Chapter 34...
about 2 years ago – Thu, Jan 27, 2022 at 01:47:26 PM

Hello, Adventurers!

Just a quick update today! We’ve been getting fresh, shiny, and new quotes from the factory so we can start production up as soon as possible after the Lunar new year! The part of the factory that Alba will be made in is currently slated to reopen for production on 9th February, and we’re aiming to have all pricing approved so we can press go on their first day back.

In terms of the app, we’re almost completely finished! There were a couple of issues with specific commands from the book (for example, being able to add any one of a list of items) on the Android and Apple ports, but we’re pretty confident they’re sorted now! We have the team doing some final checks and playthroughs, and we’re currently looking to do the initial release in early February!

Here’s a sneak peek of what it looks like!

Doesn’t it look great? Major props to our Artist Marco and Developer Chris for doing such amazing work!

Team Inside the Box x

Chapter 33…
over 2 years ago – Mon, Dec 20, 2021 at 02:12:45 AM

Alba

Hello, Adventurers!

Welcome to your last update of 2021! Thanks so much for sticking with us, and we can’t wait to get this book out to you!

Not a huge amount to update you on since our last update two weeks ago, so I figured today we’d talk a bit about the app, and go through some of the more frequently asked questions we’ve had since our last update.

First of all, the App

Progress is still moving on the App, but a bit slower than we had originally thought. As can be expected of December, lots of holiday is being taken around this time! Although we’re committing as much time as we can to finishing development, we’re still working out the final UI for the Android and IOS versions.

Since we’re planning on dropping all three iterations of the app at the same time (Desktop, IOS, and Android), we’re pressing pause on launch until all three are done.

We’re currently expecting this to be finished sometime in late January. This’ll give us enough time to check and make sure it works properly and looks great on all platforms, in spite of staff holiday! We’ll be sending out another update in January when we have confirmation of progress 🥳

What about the partial shipping refunds?

We hear you, and we hear you. Basically, Stripe (the platform that takes payments for BackerKit) is a mythic beast and VERY DIFFICULT to process partial refunds through.

We’re working on it, but the person who’s finishing the integration is also the one working on the app, and they’ve been prioritising the app for the last few months.

Sounds good! What if I want to upgrade my pledge?

You’re more than welcome to upgrade or otherwise change your pledge until we lock down the BackerKit for fulfilment next year! You should be able to do this by logging into your BackerKit account and selecting Alba.

If you have any problems with this, please email us at [email protected] - but please remember that we’ll be off for much of the holidays, and may not be able to respond quickly! The team will be back to full strength on 5th January, and we’ll begin going through customer requests then.

Awesome! What was the plan for printing, again?

Right after Chinese New Year, we’ll begin printing all our Alba products with the factory! We mean everything - the books (obviously), the recharge packs, the art cards, the posters, the pins, the patches - EVERYTHING.

If it’s an Alba product, it’ll be printing in late February/ early March. As we mentioned in our last update, this is to avoid being in production over CNY, when the factory shuts down for a month. Having things in production over CNY usually leads to things being missed, forgotten, delayed, or lost somewhere along the way, and we want to make sure that doesn’t happen with Alba.

We’ll be getting updated quotes from our factory in January to make sure we’re on the same page in terms of cost, time scale, and what’s being manufactured, so we can begin printing as soon as production starts up again after CNY. We’re hoping to be able to share a rough production timeline with you in our next update!

Until then, make good choices and have a happy new year!

Best,

Team Inside the Box x

Chapter 32...
over 2 years ago – Fri, Dec 03, 2021 at 12:44:12 AM

Hello, Explorers!

We’ve got another long update for you today! There’s a few main things we want to touch on today, and that is an Updated Printing Schedule, as well as some information about the App!

Updated printing schedule:

We’ve spoken to our factory in China, and unfortunately they would not be able to finish production of Alba prior to Chinese New Year. Because of this, we’ve made the decision to delay printing until early next year - we’re still figuring out exactly when based on production timelines, but at the moment we’re planning on starting production immediately after the factory reopens post CNY.

Why have we made this decision?

If we began production now, it would not be finished before Chinese New Year, meaning we wouldn’t be able to ship it to our fulfilment partners until after February. We always aim to have nothing in production over Chinese New Year, as the factory shuts down for an entire month to celebrate. A month is a long time, and we don’t want to be at a critical point in mass manufacture during this period, as it generally causes delays.

We’ll go into it in much more detail later, but largely this decision was made to make sure you get the highest quality product we can provide.

This is not a decision we’ve made lightly - we had a very long, very in-depth meeting with all of the Inside the Box team where we spoke about printing Alba at length, and unfortunately we came to the conclusion that we should delay printing Alba for now. This is partially due to the sourcing issues we’ve mentioned previously hiking up the price per unit on Alba - as we’ve outlined previously, paper products are significantly more expensive to produce right now than they have been before, largely because the issues and disruptions that the global pandemic has caused in production, as well as the massively increased demand.

We ran the Alba campaign so you would get the best deal possible on the game, and unfortunately that doesn’t leave much room for additional costs, even taking into account the truly unprecedented amount of funding we received from you lovely backers.

We’ve looked into alternative printing options, primarily in Europe (the UK and Poland have been our main points of call), to help mitigate this. The perks of printing it closer to home are plentiful - we wouldn’t have to worry about Chinese New Year, just the ~ 2 weeks shutdown most companies have between the end of December and early January, and we wouldn’t have to have the books on a boat for ~ one month after production is finished for it to get to our fulfilment centres.

The three main reasons for this delay

Right now, we want to dive a little bit more into why printing this game has been such a struggle. Ultimately, it boils down to us creating a product that, while technically a book, is produced like a board game - meaning that we need to have specialised production facilities that we can’t reasonably get outside of China.

This is broadly because of three things - the length of the book, the special finishes, and the recharge packs.

1. Length

Alba is a LONG book. I cannot stress this enough - Alba is a lot of pages. Not including covers or end pages, Alba rings in at a whopping 1132 pages for the paperback edition, and an even more impressive 1232 for the deluxe hardback. In terms of number of pages, that’s about the same length as the entirety of the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or War and Peace. You know, those classically short books.

Why is this relevant, you may ask? Books of this length are NOT common, and need to be bound using special machinery - which most printing companies cannot handle. For paperback books, most commercial printers in Europe can handle binding around 400-600 pages, depending on the paper weight. Hardback book printing often has a bit more space available, and we’ve found printers that can handle 700-800 pages, once again depending on paper weight. Both of these are, obviously, not enough to print one bound edition of Alba.

Although we have found some specialist printers in Europe that would be able to bind the whole book, we then run into problems with the additional content and special finishes.

2. Special finishes:

Thanks to you absolutely stellar backers, we managed to unlock a truly unprecedented number of stretch goals, and we could not be more grateful. Before we launched the campaign, we had gone through all our planned stretch goals to make sure that everything we were offering was possible for them to produce, wouldn’t impact total production time, and would still fit within our budget. Using this information, we cut a few of our original ideas, changed up the order on some to make sure we’d be able to produce the game, and added in a couple extras based on the information we got from the factory. While most of these we could produce in other countries, we’ve been having problems finding somewhere that can do all of them.

The main issues we’re having are with the hardback editions - specifically the combination of linen cover, individually numbered slipcases, and Dagger’s Dagger collectors boxes. While most of the printers can do at least one of these, we’ve yet to find a location outside of China that can do all three. While this does open the possibility of us printing and fulfilling just the standard edition paperback copies first, we still have one more problem to tackle - the Recharge Packs.

3. Recharge packs:

Finally, the recharge packs - the third and final spanner in the works.

Unfortunately, the recharge packs (one of the things that sets Alba apart from other gamebooks and gives you a tangible expression of your adventure) have proven to be a bit too specialised for most printers to produce alongside the books. The facilities to create them just don’t seem to exist in the companies that can handle binding such large books, even if they could produce all the upgrades to finishes that we promised in the campaign.

TL; DR

It doesn’t look like we can produce Alba outside of China at this point in time, due to a combination of the length of the book, the special effects we unlocked during the campaign and key components such as the Recharge packs.

Although we could make some of the books in Europe, or start production now, the end product will come out much better if we delay beginning printing until early next year.

What about the app?

App production is still underway - the user interface has largely been made and polished, and at this point, we’re going through as a team to make sure everything works and looks as good in-app as it needs to.

As we’ve gone outside of our team to produce the app, it’s taking a bit longer than we had expected, but it looks great so far.

That's all from us for now, all the best Explorers, 

Team Inside the Box

Chapter 31…
over 2 years ago – Sat, Oct 30, 2021 at 03:24:37 AM

Hello, Explorers!

Since our update last month, a fair bit has happened!

We’ve officially approved of the requotes we got from the factory for smaller print runs, which means printing will begin imminently! We’re doing one final check of the print files to make sure everything is perfect, at which point we’ll be pressing print! As we’ve asked the factory to begin sourcing materials, production should be able to begin early next week - we’re expecting 1st November, but this may change slightly.

What happens next?

The books and extras go to print! We’ve been given an approximate timeline of 8-12 weeks for manufacture to complete, which means we should have the books leaving China by Chinese New Year in February 2022!

As printing hasn’t actually begun yet, we’re still hesitant to give firm dates, but March/ April 2022 for fulfilment is looking realistic!

What about that app?

The app is still being developed at the moment - we’ve run into a couple of snags, since we’re building it from scratch, but we should be launching a complete or nearly complete version in either late November or early December! It may be missing a few things, like the promised soundscaping, but given the speed our Developers have been working, we’re hoping it will be fully implemented by then!

I have edits I want to make to the book! How can I give you the feedback?

We’ve had multiple professional editors go through the book, as well as having most of the team go through for any further errors - so we’re pretty confident that any issues in the book will be issues with style, rather than content!

With that being said, the app version will have the most recent version of the text available - which may be slightly different to what you read, depending on when you downloaded your files from BackerKit.

We’re working on implementing a feedback system directly into the app, so any issues you have can be addressed.

The text in the app version will be the text going to print - unfortunately, we cannot make any requested edits prior to printing, as this would delay printing by likely several months. We know that some of you have requested to edit the files prior to going to print, but given that there are over 10,000 f you wonderful backers, we can’t reasonably take everyone’s feedback on board for this run.

All that being said, we’ll be updating you again at the end of next month! It should be a pretty big update, with a confirmed app launch date and an update on where the books are in terms of printing!

Team Inside the Box x

Chapter 30...
over 2 years ago – Thu, Sep 30, 2021 at 08:26:38 PM

Hello, Explorers!

First of all, sorry for the delay in posting this update! A combination of holiday away from the internet and illness has meant the communications team has been understaffed for the last month and a half, which means we haven’t been able to keep you up to date on progress.

When last we spoke…

We had approved quotes from the factory, and were working on finishing up the files for the various stretch goals. We were aiming to get those files made and everything checked over and ready to print by the end of August/early September. In terms of the app, the audiobook had been checked, with necessary edits underway, we had started to sort out soundscaping, and the app environment was almost completely sorted. In terms of delivery, the plan was for the app to be finished and distributed to you wonderful backers when we started fulfilment in November.

What’s happened since…

Perhaps unsurprisingly given how understaffed we’ve been, there hasn’t been as much progress as we would have liked.

The app is still moving forward at pace, and we’re still expecting to have the working version out in the world in November.

Although almost every industry has been impacted in the last year and a half, causing delays and shortages on normal production levels, the paper industry has had increased demand put on it. This makes sourcing enough paper to print over 10,000 1200+ page books, shall we say, a little spicy.

What we’re doing now…

Unfortunately, these delays mean that fulfilment in November is no longer realistic.

We’ve decided to lower the print run on Alba so it is enough to cover current orders and that’s about it. This should help alleviate the stress of sourcing paper, even just slightly. With that in mind, we’ve asked the factory for requotes and are currently waiting to hear back from them. Rest assured, we won’t be compromising on quality!

While we wait for these requotes, we’re finishing going through the files - again, staff illness has done a bit of a number on our timelines, but it will be sorted soon. This means that, as soon as we have an approved quote, we can get the factory in production.

Although the sourcing issue makes us hesitant to give any firm dates as to when fulfilment will likely happen, at the moment it looks like March/April of 2022 is realistic. We should have an updated quote from the factory by this time next month, which means we can press go on printing, and we’ll have an estimated delivery date.

We’re still looking to launch the app in November - it’s just the physical copies that will be delayed!

As always, for all questions and queries please email us directly at [email protected] we'll assist you as soon as we can!

Team Inside the Box x