game to really bring everything to life.

Before, it was all about the mechanics. Now that those mechanics are fleshed out, we can turn our attention to the details that really immerse the player experience. After months of hard work by our resident artist Mikel Canizares, I can finally share with you what High Noon is going to look like moving forward. Below are Before and After illustrations of the expansion tiles. What you were going to get and what you are going to get.

What I love and what you’ll see in these new tiles is the attention to little details and nuances from the universe of High Noon. Abernathy’s blacksmith, you’ll see his armor prototypes and scraps he’s been working on. In the General Store, you’ll find shelves of Jethro Jenkins’ popular Firewater Moonshine casks. On the boardwalk of the Gunsmith is a poster of Madme Cleo’s Cirque de Cabaret, a massive line upcoming line of expansions you won’t want to miss. The tiles burst to life in the new artwork, each piece drawn by the talented hand of Mikel who has already done so much to breathe life into the characters of High Noon.

You might have noticed the balcony is now missing from the Bandero Blonde’s bordello tile. That’s because it’s now a separate tile altogether. This allows for more exploration in the bordello itself, providing valuable additional loot crates for the girls to equip themselves for the battles ahead of them. The balcony itself will now sit on acrylic risers above the tile, giving the miniatures the actual elevation they enjoy. This will also introduce how some elevated tiles will work in the future.

Now you might be asking yourself how these tiles will work with the tiles from the Starter Set. The short answer is they won’t. Functionally, they work just fine. But putting the two artworks side by side, they’ll stick out like a sore thumb and completely break the immersion.

Which is why I had the Starter Tiles re-envisioned as well.

I’ve been playtesting on these tiles and I gotta tell you the experience has been night and day. While there was no way for us to have had this done by the Kickstarter, this is where High Noon needed to go and now it’s going to get there.

So you’re probably asking yourself how this applies to you. You’ve already got the game and the tiles. How is this going to work?

This is where I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and this is where I’m at with it. If you are someone out there who is happy with just the core game, there’s no reason to have the new tiles. Everything you need, you already have. Heck, I’ve been playing that version of High Noon for 4 years now, and I’ve never had a complaint about it. It’s perfect as it is.

However, if you’re someone who wants expansions, these would work no differently. They’re essentially “expansion tiles,” which we plan to release a bunch of in the future anyway. So these tiles will be available for purchase separately for those wishing to broaden their experience of the game.

As for you all who backed the Kickstarter, anyone who backed at any level above the base game or added an expansion posse of any kind to your order, I’ll be including a pack of these upgraded tiles with your expansions, absolutely free.

I’ll even take it a step further. If you’ve been holding out on pre-ordering an expansion posse and you’d like to receive a free set of the upgraded tiles, simply send me a private message requesting your order be unlocked and you can add a posse to your pre-order. From there, I’ll add the tiles in fulfillment.

So there you have it. New instructions. New minis. New artwork. New Tiles. New mechanics. New everything. And we’ve only just begun. Thanks for coming this far and I look forward to sharing with you more exciting developments as they happen!

EUROPE UPDATE!!!
over 2 years ago – Sat, Jan 08, 2022 at 12:01:08 AM

Great news!

We've just received notice from our fulfilment center in Germany that they are expecting delivery of the High Noon Starter Sets in two weeks! We're almost there, posse! Yeeeeeehaw!

I've gone through the list of backers to confirm everything is all set for delivery, but I noticed a few snags. We need to get those sorted asap so we can ensure everyone gets what they're expecting.

So here's what you need to do:

If you haven't completed your survey... I've resent you the link to your pledge manager. Please go in and complete your pledge asap. Some of you either haven't paid or haven't entered a valid delivery address. We can't ship the game if we don't know where it's going.

If you've changed addresses since the campaign... Send me a message (not a comment) and I can unlock your address so you can update it. I can't ship anything until addresses have been locked. 

If you want to add anything to your pledge... Send me a message (not a comment) and I can unlock your order so you can add whatever you want.

Because it takes a few days for the system to lock everything down, I'll be initiating the lock on Monday, January 10th. Once I lock it, that's it!