Our factory has been making things! And formatting files is hard! Here's an update on our recent progress getting Brave New Worlds made, we are getting close
over 4 years ago – Fri, May 08, 2020 at 10:04:01 AM

Hey everyone,

So... these past few months have been utterly, unprecedentedly, crazily crazy for all of us. I hope all of you are staying safe, caring for your loved ones, and finding ways to experience joy while cooped up inside. This whole coronavirus crisis has made it even more urgent for me to be able to deliver Brave New Worlds ASAP, because what better way to spend time cooped up inside than by playing board games and exploring the Solar System?

Last time I posted here I was telling you about how our factory had shut down due to the virus, and I didn't know exactly when they'd be opening up again. But just a few days after that update I got word that their employees were slowly getting back to work. And so for the whole of March and April I've been going back and forth with Gameland, communicating over email and nailing down final dimensions, reformatting files, making choices about paper weight... and bit by bit, our factory has been starting to knock out components of Brave New Worlds.

This has been... an insane undertaking. I'm a scientist, not a businessman, not a graphic designer, not a... well, "international time-zone coordinating meeting haver". But I've tried to get a little better at all these things, and the result is that we're closer than ever to getting Brave New Worlds on our tabletops.

But okay, that's enough fluffy intro stuff - let's get to the good part and see where we're at.

Pics of Brave New Worlds: Guide to the Solar System (physical paperback!)

It exists! Or at least, one copy does! These are pictures of a test copy of Brave New Worlds: Guide to the Solar System which Gameland sent me in early April. And it looks beautiful... I can't wait for you read it. But man, it was difficult to get to this point. I've done some digital archaeology on my inbox and discovered that over the past two months I've exchanged three dozen emails with Gameland just trying to get the details of certain components right, and the guidebook was the most painful of all. At the risk of boring you with too many details... well, I had designed this whole book in an RGB ("Red, Green, Blue") color scheme, but Gameland required files in CMYK ("Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK"). Not being a graphic designer, it took me a few days to learn how to convert color schemes, but the file size then ballooned up to over 2 GB (there are a LOT of high-resolution photographs in this thing...). And it turned out 2 GB was just too large for Gameland to handle...

So after a few weeks of back-and-forth, trying three different file-sharing services ("WeTransfer" is pretty great...), and me finally learning how to use Adobe Acrobat to prepare PDFs for printing... we finally got there, and Gameland was able to print the beautiful book above.

I combed through every page of this thing looking for typos and didn't find a single one! Until... I got to the back cover....

...and found this super-annoying one. Even the best laid plans...

But that's what proofs are for. After catching this I was able to reach out to the factory and have them correct it. The whole process, from the first email I got telling me they couldn't download my files, through numerous versions with different color profiles and file sizes, to the final correction of this back-cover typo, lasted from March 3rd all the way through to April 13th. It took another week of back-and-forth to resolve some questions about paper thickness and the size of this print run... but it's finished. Phew.

First test prints of punchboard art look good!

On April 27th I got word that the factory was starting work on all the cardboard components which come as punchboards - tiles, reference cards, score markers, etc. Punchboards are made by first printing on paper, which is later fixed to grey board and then cut apart with a die cutter. My contact at GameLand sent me these pictures of this first step just to make sure everything looks good - and it does!

I don't really have any boring design woe stories to tell about these components - everything just worked out. Huge relief... :D

After sending me these, they also showed me the final box art printed up, albeit not in box form yet:

More small fixes were required to get the box to this point, including shifting the art on the side panels out a bit in order to get the bleed right... more boring stuff. But it all takes time, and I'm really happy with how this close-to-final product turned out.

ACTUAL DATES FOR WHEN WE EXPECT ALL COMPONENTS TO BE FINISHED

So my purpose with everything I've written so far is just to bring you in a little behind the scenes so you can get a sense of how I've been spending this time in lockdown. So much of it has been really tedious stuff, which I normally try to knock out over a late night in a cafe with a glass of wine... an experience we're all sadly being deprived of right now. But it's been getting done, bit by bit, and after all this hard work I'm happy that I can share this email I received from GameLand concerning the schedule for when we can expect everything to be manufactured:

In case you missed that, the big takeaway is that we FINALLY have a date! It's an estimate, and things could change, but it tentatively looks like that by May 19th (or, haha probably a few days later...) I'll be able to send you pictures of bunch of finished components. This is a huge deal.

One of the reasons that this is such a big deal is that with even a tentative date in hand I can finally start moving on what comes after manufacture: logistics. So this week I'll be reaching out to the companies I first connected with about a year ago, rekindling the conversations, and figuring out how to quickly get this into your hands. Just starting these conversations didn't seem possible two months ago, when coronavirus threw everything into uncertainty and I couldn't quite say when I would need to book shipping services. Now I can, and so that's my priority moving forward.

Some of you have reached out to me asking about address changes, but please don't worry just yet - once we have a firm shipping date I will reach out to you all and get you to confirm your shipping addresses! I won't mail out anything before having received a response from you confirming your current address. And I'm not going to ask you that information just yet, because I still don't have an exact date I can promise for when this will be shipped. All I can say for now is that it's looking more real than ever, and you should expect another update from me soon.

Okay... I'm going to leave the update there. I'm leaving out a few things, like progress on custom art for our laureate backers (I haven't forgotten about you!) and some maybe-boring details about the final component, a little plastic insert I'm trying to make happen which will hold all of the components. But now that things are moving along, I'll be able to post more regular updates as we start to see results. The next update I post I hope will include some pictures of real tiles, real booklets, a real box.... it will be great.

Thanks as always for your support, this couldn't have happened without you. After a little coronavirus hiatus, we're now back on track and have almost made a game. I'll keep you posted :)

- Mickey

A quick update about the situation in China, and what it means for our timeline
over 4 years ago – Tue, Feb 25, 2020 at 11:07:11 PM

Hi everyone,

I really like posting updates when I have some exciting new bit of progress to share, but I’m going to break that pattern this time because we’re in kind of an unusual situation. I posted at the end of December that all the design files had finally been finished, and progress after that looked like it was happening quickly. Files were submitted by December 29, downloaded and factory-checked by January 6th (actual quote from contact at Gameland: “The artworks are great!!! There is no issues about your artwork! So great you are!”), and a final question regarding the sizing of some components was answered by January 12.

But that brought us dangerously close to Chinese New Year, which basically all of China celebrates for several weeks. Gameland let me know that Brave New Worlds would start production when Chinese New Year concluded, and that was that…

But on January 30th of this year, the World Health Organization declared a Public Health Emergency because of the outbreak of a new strain of coronavirus in China. The outbreak started in Wuhan, which is a long way away from our factory in Ningbo, China (about 10 hours by car), and so I wasn’t sure at first whether this would affect our timeline. But since then the outbreak has worsened, and the Chinese government has taken stronger measures to try and combat the virus. Holidays were extended, flights were cancelled, and factories all across the country were closed while new measures were put in place to try and slow the spread of this disease. And that includes our factory.

Unfortunately this situation is pretty fluid, and I can’t give a definitive answer to how long this epidemic will delay delivery of Brave New Worlds. I emailed my contact at Gameland last week to check in and she told me this:

I would love to tell you that by *this time* our factory will be up and running and by *this time* we’ll be shipping overseas, but the truth is that right now, we just don’t have enough information. What I *can* say is that I will continue checking in with our factory, and will let you know as soon as I have more information about when things will start moving forward again.

So! Obviously coronavirus is a pretty scary thing, but we're slowly figuring out how to combat it. This will delay our timeline a bit, but I'll make sure to keep you in the loop.  As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to message me directly! And if you just can't wait to try the game... well, we have those lovely print-and-play files now, maybe give them a whirl? :)

- Mickey

Print and Play files are live!
almost 5 years ago – Sun, Jan 05, 2020 at 11:27:35 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

It's all finished! Finalizing files, finishing the rulebook, a foreword for the guidebook - here's an update on what I've been up to for the past few weeks
almost 5 years ago – Mon, Dec 30, 2019 at 11:03:21 PM

Hey everyone,

It’s been a *really* busy past few weeks, and I have a ton of exciting updates to share. It’s almost difficult to know exactly where to start… but let’s start with the small stuff first, and work our way up :)

The trouble with Arrokoth…

Really minor stuff first. So, remember that Kuiper belt object MU69 that New Horizons flew past a little over a year ago? The one the New Horizons team had provisionally named “Ultima Thule”? Well I was eager to include every single world ever visited by spacecraft in this game, so of course I included that:

 But on November 12 the International Astronomical Union finally decided on an official name… which was different from the provisional one the New Horizons team had been using, and the one I'd included in my original design. If these tiles had been printed up a month ago, I would have made 500 copies of the game with an outdated name for one of the worlds. (Maybe that doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is to me, damn it!) Anyway, I’ve tweaked the tile to reflect the appropriate name (this one won’t change!), so we can all breathe a sigh of relief!

 Now onto bigger and better things…

Box design, front and back, is finished!

 It’s starting to look like a real game! The box design really was important for me to get right because I want to give this game every possible chance of being able to sell if I can get it into stores, where I won’t be there in person to be able to talk it up. Part of that meant purchasing an ISBN with a barcode (a requirement for basically any retailer), as well as designing the back of the box in a way that *hopefully* looks appealing to potential space-inclined gamers down the road.

So, I can’t pretend that I’ve totally figured out the distribution strategy that will come after I’ve delivered games to all my backers. But getting games into stores and gift shops will definitely be part of it. I wish I knew of a magic combination of words and images which would convince future customers to plop down money for a game sitting on the shelf… but hopefully this box design comes close. (I’m an optimist!)

Anyway, that’s finished and it’s a big relief. But there are even more exciting things to talk about…

The rulebook is totally finished!!

Whew! After a ton of work, and leaning heavily on prior editing help from one of our backers (thanks again April!), the rulebook is DONE. The main things to finish were mostly typesetting the whole thing, adding a few helpful diagrams (now there’s a visual aid showing exactly how gravity assists work), and adding a few neat space facts at the end to support the descriptions of different space agencies’ unique abilities and the design choices regarding different components. I’m pretty proud of the way it turned out, and the whole thing reads much more clearly than it did in its first iteration. You can read the finalized rulebook in its entirety by clicking the image above (or right here: https://www.facebook.com/pg/BraveNewWorldsTheGame/photos/?tab=album&album_id=2476227105822911)

A foreword for the guidebook!

Okay, I’m not sure how much this will resonate with everyone, but for me this was one of the most exciting developments of the past few weeks. I have spent a ton of time making the guidebook as beautiful and informative as possible. And part of my motivation for doing that was (1) obviously I just wanted to make something great, but also (2) I wanted to leave open the possibility that the book could be sold on its own, as a standalone solar system guide. But selling books is hard, and I’m not a well-known space scientist - what reason do readers who don’t know me have to trust that I know what I’m talking about?

This is where forewords can be really helpful. Even if you haven’t heard of a particular author, if the foreword is written by someone you trust then that can give you confidence that the whole work is worth reading. So a few weeks ago I reached out to someone, emailed her a few pages of the book, and asked whether she’d be willing to write a little something….

And she said yes! Emily Lakdawalla is senior editor for The Planetary Society, and if you’ve ever stumbled across articles on planetary.org there’s a good chance you’ve come across her writing. She’s kind of a legend in the space image processing community, and a really well-known figure within the space and science communication community generally… and honestly, I’m just so floored that she agreed to be a part of this. Sending her pages from this book and waiting to see whether she liked them was… haha well, more stressful than I should probably admit. (I was imagining a worst-case-scenario of spending a year on something and having one of my idols tell me “actually, this is terrible, I want no part of it”. But thankfully that didn’t happen!) She’s written a beautiful foreword for this book, and I’ve reproduced it at the bottom of this update. Feels great to have a little external validation from someone who knows what she’s talking about that this book isn’t too bad!

And with that, all component designs have been sent to the factory!

With the final completion of the companion book, the rulebook, the box design, and a small tweak of the tiles… well, that was it. Everything was ready. And so at 3AM on Saturday night, after exhaustively checking and double-checking that everything looked good, I emailed the finalized design files to Gameland. This means that all the creative work necessary for manufacturing Brave New Worlds is done! Now, there is still a bit of creative work left to do, unrelated to the manufacture of the base game:

• Creation of the print-and-play files, using all of the finalized components I’ve talked about in this update
• Creation of custom astronaut reference cards for our Laureate-level backers

The second item I unfortunately got a little distracted from with my focus on everything else, but if any Laureate-level backers are reading this now, trust that this has jumped up to the top of my priority list again, and that I’m really excited to finish these up! The first item… actually, I don’t think this will take much time at all. But I do need to do test-prints of components and ensure that everything lines up properly when printed double-sided. I hope that I can post another very short update in a week or two with a link to the final print and play files.

A final comment about timeline

The process to get everything finalized and edited… well, it took a little longer than I expected clearly. Even during my last update I was clinging to the possibility that I might be able to get everything made and delivered by January 2020, but it seems clear now that we’ll have to push this back a bit. Our factory will be closed down for Chinese New Year, January 10 - February 11, and it looks like most of the manufacturing will have to happen afterward when they open back up again. So I need to temper expectations a bit - I think it’s very likely we’ll have the game totally manufactured by March, but I’ve never had to ship anything from China to America before, and I can’t say exactly how long that will take. But the great news now is that the delays are no long limited by my ability to artsy, science-y, creative things - it’s all purely logistical from here on out. I will continue to keep you updated as we move forward and get this thing made and shipped. In a future update I’ll ask again for everyone’s updated addresses, and we’ll talk about shipping costs that will be charged through the pledge manager.

But anyway, it’s a little early for that. As always, just know that I’ll continue working as hard as I can to get this made and delivered as quickly as possible. As always, thank you so much for your support! This couldn’t have happened without you.

- Mickey

********************************

Emily's Foreword for Brave New Worlds: Guide to the Solar System

For nearly all of human history, Earth has been our only world. It’s the only planet we’ve seen with our own eyes, walked on with our own feet, reached out and touched with our own hands. Everything else in the universe was no more than a light in the sky. Two of those lights were disks – the Sun and Moon – but in their circular perfection they didn’t seem like worlds. Instead, they belonged to the realm of the gods.

With the invention of the telescope, we turned some of those points of light into more disks, and even revealed Earth-like mountains on the Moon. Still, the heavenly orbs were beyond our reach, forever in the sky while we stood on the ground. We imagined traveling to these new places and finding other civilizations. No matter how fanciful the stories, we always imagined them as variations on Earth.

Everything changed when humans sent the first spacecraft to another world. And it’s kept changing, since we’ve never stopped sending them. There is still only one world that humans have visited with our own fragile bodies (the Moon), but we now craft autonomous robots that can travel into space for us, bringing cameras and sensors that allow us to see worlds beyond Earth as though we were there. We haven’t found other Earths or other civilizations. What we’ve found is that the truth is always stranger than we can imagine.

Every world we’ve explored – and there are many, as you’ll read in this book – is unique. No matter where we go, we’re surprised. We saw the far side of the Moon for the first time and discovered it looks nothing at all like the near side, with no dark lunar seas. We went to Venus and found our “sister” planet to be a Hell of sulfuric clouds, volcanic temperatures, and crushing surface pressure. At Mars, a desert drier than any on Earth’s, covered by abundant evidence for the ancient flow of liquid water, and widespread deposits of ice just beneath the surface, ready for an astronaut to sink a shovel into.

Beyond Mars, things got even weirder. One of the first asteroids we visited, Ida, had a moon! Not even Venus and Mercury have moons. Every asteroid we’ve seen has looked different from the ones visited before, with shapes like marbles or diamonds or peanuts or sea otters. The largest asteroid, Ceres, likely had a saltwater ocean once and has mountains of salt on its surface. The smallest asteroids might be covered with fine dust or plated with jagged boulders; we don’t know until we visit each one.

We expected the moons of the giant planets to be similar to each other, so the diversity of the Galilean moons of Jupiter was stunning. One is a seething mass of volcanoes, the next is a brilliant ball of striped ice with a saltwater ocean, the next is a cracked and fissured world with many ocean layers and a molten core making its own magnetic field, and the last is an ancient, battered husk. Then Saturn’s moons were different again, and Uranus’ and Neptune’s different still. Everywhere we go, we find nature to be more creative than we are.

All these discoveries were brought to us by robots. We build them and launch them, and after that, for nearly all of them, our only interaction with them is through radio. These robots are autonomous, meaning that they are not remote-controlled; they can operate themselves fine for anywhere from days to months without further instructions from Earth. However, none of these robots is artificially intelligent; every one of their actions results from a sequence of commands written by human programmers.

What do we get out of exploration? It’s a prize better than gold or jewels: knowledge. As you’ll learn in this book, we’ve learned so much about the worlds we’ve visited: what they look like on the outside, what they’re made of, whether they’re actively evolving or passively experiencing external forces, how they fit in to the history of our solar system. We’ve also developed technical knowledge: how to solve difficult problems of seeing through opaque air, surviving in harsh environments, operating for months without human intervention. All these technological developments have applications back on Earth that enrich our lives in ways far more valuable than the cost of the missions.

But here’s the best thing about knowledge: unlike gold or jewels, it can be shared without any diminishment in its value. And it is shared. It’s a young field, but it’s already a tradition to share. The space agencies of the United States, Europe, Japan, India, and China all freely share the hard-won scientific data from their deep-space missions with the world. It doesn’t matter who you are or where you’re from; as long as you can access the Internet, you can explore the distant worlds of our solar system through robot eyes.

Come and look.

- Emily Lakdawalla, Senior Editor for the Planetary Society | December 2019

More progress! A timeline of the past year, and a COMPLETED companion book
almost 5 years ago – Sun, Nov 24, 2019 at 10:55:01 PM

Hey everyone,

It's time for another update on the progress we've made in creating this game, and I wanted to use this opportunity to place the whole project in context and give you some insight into my philosophy for it. But first, the good news:

The companion book is finished! Yeahhhh!!!

And I'm extremely proud :) Since my last update, I've been working as fast as I can to complete entries for every little moonlet and space rock we've ever visited with a spacecraft.  I'm happy to say that after finishing Arrokoth (formerly known as MU69) a few days ago, the collection is complete:

I'm in the process of having a copy-editor double-check everything for typos, awkward wording, etc., and then all that's left is to order the pages and prepare the files for my printer. Those tasks are a little annoying, but soooo much faster than the difficult creative work involved in writing unique entries for different worlds. So I hope to be able to deliver to Gameland the finalized files for this companion book this week, and that's a great milestone.

But I'd be lying if I said that this didn't take me longer than I expected it to.  So I actually decided it would be a good idea to take a look back and track my progress. And because I'm a physicist and I like data, I made a plot:

When I launched my campaign, I had finished entries for all the major planets of our Solar System and most of the major moons. And I figured that since all that was left was to write shorter entries for the littler worlds, I'd be able to knock those out in a month or two... but of course that was a little optimistic. Completing a project like this requires juggling a lot of different things, and you can see from the way that the plot levels off in the middle that my attention wasn't *always* focused 100% on the booklet (finalizing designs of other components, putting in hours at my real job, and preparing for a big move were pretty time-intensive as well...). So ultimately it took a little more than a year to finish everything for this book, which is comparable to the amount of time I've devoted to making a playable board game. 

Why I've invested so much time in this companion book

A huge part of my motivation for this project to inspire and educate people about all the crazy worlds in our Solar System. I want to teach people about what we've discovered already (80+ worlds visited up close and photographed in high resolution) and inspire them to want to go visit themselves.  Because of that, I specifically designed the playing surface so that it could incorporate every single one of these worlds. But I also realized that without any context, just flipping over tiles and revealing a bunch of strangely-shaped rocks might not be that inspiring. Without context and a story for each one, I worried that the whole experience would suffer. It's just *more fun* to land a spacecraft on Io, and then argue with your friends about whether the wheels would melt in a pile of molten sulfur, or whether humans could make their way through snow-drifts on Methone. But of course, badgering people over the head with space facts is just a turn off - the best way to teach people about science is to allow them to discover things for themselves.

I also just see myself as kind of uniquely qualified to offer something of value - real hard-science, written in an engaging way, and hopefully visually appealing enough to inspire people to read more closely. The book was always a big part of this strategy, even though it's not strictly necessary to play the game.

Anyway... I'm risking waxing a little too poetic about this. But I just want you to know that I'm really proud of the book as it is right now, and that I've worked hard to make this as factual, accurate, and fun to read as possible. And now that it's done, we can move on to bigger and better things :)

Where we go from here

With the completion of the companion booklet, there are just two more components to finish!

• The Rulebook: This is already written and copy-edited. All that remains is to type-set it and add in helpful diagrams. This is my immediate next priority, I will be racing to finish this up.
• The back of the box: This is such a silly thing to be stuck on, but I just need to put together an illustration for the back of the box before it can be printed. This will simply describe the game, show the layout, describe what's inside, etc. This should take about a week.

Finishing these design files quickly is really important, because my manufacturer is hesitant to start producing all the paper and cardboard components until they have design files for all of them. So these are my number one priorities. Unfortunately that means delaying finalizing the print-and-play files for a little bit longer... and I just have to beg some patience on that front, I'll be working to finish that as soon as possible.

Anyway... it's been a long journey. But I feel so privileged to be given the chance to complete this project. I literally couldn't have done this without all of your support, and I believe that the product that we get out of this whole endeavor will be reallllly wonderful! So hang tight - I'll be working as hard as I can to get everything ready, and hopefully in a month or two we'll have something physical to enjoy.

Thanks for your support and for following along!  And to my American backers, Happy Thanksgiving!

 - Mickey