Project Update
over 4 years ago – Wed, Dec 01, 2021 at 01:27:02 AM

Hi everyone!

We're excited to share that we've completed development and playtesting for the expansion stretch goal. Additionally, the cards and game box are in final QC before going to the manufacturer. We're hoping to enter production within the next 1-2 weeks.

Let's break down the details:

Playtesting

First, a huge thanks to everyone who participated in gameplay and the tournament at Gen Con this year. Your feedback was absolutely essential. It not only helped us fine-tune gameplay and to fix some broken combos, but to assess the rhythm of the game itself.

Based on your notes and experiences, as well as detailed feedback from our booth team, we carefully tested and implemented the following changes:

• Endgame now plays "to the death," with a new rule called "Heroic Last Stand." When you're down to a final card, it can no longer be exhausted (basically, tapped) and will run on adrenaline until defeated... or victorious. The result is that endgame now feels epic and awesome, rather than slower and more arbitrary.
• Players are allowed to play every card from their hand. You don't have to keep one back. This adds another layer of strategy for high-powered characters: do you get them on the table quickly or hold them until the end so they can take advantage of Heroic Last Stand benefits?
• Defensive Instants have been redesigned to play their abilities for OTHER cards, rather than themselves, so that their unique abilities carry more weight.
• Deck-building rules have been updated and formalized, along with a mechanism to let party leaders remain in your party from game to game.
• Tons of tweaks to individual cards and abilities, as well as simplifying the rules and building a revised Quickstart guide.

Card Art

All card art is completed, thanks to a heroic effort from Jacob Blackmon. The rest comes from existing photos and illustrations from the ZOE/DG library. One of the extra-fun parts was bringing fan-created characters and Metaverse characters to life visually, as they had only existed in print or on livestreams before. We're expanding the coloring book to include some of these new pieces!

Additionally, all design is complete for new faction icons and their corresponding cards, thanks to Gabriel Gonda.

Game Rules

The text of the updated card game rules is now available for backers to review. If you want to get a head start, take a look!

Ultimate Dungeon Showdown is released under the terms of the Shared Cinematic Universe License Agreement (https://scu.la). This means that everyone is allowed to remix the game, including to CREATE and SELL (or give away) new cards! Creators must provide ATTRIBUTION, must SHARE-ALIKE, and must TRANSFORM (make something new) in order to abide by the terms of the license.

For official, organized play, new cards must be approved as CANON by the game’s creators. If your new cards are approved as canon, the creators will provide an official Canon Deck Icon for the upper left corner of your cards. For your new cards to be approved, you must have the full written rights/license to any characters, artwork, or intellectual property.

We've purchased www.ultimatedungeongame.com and will be adding card templates and design resources soon!

Final QC

We were hoping to share PDFs of both complete decks (144 cards!) in this update, but we need to do one final round of visual tweaks to clean up tiny individual errors from the data and graphics merge.

After some back and forth with the manufacturer, we've also confirmed the final specs for the box layout and design.

Once we're happy internally (should be very soon) we'll send these files to the manufacturer and get a proof made. So far they appear to have everything in stock that we'll need and they aren't yet worried about the global cardboard shortage that is affecting many game manufacturers.

Next Steps

Once the card game goes to manufacturing, Ben will turn their attention to the maps and scenarios. The maps are done and the scenarios are drafted, but now that the card game rules are finalized Ben will need to do some copy-editing and playtesting.

We also spoke with Level Up Dice today and have developed two tiers of backup plans with them for the Series dice. Everything is ready to go for manufacturing the stone and aluminum dice, but there continue to be supply chain issues with plastics/resin. 

Once we get all physical goods into the manufacturing queue, Ben will turn their attention to the digital rewards, especially the roleplaying game. All of the card game playtesting to date has kept the needs of the RPG in mind, so with the card game rules finalized, it's the ideal time to move on to the tabletop mechanics.

For the next update we're planning to include links to PDFs of the entire card game so stay tuned!

Progress Update
over 4 years ago – Sat, Sep 04, 2021 at 09:24:04 AM

Hi everyone!

We're making good progress on Ultimate Dungeon Showdown and wanted to share the latest news.

First, we're bringing 30 sample decks of the core game to Gen Con in a few weeks, where our team will be running non-stop demos at our booth. We're also hosting a tournament on Sunday, where early adopters will have a chance to test their skills.

The 70 cards in the unlocked expansion deck are fully drafted and new art is in progress. (See below for the latest from Jacob Blackmon!) We're hoping to have several expansion decks at Gen Con to playtest as well. Digital versions of these decks will go out to backers for playtesting soon as well!

If you've been following the world of tabletop games this year, you've probably heard of major supply problems with manufacturing and shipping. To help mitigate those issues we've contracted with a new manufacturer who can, if necessary, air freight the game to us. We'd like to avoid having games stuck on a container in the middle of the ocean for months. This has meant changing the card stock, but we have been able to reserve their top-of-the-line stock for this project, preserving the deluxe feel that we unlocked.

The proofs for the deluxe wooden GM screen and dice box are here! Ben stopped by the Nerd Wood workshop in Portland and picked them up in person. They say that the pictures don't do them justice—it's gorgeous work. They'll be available as add-ons in the BackerKit for this campaign.

 Here's the latest art from Jacob Blackmon!

Pick Your Character Quotes!
over 4 years ago – Tue, Jul 20, 2021 at 08:03:58 PM

In this update

• Choose quotes for our first 144 cards!
• Project update
• Gen Con Update

Character Quotes

We're just about ready to release a new playtest with all of the unlocked expansion set cards, but first, it's time to choose representative quotes for each character!

This is your opportunity to make your mark on the game—if there's a flavor quote that you want to see in the game, you can submit it right here.

Project Update

Thanks to your support, our stretch goals not only added more cards in the core five Series, but unlocked three new Series: Countermay, Fartherall, and Hopjockey. Gabriel, our graphic designer, put together the new icons and palettes for each:

"But it's still generic art!" you say, and we hear you.

That's why we've also submitted a new art order to Jacob Blackmon, who is creating art for 21 additional characters. Meanwhile, Ben is making selects from our photo library and editing them for the other expansion deck cards.

We've also requested manufacturing quotes from several new manufacturers, had a first meeting with a company to manage retail distribution, ordered proofs of the minis, and are updating the rules to include the new mechanics introduced in the 70-card expansion set. Our next big update will be about playtesting for the expansion, so stay tuned!

Timeline & Gen Con

After much discussion, we're aiming to have Ultimate Dungeon demos and sample decks at Gen Con, but while we expect the core game to be ready by then (at least in small numbers) we don't expect the map booklets to be fully proofed and print-ready, so we will NOT offer Ultimate Dungeon for retail sale at Gen Con. We're continuing with our original timeline for fulfillment, which will make sure that backers receive copies of the game and other accessories first.

Strangely, this is likely to be the first campaign we've done where all physical rewards are fulfilled before the digital rewards ship. This lets us use manufacturing, freight, and shipping wait time to shift gears from the card game to the roleplaying game.

We Made It!
over 4 years ago – Sun, Jul 11, 2021 at 03:23:55 AM

Thank you, everyone, this campaign was a lot of fun and we're excited to have all of you joining us!

So now that we've achieved our fundraising goal, what comes next?

It began this morning with a flurry of emails to vendors and manufacturers. Our goal is to get proofs printed as quickly as possible so that we can assess quality and hopefully move to full manufacturing very quickly.

While that's happening, we have loads of playtesting to accomplish. The initial game of 70 cards is performing well—playtests today moved at a great pace, with a lot of laughs!—but of course, now we have 70 more cards to test and fine tune. You'll all have an opportunity to participate in that process.

We've also begun setting up our BackerKit surveys, so we can dial in our exact order amounts quickly. While we're right on track internally, the word among game designers is that international freight (especially by sea) is a huge, expensive mess this year. We want to give ourselves as much buffer as possible to get the product from the manufacturer to our warehouses. (We're also getting backup quotes for domestic manufacturing, just in case.) Now that we know exactly what's in the game box, manufacturers can give us much more precise quotes!

The fantastic news is that we raised enough to print at least 1000 units of the game. That threshold opens a number of doors, since we don't have to do a bespoke, tiny run of custom games. Having access to offset printing alone makes a big difference.

With those pieces of the puzzle in mind, we're prioritizing all of our physical elements and new art. Once print orders are confirmed and placed we'll shift gears to finalizing all of the digital rewards, especially all of the elements around the roleplaying game.

The key question for all of you, right now, is whether you want the option of adding a printed volume of the RPG in the BackerKit surveys. We're making the RPG available to backers to print at cost at DriveThruRPG, of course, but if demand warrants we can consider a full offset print run. Please let us know in the comments!

In the meantime, thanks again, it's pretty darned awesome to have cool, creative work lined up for the next few months. And after playing four more rounds of the core game earlier today, we're pretty excited to share the fun with you soon!

All Four Exclusive Cards Revealed + New Art Revealed!
over 4 years ago – Sat, Jul 10, 2021 at 01:15:20 PM

As a special thank you to everyone pledging to the campaign, we've designed four cards that will only be included in this very first manufacturing run of the game. We've revealed two already: Zoe Adastra and Aaron's Williams's Nodwick.

Here are the final two exclusives!

The Oracle of Pale Mountain

She's appeared in JourneyQuest, The Gamers: Hands of Fate, and Hopjockey. One of the few characters who travel across the multiverse, she will answer three questions if you can find her... and will likely distract you with baked goods as well!

The Official ZOE Red Card

The Red Card returns with updated mechanics and rules! But beware—once you play a Red Card you have to give it away.

•  Card Game Play – Special rules included for its use in different scenarios.
•  Roleplaying Game Play – The closest Dungeoneer Player Character is immediately returned to the Dungeoneer’s Guild. Draw a new Recruit and player continues as that character.
•  Tournament Play – Take your party and deck and Immediately swap seats with an active player at another table. Give a referee the Red Card. They get to keep it. Swapped players continue play against their new opponents.
•  Play at ZOE Events – Play against a ZOE team member who just made an egregious pun. They must draw a new Recruit and continue as that character. Give them the Red Card. They get to keep it. Limit: 2 Red Cards accepted per event.

New Card Art Revealed

We're going to be keeping Jacob Blackmon VERY busy illustrating unlocked stretch goals. Here are his latest creations!

Planet Thunderdome Work in Progress Revealed!

This massive satellite is one of our largest maps by scale. The central combat arena is big enough for gigantic robots to battle each other for supremacy. It's surrounded by dozens of booths, vendors, gambling halls, repair shops, and a galaxy's worth of forgotten detritus. From there, docks extend off the planet to allow massive ships to disgorge tourists, troops, and petty space dictators (with their complete entourages).

The map is written by Christian Doyle, with scenarios by James Durham, and illustrated by Corey Macourek. It is part of the Metaverse Series Bundle!