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Tuesday, September 22, 2009

NEW PRODUCT RELEASE DAY

Steve Cole reports:

Well, it was supposed to be yesterday. We were one day late. Due to a number of misadventures, we didn't get the Klingon Armada book ready until sometime after 2pm on Monday, and with two of the three print engines down (they started misbehaving over the weekend, while printing Starmada) there wasn't time to print enough books for the first day's shipments.

So we will ship today. One day, big deal.

Here's the score:

Drone minis and Plasma Torpedo minis: ready to ship. We had these over a week ago, and since we need to pay for them, they need to be released.

Starmada, the hard copy of the book that's been available from MJ12 as a PDF: ready to ship.

Klingon Armada: delayed one day, as noted, delaying everything one day.

Klingons PD20 Modern: This has been delayed to 19 October. Jean did her part. Other projects kept me from doing my part.

No excuses, just a delayed victory. Here's the explanation if you want to see how ADB, Inc. works.

I had ten days between the return from my trip to the convention in Denver and the scheduled release date. I scheduled to be one day for office stuff (the friction of war), two days for Klingon Armada page layouts, and seven days for K20M page layouts.  That actually left Saturday, Sunday, and Monday for printing books.

Office stuff took five days instead of one. There were just some issues around here that had to be dealt with (and I took one day off for my 32nd wedding anniversary).

Starmada took eight days, using up all of the reserve days. Some of this was my fault and some of it was a miscommunication. The book was designed to be a mixture of pages I wrote (not many), pages Dan wrote and laid out, and pages Dan wrote and I laid out. We had a huge miscommunication in that I planned to do the book in Starmada format (so that Starmada players would recognize it) and Dan set it up for Fed Commander format (assuming if I was printing it, I'd want to do it my way). That was funny once we figured it out. Worse, when I went through the raw text, I put it into FC format by force of habit and it took a day to convert it back to Starmada format. I should have paid attention. We spent most of one day just getting the fonts to lay out. After that, it was just endless "check this, oops, change that" and we noticed some design issues that Dan's playtesters had not noticed, and Dan was kind enough to solve them, but it took a day. Anyway, it's done, and it's a good solid book. I learned a lot doing it, including some new font tricks, and marveled at how simple Starmada actually is.

At this point, I haven't even started taking Jean's Klingons PD20M files and sticking them into Pagemaker (which in theory should only take three days or so). We could just delay all five products a week but I made a command decision to ship four of them on time (which turned out to be a day late) and just kick K20M to the next release cycle (when Hydran Attack will be shipped). Part of this is that I'm signed up for three days of "business school" this week, which wouldn't give me time to do it anyway.

The delay in K20M will probably kick Federation Admiral (set for 19 October) back to November 16th. (And remember that F&E 2010, also set for November 16, has priority so if there is only time to do one, it won't be FA.) This is just an ugly reality of game production. We have thousands of dollars invested in countersheets for Hydran Attack and F&E 2010 and we need to get those products onto the market without delay. We have no cash tied up in Federation Admiral, and even if it will sell better than FCHA and F&E 2010, we have to print those first due to the cash tied up in them.