The Present! Relief and Regrouping
We’ve done it! despite a year of trials and tribulations, we’ve managed to get every copy of Crystal Collapse out for delivery! All European orders have been delivered, most UK ones are in the hands of happy gamers, and the final US and Canadian orders are on their way and expected to land any day now, bringing joy to the masses!
The Game
Crystal Collapse is a genuinely enjoyable game, and I love playing it with my friends and particularly with my son Jacob. At just 9 years old, he’s really getting into it and is quickly mastering the strategy and tactics to the point that I have a tough time winning against him! You can really get creative with it and have some fun! As we release more new models, the tactical options will expand and you’ll need to dynamically adapt your strategy to deal with the new foes!
Current Projects
Whilst I ideally want Crystal Collapse to be my main focus, at the moment, until we see a bigger player base and more commercial success, I need to balance my workloads with maintaining my income streams. I continue to run my Patreon for D&D/RPG miniatures with monthly releases to create encounter bundles. I also set up my Fabled Fantasy Tribe on My Mini Factory a few months back, offering some fan-art type miniatures of familiar fan-favourite characters who I’ve supplied in 40mm scale with profiles for unofficial use in Crystal Collapse – for example:
If you’ve got the game or you want to get started using the current digital rulebook download, please head over to The Lion’s Tower Fabled Fantasy Collection where you can buy the STL files and Resin prints so you can use them in your games
The Past – An Underwhelming Start and a Crushing Disappointment!
TLDR – Thanks to some technical issues and a soul crushing defeat, around 6 months after we’d hoped to have everything shipped we have actually got it all delivered! Click to read on to find out the full ins-and outs if you’re interested!
Myself and Max talked a lot about using Kickstarter or doing a self-fulfilled Pre-order, and in the wake of some really big, high-profile companies funding campaigns and then closing shop without ever delivering, we felt that we’d have better luck guaranteeing delivery and self fulfilling through our own website. I set out building the site from the ground up and set up the store and once it was polished, we tested it and it was functioning perfectly (or so we thought…). Then we started the ball rolling – our first port of call was Max’s native German audience! Unfortunately, we encountered a significant setback in the form of a technical glitch…
The Disaster!
The issue we encountered stopped PayPal from working altogehter, but only after the order had been placed and payments were being processed. We didn’t discover this until AFTER we’d had 2 big media slots to promote the game. A fault finding exercise led to the discovery of an incompatibility between the multi-currency function native in woo-commerce, and the Paypal plugin (essentially breaking the payment portal any time the currency was changed to anything other than GBP). It was too late though – we’d lost momentum and we were now looking at a mountain of abandoned checkouts worth a whopping £33,000! It was absolutely soul destroying to see that and not be able to do anything to get them back. One small positive though – it demonstrated that there was an appetite for Crystal Collapse!
We resolved to deliver the orders that we’d received, whilst putting additional orders on hold until this first wave was fulfilled.
Production Issues
Our next hurdle came in the form of our plans to split production – Max was organising MDF and printed products in Germany, whilst I organised the miniatures in the UK. Unfortunately, the printed products came up short in quantity and then we had some damages to boot, so we had to figure out what was missing and get a re-order in. The miniatures suffered a similar fate with Customs holding on to the miniatures for several weeks, then opening the package and being a little too heavy handed and breaking a large portion of the miniatures requiring a mass reprint and reship. Needless to say these shipments were landing us with customs fees and shipping costs with each pass so costs were stacking up!
Finally, Max managed to get all of the EU orders shipped, but I was still short of some MDF components. Rather than incur all the extra costs and delays we’d been experiencing again, I spoke to a friend of mine , Andrew at Flatpack Forces, who kindly cut the remaining components for me to be able to ship out the UK, US and Canadian orders.
The final hurdle!
A month or so later of juggling sculpting work with packing games, checking contents and sorting out all the shipping and we finally got the last of the orders out the door and into the hands of our wonderful customers! Albeit some 6 months later than we’d hoped (but still better than a lot of Kickstarters manage!)
The Future – Onward and Upward to GAMEFOUND!
Not wanting the last few years of work to go to waste or fall flat because of this set back, we decided that we’d enhance our core game essentials with a mass produced game box with the help of a crowd funding campaign – though it seems that since our initial assessment, Gamefound appears to have leap-frogged KickStarter in popularity due to a number of features that increase buyer protection (virtually non-existent on KickStarter), and the frankly essential (in this current economy) Stretch Pay which allows you to spread your payments out interest free over an extended period of time.
The New Essentials Box
Anyway, the long and short of it is that we are now beginning to promote the Gamefound Campaign for Crystal Collapse to help boost the player base, improve the quality of the Essentials box (to include custom playing cards, a better quality game board, pre-coloured punchboard terrain pieces and simple standees so you can get stuck in with the game immediately. We’re also bringing a new faction (the Rebels of Rosenburg), and a bunch of new individual characters to give you more choice and strategy options in your party selection.
We’re also adding a monster hunting Solo mode which can be played in PvE, P+PvE, or PvEvP modes (i.e. solo, co-op or competitive), and these will in turn bring some monsters and mobs to the game to enhance your experience!
The Gamefound Campaign and Freebie
You can view the Gamefound campaign preview HERE, but just in case, hers a few of our infographics to help promote the campaign, just to get your juices flowing! play careful attention to the FREE, EXCLUSIVE miniature that you get by following the campaign and then going on to back – Leon Averice, the Lion of Rosenburg! Leon is a real badass veteran soldier, come out of retirement to defend the Kingdom of Vaaland and the honour of King Hector. Leon uses his massive gauntlets to beat down his opponents and is sure to be a force in game!
Don’t forget to follow the campaign so you don’t miss out!
A note for all Pre-order Customers!
One final note to all Pre-order customers – everyone that backed our pre-order campaign will be getting a complimentary Crystal Collapse Essentials box once the campaign is successfully funded. We’ll also throw in the special Leon Avarice Miniature!
Thanks for sticking with us and for your continued support! We really hope you’ll get on board and join us to make the Gamefound campaign a raging success! Please share it with your social circles and gaming friends. The more backers and funding we get the better we’ll be able to make the Essentials box for everyone, and we desperately want it to be a top tier game to be enjoyed by all!
Cheers!
Dan
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