Minor delay, progress reports, and our map artist
Howdy from the Range, partner!
Minor delay
After some consideration, Jim and I have made the decision to push our deadline one more time. Previously we had been planning on going to Kickstarter in September, but we’ve chosen to push it until June of next year.
Our goal from the very beginning has been to go to Kickstarter with a game that is fully baked. Maybe it’s just the way we work, maybe it’s a deeply ingrained habit I have from decades of working in a creative industry, I don’t know— but we have always wanted to hold off on crowdfunding until the only thing left to do was manufacture. That approach comes with a few advantages (it allows us to really sell the exact thing we’re making, to avoid delays after funding, and to get the game in funders’ hands relatively quickly) and a few disadvantages (we assume a larger portion of the financial risk).
We haven’t hit a setback, or any unexpected problems— we just want to give our artists more time to work, and we want to circle back and beat a couple final missions into shape before we hit the gas on marketing ahead of the launch. We continue to feel excited about what we’re making and confident that you will love it too.
Our incredible map artist
It’s been a while since you’ve seen any art, and we have loads and loads of it to share. A veritable treasure trove of art, made by our brilliant artists all over the world. You’ve already met Omercan and Fernando, and now it’s time to introduce our third (and final) artist for Lonesome Star. Victoria Voytsekhovska is an artist and animator living in Ukraine. We first contacted her about making some backgrounds for our Kickstarter video (more about that another time), but working with her was such a pleasure that we quickly put her on map-making duties.
Getting the maps right in our game has been a deceptively tricky process. Sometimes a couple of hexes in one direction or another can really make an episode sing. This map is from an episode in the Rebel path, where players rescue the cranky leader of the local resistance. He’s holed up in a distillery in the ruins of an old city, single-handedly fighting off a family of bounty hunters. It took us a few tries to get the first few turns to play out right— players have to keep the Rebel fighter alive, so we wanted to start with the enemies targeting him before they enter the fray. They start out in the northeast corner, with enemies on the south side and their ally stuck behind the broken tables to the north. The map really needs to create space for interesting strategic decisions, so players can start to engage with the bad guys without rushing in and getting outgunned by the five enemies.
Of course, it’s on us to make the map work but it’s on Victoria to make it look good. Luckily for us, she’s incredible. In Lonesome Star, red borders between tiles denote cover. She's always finding clever ways to make the functional bits of the map feel organic and like part of the world.
Victoria has been an ideal collaborator, always riffing and coming up with better ideas than ours and making the world of Lonesome Star come alive with little details. It’s also been awesome getting to get to know her through the process. Despite all of the adversity her family has faced over the past few years, she’s been an absolute joy to work with, and her enthusiasm for the game (and art, and life in general) is really inspiring. She’s working on a short film about her life in Ukraine during the war, moving from Mariupol to Lviv with her husband and young son. We’ll keep you posted on that, too.
Until next time,
Hamilton and Jim