After a long road, two thousand copies of The Ice-Bound Compendium have been printed! We got a package this week with the first four:
(This was pretty early in the morning. Jacob was more awake than I was, but we were both excited.)
It’s been hard waiting for this final, “point of no return” step. Our final proof looked fantastic, but there’s always a fear something will go wrong in the final stage: someone will click the wrong checkbox or misalign something and we’ll end up with a few cubic meters of imperfect books. We are incredibly happy to report that everything looks fantastic. Just over a ton of these fantastic books will shortly be on a boat moving across the Pacific to our distributor the in the USA. Whew!
Some other updates, while we’re all waiting…
Release Plans
Because of the Apple/Metaio situation, for the last few months we’ve been planning to release both versions of the game (PC and iPad) by December 15th, which is the date Metaio support ends. This was mainly in case Apple has secret plans to stop approving any new Metaio apps submitted after this date. After some additional research and thinking, and since we’ve already got a build submitted to Apple, and since Apple hasn’t made any statements to Metaio developers that their apps will be pulled by a certain date, we think we’re okay to release after the holidays, which will give us more time for the books to arrive, to put the final polish on the game, and to build up some marketing buzz.
So: this is not public yet, but we’re hoping very shortly to announce an official release date for The Ice-Bound Concordance of January 21st. This should give the books enough time to make it here and be ready to go on sale by that date, along with the game’s release. It also gives us some breathing room to do the launch right.
We’re not sure exactly when you’ll get your Compendiums (it’s going to depend on how long various stages of shipping and processing take), but we’ll keep you updated, and try our hardest to make it as close to that date as possible (or before it, if we can make that happen).
Update your shipping info!
If you’ve moved since a year ago when our Kickstarter happened, you should verify your mailing address in the Ice-Bound BackerKit is still correct, so your Compendium ends up at the right place. To do this:
- Go to http://ice-bound.backerkit.com. You can either click “Log In Here” if you remember your BackerKit login info, or put in your email to get a new link to your survey.
- Once you’ve got your survey pulled up, you can see your shipping address in the upper right. Click “Edit Shipping Info” if you need to update it.
Beta Update
We’ve been beta testing the game for almost a month now, and it’s improved immeasurably, thanks in no small part to some of our backers. We’ve fixed countless bugs, from teeny ones to giant scary game-crashing ones, and made a number of small design changes, mostly focused on better communicating what the game is doing. For example, in this screenshot:
…the green band and caption along the bottom are a new addition. The game was already prioritizing cards based on themes the player had previously selected, and suggested it was doing this in the dialog, but actually pointing out specific instances of this makes the connection stronger and better shows off the cool story mojo going on behind the scenes. There are several tweaks like this we’ve made that will hopefully make it clearer how you’re helping to shape the story as you play through.
We’ve also been working through the content doing a major editing pass, and it feels really great to get some creaky sentences revised that have been hanging around awkwardly since the early days.
Early Reviews
In a few days, we should have a few dozen more advance copies of the Compendium, and would love to get them in front of anyone interested in doing an early review. Do you write for a game site, have a Twitch stream, post content on a book blog, head a successful cult, or have connections with any of the above? Let us know at [email protected] and we’ll get you access to a review copy of the game and book.
Similarly, if you have any connections with well-positioned people who might be into a project like Ice-Bound, get in touch with us: we believe there are still lots more people out there who would love a game like this, if they only get the chance to discover it. 🙂
Take Care
We love you all. Stay tuned! The waiting is almost over.