Happy New Year! Let's Talk Fulfilment!
over 2 years ago – Fri, Dec 31, 2021 at 06:43:46 AM

Hello, all!

The pledge manager is still going along strong, with just about 80% of you already having responded, which is GREAT! The Pledge manager will be going strong for a while still, but the first round of pledges will be locked in on January 7th, which is next Friday! So if you want to make any last minute changes, or switch things up - that's your time.

Let's talk some fun stats!

One of my favorite parts of Backerkit is the fun stats that come through as people complete their survey. Big thanks to Kelsey who was the first backer to the project, and the current Character Tracker Speedrun 100% Glitchless goes to Jenni, who completed their survey within 6 minutes of receiving it! Speedy!

Also, before you take a look at the next image, take a guess what the most popular class was? I'll wait a minute...

... have your guess?

Turns out that Druids rule the show here! Close in second are Clerics and Wizards, with Rouges being right behind! Interesting that 3/4 of the top are full casters, with Rogues being #4. Their tracker is most important for the Arcane Trickster subclass, which is apparently way more popular than I expected! Let me know if you guessed right down in the comments!

Also everyone is excited for the Liminal Space chonky D20 - I'm working on production for those right now, as well as the blanks for upcoming Dual Vaults. Trackers will get engraved once things are locked in, as the Day One and Kickstarter variants are limited run. All of the Acrylic for those arrived earlier this week, by the way- so production will begin on the 7th and likely be complete by the 21st! That puts us right on track for fulfillment!

Back to work!

That's it for me today, and for the year! Very excited to start production to kick of 2022 with making some woodchips- and very excited for more projects coming soon!

- Michael

Pledge Manager is LIVE!
over 2 years ago – Fri, Dec 17, 2021 at 01:30:38 PM

We're LIVE!

This is a real short update, everyone! The pledge manager is NOW LIVE! Check your emails for the link to your survey and finalize your order! The pledge manager will be live until the end of this month!

Also, if you missed the campaign but still want to get the Vaults at campaign pricing, you can check out the preorder store HERE. This will not include the free personal engraving, but WILL include the Kickstarter logo variant.

Thank you all for your patience and support! More updates to the campaign and store will be coming over this weekend!

Happy Holidays, everyone!!

- Michael

An Update On The Pledge Manager
over 2 years ago – Tue, Dec 14, 2021 at 02:55:06 PM

Hello, all!

I was hoping to have the pledge manager out by now, however some issues in Backerkit have slowed me down slightly. Let me give you the rundown.

SKU-ed Expectations...

Ok, **heavy breathing** this is going to be a bit of a rant.

In Backerkit, every variation of every item gets it's own unique SKU. This means that I had to manually enter 427 unique SKU combinations for the T-Shirt crests alone, with an additional 13 SKUs per vault wood type and tracker type. Compound this with an auto-saving, auto-SCROLLING UI that resets your position after each box being filled in, and this was a very frustrating past few days.

I've been talking with Backerkit to get around these platform limitations and for some of these, we've come to an elegant solution! For others- not so much. The biggest issue, something I've dealt with across three Kickstarters now, is the inability to assign an add-on question and it's response to an add-on item. Questions are asked, but they are attached- which leads to some confustion.

For example, if you purchase two Class cressts, both in black walnut, and then two personal engraving messages - I can't know which combination of message and crest goes on which vault without questions asking you to describe/number your vaults yourself.  This is honestly a really sub-optimal experience for all of you, which I'd like to solve, but can't with Backerkit's limitations.

So, we're going how we've gone on before - with descriptive questions and me emailing you in case anything that is too complicated for the website's UI.

The good news is though, that I have most of this in place! The bad news, is that I still require Backerkit's permission to launch, and it's been over a week of back-and-forth emails convincing them that I know what I'm doing (having done this twice before, both on a larger scale) - so I'm just waiting on their blessing to be able to launch the campaign.

Once that button turns green and I have approval - I'll be sending the campaign survey! Hopefully that will be soon, as I want you all to be able to get your surveys filled before the Holiday shipping crunch upcoming which will put a big damper on the project. Plus, I want you to be able to go to your holidays excited and now waiting on an email from me!

As soon as I know more, I will let you know! Thank you for your patience, I'm working to get this resolved as quickly as I can!

Thank you,

Michael

WE DID IT!! Now what?
over 2 years ago – Fri, Nov 26, 2021 at 10:25:54 AM

THANK YOU!!

The Kickstarter just ended, and while I wasn't able to do a full-fledged livestream due to the Holiday, honestly, we weren't planning to travel until after the campaign had already begun, I'm sitting here at the kitchen table very thankful for all of your support- so perfectly timed with yesterday's celebrations. 

I am so excited to be bringing this third Kickstarter to fulfilment, and I'm already excitedly looking ahead at what I'm going to be able to do next once the Trackers are available every day on the Loot Tables shop.

Speaking of that shop though...

If you're looking to double-dip on some Loot Tables goodness, and get something before the holidays for you or your favorite TTRPG player, I'm running a special promotion all this weekend! Click the image to check it out.

What's Next?

Thank you for making my third Kickstarter project a reality! As most of the designs are complete and I've been working ahead on making vaults, I expect this to be my smoothest Kickstater yet, but there's still a few steps before I can ship packages out. Let's break it down.

First, Kickstarter needs to transfer over the funds so I have the funds to make the rewards (this can take up to two weeks). Make sure you get your pledge resolved, but Kickstarter does all they can to help out during this process. At this point, it's Kickstarter, not me, who is fulfilling your pledge.

Next, I have to find out which classes, addons, and personalization you all picked (I'm so excited to see what you choose) and where I need to ship them. I'll send out a BackerKit survey to collect this information, and I'll have a video posted here in another update soon explaining how things will look and how everything works.

I’ll give you a heads-up before we send the survey so that you can watch for it. You don’t need to create a BackerKit account to answer your survey. The invitation email contains a link to your personal survey. It is important to submit your responses as quickly as you can since I need this information to process your rewards.

If you need to change your survey responses, purchase add-on items, or update your shipping information, you can click the link in your survey email again or request your survey link under "Lost your survey?" on our BackerKit project page. (This page will only start working after we send the surveys out.)

If you prefer, you can contact me directly and give me your information, but answering your survey help me get your rewards out to you faster. BackerKit helps me save lots of time by streamlining the survey process, automating data organization, and providing me with pledge management software to make it easy to process your pledge reward shipments.

A note for Facebook users: If you used your Facebook credentials to log in to your Kickstarter account, the BackerKit survey link is sent to the email address you use for your Facebook account. If you have another email address that you prefer to use, please contact me.

Again, thanks for all your support. I can’t wait to send you your vaults! Onward to our new journey!

- Michael

Less than a week to go! Let's finish strong!
over 2 years ago – Mon, Nov 22, 2021 at 02:41:31 PM

Hello, everyone!

We're quickly approaching the end of the campaign which will end THIS FRIDAY at 1pm EST - which is also the day after Thanksgiving here in the US, which I honestly didn't 100% plan for, because I'll be away with my family while the campaign is ending. Likely we'll do a short Instagram livestream to celebrate a successful campaign, though! Keep an eye on Twitter for more info there.

Let's talk prototypes!

Now, here's where getting absolutely whammied with a case of HFM through the LT household has slowed me down a bit, I am about 5 days late with this post, and I don't have 3 designs to show you today, specifically Cleric, Paladin, and Rogue. 

Paladin and Rogue will look similar to Artificer, with icons & spaces for the limited spellcasting those classes get (for Rouge, I mean here Arcane Trickster, basically) - with the half-caster spell slots on the left. Clerics are another full caster with Turn Undead, and will look similar in layout to Druids.

With that out of the way, let's show off what we got!

I'm trying to get the time to engrave the last three before heading out for the holidays, but with fulfilling people's existing orders and some IRL efforts - it's going to be close! I'll keep you in the loop!

This is a bit of a screenshot dump, but it should give you an idea of how the prototypes currently look. I'm experimenting with some additional detail, as well as being able to commission the artists to make some small tweaks to prepare these designs better for laser engraving once the campaign ends. 

Super excited to get to work - I'm finalizing things in the pledge manager in the next few weeks to get right into the fulfillment stage of this campaign once things close. This has been a smaller affair than I was originally expecting, so honestly fulfilment is looking really positive and I expect to potentially beat my original timelines. I'll keep you all updated on that on twitter!

Thank you for backing the campaign, let's close this one strong!

- Michael