TGG2 Update #78: Shipping News + Assembly Charts + Reflections

Dear TGG2 backers,

We hope you all had a great summer and some good vacations. As always in August, we ran with a skeleton crew, but everybody is now back in full force. The foundry continues to produce the TGG2 minis, and our packing and shipping team is on deck getting your Rewards out the door as soon as your selection can be completed.

As much as possible, we are continuing to skew shipping so that Rewards Selections are shipped roughly in the order that they were placed. The Troops are taking longer than planned to be produced in the quantities we required. Therefore, in order to have something of everything to ship at any given time, we work constantly with the Foundry to balance their production. On their end, remoulds are done regularly. This slows down production, but ensures the best quality for your minis.

TGG2 Shipments of the day ready to go to the post office

Hundreds and hundreds of minis that have just been delivered by the foundry

Keep reading for more details, as well as an analysis of the TGG2 project.

Assembly Charts

If you felt confused when you looked at the Avatar of Shaah or the War Pulpit parts, here are the assembly charts you've been looking for:

• Avatar of Shah Assembly Chart - pdf file (right click to save)
  
  
• War Pulpit Assembly Chart - pdf file (right click to save)

Remember that on such big kits, we have marked all the parts inside their sockets / point of assembly, so that it is easier to identify what goes with what.

We have already seen some War Pulpit and Avatar of Shaah photos on the web and Claudia, our graphic designer, has even started painted her own Avatar. So will you be the first to post a picture of your painted War Pulpit ?

Work in progress images of Claudia Zuminich's Avatar of Shaah

Painted Minis

Talking about painted minis, please continue to send us your pics, no matter what your painting are. We are very curious about what you've done with your minis, what color scheme you are using for them, and how you integrate them in your army. Once again, Claudia has been doing some painting on her Knights of the Chalice and we think they look great :)

One of Claudia's Knight of the Chalice (work in progress)

Sprinkled through this Update, you'll find some of the painted minis photos that were sent our way or found on the web.

Last moulds!

All the minis have now been moulded except the Altar of the Succubi that is currently in being finished, and the metal heroines that will be made immediately after that.

In terms of casting, both versions of Yscarloth and of the Dark Elves Chariots are now in rotation. A first shipment of those just hit our office.

The first Spider Mother cast are being made this week.

The moulds of the Altar of the Succubi will be finished next week. Its casting will begin right after we've approved the prototype.

Metal Heroines

For those of you who have patiently been waiting for the metal heroines, your wait is about to come to an end. We've been planning their production this past week and the manufacturing process will start in less than 2 weeks. So, at last, they soon will be yours!

Just so you know, earlier this summer, we investigated alternative options like working with another foundry just for the metal casting, etc.

In the end, after we analyzed the scheduling of the production, the capacity of each foundries and the level of quality we wanted to guarantee, the best option was still to work with our regular supplier. We might have been able to save a week or two in delays, but we thought in wasn't worth it quality-wise. So it means that the metal heroines are coming and their quality will be top notch :)

A very unique Two-Tricks Felicidad in monochrome black and white scheme by Pascalrooze

Eye Candy

While writing this update, wee stumbled upon these awesome cosplay's of our Davidians. This is thrilling to see our characters brought to life with such talent!
We contacted Sallozare, the cosplayer and she wants to make some more Raging Heroes cosplay as she loves our minis. So be ready for some other awesome images in the future.

Awesome Davidians Cosplay by Sallozare, photo by Haji-San - Click for Full Size
More images, follow her on Facebook.

Stats for your minis

As the development of the TGG game is nearing its completion, we are working on creating game statistics for your TGG miniatures. We know that most of you are using them in any different games, but you'll soon also be able to use them in the TGG universe, with all their respective background and rules. More on this soon...

Reflecting on TGG 2

We know that you have been very patient with us and we really thank you once again for that and for your support. We are very happy to read great feedback on the minis and to see them pop up on forums and social media.

As we are nearing the end of the project, the dust settles and we can look back on TGG 2 and draw new conclusions to see what needs to evolve.

TGG2 has been a great and epically big project and so have been the challenges that went on with it.

You probably know that the entrepreneur's life is at times a lonely and stressful one... sometimes, a very stressful one. Sharing it with you means a lot. Even if only in writing. By the kind of images we've posted until now, you might have guessed that we are a bunch of camera-shy geeks, which is why writing is our preferred way of sharing.

We know that many of you back Kickstarter projects to also get an insight about what's going on behind the scenes, how it is to run a campaign and a miniatures company, and to be part of that adventure. So if that's your case, here we go.

Aiming for awesomeness and quality

From the start, our goal has been to make some miniatures like no one had done before.

Seeing how many Erzebels, Daughters of the Crucible, Avatars of Shaah, Regular Sisters, Asharahs on Pegasus (and many more) we had to produce for TGG2, it looks like you've agreed with us that theses minis are out of the ordinary.

Some of these designs have been in the works for up to 15 years (the Avatar of Shaah) and some have been in our thought since the early days of raging Heroes (Asharah on Pegasus, the Sisters of the Orphanage, etc...)!

Ringil's superb version of Santa Dolores. Ringil and Ravenswood form the Serpentarium blog painted most of the TGG1 minis

However, this ambition came with a cost

For you, it has been a cost in time, waiting as the production is SO complex that it took much more time than what had been planned by us and by the foundry.

For us, the frustration of not being able to deliver your Rewards on time is unbelievably aggravating too. And we also have to deal with the substantial cost in dollars: every additional week of delay costs us dearly. And this cost in time and money delays many other projects we've been sitting on.

If we were to put all the minis we produced for this Kickstarter on top of each other, the column they would make would be approximately 15km / 9.5 miles high !

We knew that the quantities would be massive, but us and the foundry thought that with the TGG1 experience we were well prepared for TGG2. This feeling was confirmed when, after the TGG2 campaign, while we were finishing the sculpts for TGG2, the foundry had some time to do some re-stock on TGG1 for our general public sales and did it very swiftly in massive quantities. This made us feel very confident that everything would work out great.

A much higher level of complexity

But we got trapped by our wants to make even better minis, with more complex details and poses. It may not be obvious from the outside, but the technical complexity of the miniatures we've produced in TGG2 was by far superior to the ones from TGG1.

And this added technical complexity meant that the minis were not only longer to sculpt, but also longer to produce.We need to split them in more parts which means that they take more space in the molds. And so when you can put up to 3 or 4 TGG1 Troops kit in a single mould, you can only fit 2 Troops kit (and sometime only 1!) when it comes to TGG2. So of course, many more mould rotations are needed to produce the same amount of minis.

Pascalrooze's beautiful Doralys

“Why didn't you think of that earlier?”

The fact is that we did. But we were not overly concerned as the foundry was getting more and more efficient and they had some new additional staff, so everything looked fine.

What we didn't see coming was that our sub-mastering process (duplicating the 3D prints before making the molds) would take much longer than before because the TGG2 minis were full of bellowing capes, heavy skirts and more massive beasts.

Normally, a big chunk of matter is not a problem, but when you add a lot of details on in, in some case it can be problematic for chemical and technical questions too complex to explain here.

Cascading manufacturing challenges

This was a problem, but once again, in itself, it was not such a big deal. It is when the Release Agent problem came up that these two things combined together wrecked havoc on our plans. Dealing with these two issues at once had a very profound impact on our manufacturing pipeline. It took several months to the foundry to resolve the cascading issues that came out of having to change the release agent and altering the sub-mastering process at the same time. And with these added problems the complexity of the TGG2 sculpts suddenly became an heavy cross to bear instead of a normal quality evolution of our range.

Vizart continues to paint many TGG2 minis

Lessons learned

The reason we are sharing this with you today is because we've been doing a lot of thinking in the past few months.

We've come to realize that some of the options we added to several of your TGG2 minis were adding a very important cost in manufacturing. Adding two pairs of arms here, extra heads there can actually have a big impact on the box cost.
Making the troops so “multipart” and customizable is a very heavy choice especially when regular troops are so big and complex, such as the Icariates for example.

So TGG2 was an even better deal than expected

All this means that you got yourself a hell of a deal by being a TGG2 backer. Why?

• Because the large miniatures (Avatar of Shaah, Altar of the Sucubbi, etc...) will hit the general release market at a much higher price than what you paid for them.

• Because there is a very good chance that some of the troops you pledged for won't hit the market in the form you got them for yourself, as:

• Some will likely have less options (additional arms, heads, legs)

• Some will likely be less “multiparts” (we might fuse some elements together)

• Some will be more expensive than anticipated.

• All-Star boxes will more expensive to buy and each of them will also be sold separately as heroines.
  
  

And some elves from Vizart

So what does this mean for the future?

It means that in the future, we will preserve the great designs and the epicness of Raging Heroes minis, but we will slightly alter the way that troops can be customized.
Now that we've created most of the basic troops for our various armies, the future troops to come will be mostly specialists and elites. Since nobody needs as much of these as regular troops, there is no such need to make them as customizable.

On the plus side, we've made major advances in the sculpting department, both artistically and technically so future releases are already being outputted a lot faster. And, with the massive growth of our range of miniatures with TGG1 and TGG2, we now have many opportunities to create exciting games that will make use of the TGG universe. And the first one will be out soon, so stay tuned!

PS: As always, if you want to be sure that your questions or issues are addressed, please make sure to contact us directly at RagingHeroesTeam@gmail.com. If you've already done so and have not seen a reply, please look in your SPAM folder. If there's nothing there, simply send your message again. We will do everything we can to find the best solution for you.