Thanks a meeple!
almost 6 years ago – Fri, Jun 08, 2018 at 10:57:43 PM

 
Hullo meeple friends,

This update has a soundtrack. Hit play and read on:

What a finish! 400+ backers, 600% funded, and all stretch goals unlocked, including our last one to pay a bonus to Daniel Solis for the splendid meeple designs. Thanks so much!

The music that you're listening to right now (I hope) is my favourite track from the soundtrack for de Blob, a Nintendo Wii game that I worked on when I was at BlueTongue THQ here in Melbourne, Australia. It's a game about colouring the world to make things better, and I like to think that our candy happy meeples are in that same tradition. So enjoy the disco grooves of my mate John Guscott (with musicians from Aussie funk band The Bamboos) as we talk about what happens next...

Kickstarter has charged your card

Kickstarter have processed the payments. If there are any issues with your card, please contact Kickstarter directly to resolve the situation.

Kickstarter will transfer the funds to us in about two weeks, and then we can start cooking.

BackerKit pledge manager coming soon

We use BackerKit as our pledge manager, as the software works a treat and they are also deeply lovely people to work with.

We'll be setting up the BackerKit survey next week, and will send you the survey link before 15 June. In BackerKit you will be able to tell us exactly which meeple packs you want, you can confirm your Add Ons, and we will charge you postage. If there are still any issues with your credit card and Kickstarter, we can also resolve that during the BackerKit phase. Plus, if anyone missed out during the campaign, we will also be open for late pledges.

We plan to get the BackerKit survey wrapped up fast so that we can start production, so expect a deadline of 30 June or sooner. We will confirm when we've opened it up for you.

How it happened

For those interested in the nuts and bolts of Kickstarter, we were really thrilled with the trajectory of this campaign.

Our usual Kickstarter maths is to look at our total from the first three days, and multiply that by three to estimate the final amount. The other thing that usually happens is the campaign goes flat in the middle, and as some people look back at their budgeting they often drop their pledges, so much so that some days a campaign can go backwards (which is fine, we prefer for people to back to their comfort level).

But, this campaign just kept climbing the whole time, with the usual boost in the first and last days. Look at this happy curve, it's like a meeple ski run. The final total was actually four times the first three days, which is outstanding. Thanks all!

Special thanks

We've got a whole bunch of people to thank for making this campaign possible, and probably more I'll remember the instant I hit publish, but the first one is easy:

• YOU, that's right, you! We can't make meeples without peoples, so thanks again. We love the ecosystem of Kickstarter, so thanks for being along for the ride;
• Daniel Solis, our wonderful artist. He's also a superb game designer, look for his game Junk Orbit which is making its debut at Origins;
• Christian Were, who took all the fantastic photos, and edited the video. Our meeples look great in person, and Christian captured that for us;
• Roberto Massaglia, our layout genius from Arte Design who put together our fantastic logo. My art brief for logo was "BMW Clown Car", because I wanted to convey the classy nature of the enamelled metal with the fun nature of meeples;
• Kris Wilson, who always helps us with our audio, and knew by instinct that meeples means ukuleles;
• Chris Hanrahan, from Evil Hat Productions and End Game Oakland, who has helped us so much with all our Kickstarters, and was our first meeple enthusiast. If you like roleplaying games and space adventure (who doesn't?), have a look at Tachyon Squadron for the Fate RPG, on Kickstarter right now;
• Everyone who retweeted, shared, or otherwise spread the word about our campaign, as you can see it really helped us with this great result;
• And finally our production crew, who will be polishing many a meeple in the near future.

We love doing this, and you made it possible. Thanks a meeple times over!

Best,

Mark, Andre, Jackson & Penny

The Meeple from the Mountain
almost 6 years ago – Tue, May 29, 2018 at 02:18:55 AM

Hello everyone,

There’s only a few days left to help get these meeples to your gaming table. As our campaign starts to draw to close, so too does Mark and Penny’s #meepleholiday. We’ve uploaded all of the travel snaps to a Facebook album here, for your viewing pleasure.

So, it’s time to talk about the bonus meeple in the room.
When he was doing the designs, Daniel had a brainwave: how about a landscape in meeple form? And like that, he hit us with Meeple Mt Fuji. It is based on a Hokusai print of Mount Fuji. “Just a little fun here”, he wrote.

I mentioned a while ago that Andre keeps his heart right between Australia and Japan, so we could not resist this. And, we always knew we wanted to make a special stretch goal meeple for you.

So, finally revealed in photo form, here is the final meeple, with the art. We’ve used a deeper blue enamel, and the metal finish is Shining Bronze. We took the little climbers off the slope, as without the full image it was hard to see what they were. I like to image they made it to the top and down the other side, where they are enjoying some well-earned sake.

 If this meeple is unlocked at the next stretch goal (we’re so close!), every backer who pledges for at least one Meeple Pack will get one of these, and only one. We want this to be a strictly limited edition. We will make enough for you all and then never make any more in this exact enamel and metal combination.

Maybe down the line we will take up Daniel’s idea of making a landscape series of meeples (would anyone like to see that?), in which case, the Mt Fuji Meeple might return. But, if that happens, we will change both the metal and the enamel colour. We’re only making it like this once.

Thanks so much for helping us to make such beautiful things, and most of all, here’s thanks to Daniel, and to any creator who ever quietly clears their throat and says “Wouldn’t it be cool if…” and then drops the most astounding idea into the room. Huzzah!

Fuji Meeple is excited to see you at the $20,000 point. We hope to meet it there!

Best,

Jackson, Andre, Mark, & Penny

3 days to go: Bonus meeple unlocked!
almost 6 years ago – Tue, May 29, 2018 at 01:02:58 AM

Hello meeple people!

Thanks soooo much, we are now 400% funded and that means that the bonus Mt Fuji meeple is now unlocked!

Everyone who pledges for One Meeple Pack or more will receive one of these special meeples in dark blue enamel and Shining Bronze metal finish. We will never make this meeple again in this colour and metal, and we would only make more if we go ahead with the idea of making a Landscapes series. So, this should be a nice rare meeple, only for backers of this campaign like your eminent selves!

The photo above is the meeple catching some sun in the Swiss Alps. I had a lot of fun photographing meeples around Europe when Penny and I travelled as guests of Pyrkon in Poland (what a marvelous convention that was!). Penny also had a bit of fun photographing me photographing meeples. In one mad moment I considered inventing the Meeple Selfie Stick to make it easier...

You can see the whole #meepleholiday series on our Instagram account, or in the Facebook gallery. It would be lovely to see photos of your meeples having adventures when we ship them to you in a few months time!

When not having their photos taken, we like to put the meeples to work - that is, worker placement! We took our Carcassonne set on holiday, so here's them doing their job. The final result was me in third place (yellow), Penny in second (red), and first-time player Ian now first-time winner (green). He's also a backer, so he was already a winner in our book!

The campaign has just 3 days left, and we will have BackerKit live to you before mid-June. Thanks so much for joining us, and if you have any friends who would love a set of these charmers, please spread the word. If we can reach AUD $30,000 (equal to 600% funded), we will be paying a bonus to our wonderful artist Daniel Solis.

Thanks everyone, we are so pleased to have unlocked this special mountain meeple for you!

Best,

Mark, Andre, Jackson & Penny

A meeple for everyone
almost 6 years ago – Tue, May 22, 2018 at 09:11:18 AM

Hello everyone,

Last time on Making a Meeple, we talked about our Japanese wave pattern prototype. So, we had the size, the shape, the metals and the enamels, now we needed to make them all different.

Daniel did a ton of designs (he always does, it’s such a great way to explore ideas) with big single images or tessellated patterns, and we decided we liked the fine work the best. So, with the colours in mind, we thought about universal symbols that would fit each colour, and also make people happy. We wanted everyone to find their own inner meeple, even that one scowling person who wanted to get this Euro game over with so that they could play something with zombies in it. Voila, for you my friend, the black skull meeple was a no braiiiiiner.

Some ideas were easy: blue waves, red hearts, yellow daisies, purple stars. The one that was hardest was green. We knew we wanted something natural, but it turned out to be really heart to get a nice universal pattern. We tried clover leaf, vines, regular leaves, pine, and nothing quite worked, until we made the obvious breakthrough: we design in Australia and craft in China, so of course, it should be bamboo!

Here is all of Daniel’s original art, with the meeples you see in the video and photos.

We were ready, but as they say, there’s always one: we just couldn’t get one of these meeples right. No, it wasn’t the Black Skulls, don’t be so mean to the goth, they’re lovely. It was the Yellow Daisy meeple, we just couldn’t get the yellow enamel right.

The daisy design was fantastic, it was so appealing, but there was something about the depth of the pattern that just didn’t take to the colour. Yellow is hard to work with at the best of times, but we found that they were turning out either muddy or soapy.

Why did this meeple not colour reliably when all the others did? We finally had a thought: it’s because the pattern has larger shapes. The hearts, skulls, stars and waves were all small repeated patterns. Maybe it would look better if the daisies were smaller.

So, Daniel obliged with one final design, and they came up beautifully. I have to apologise again for the flat light in the photo, but we finally had the golden, sparkly, shiny yellow meeple that we wanted. Here is the comparison between the artwork and the final meeples.

Here is a group of the new yellow meeples. Again, the unflattering fluro light is too harsh, but in normal conditions these glow.

All this happened after we had finished our final photo session, so we’re sorry we don’t have these out there on the front page, but there’s the true story of the yellow meeple, and how we managed to get it at last. Trust us, you will like these ones better, because the last ones looked like soup.

There’s one more meeple to show you; our super-secret bonus meeple. It’s waiting to be unlocked at our next stretch goal of $20,000… but, spoiler, it’s hiding in plain sight in the project video. Go have a look!

Best,

Jackson, Andre, Mark, & Penny

Stretch goal unlocked! Velvet bags for your meeples!
almost 6 years ago – Tue, May 15, 2018 at 07:23:29 PM

Hi everyone,

We have flown past our first stretch goal over the weekend – velvet drawstring bags for your meeple crew! Each set will now come with a velvet bag of a matching colour to keep them warm and comfy between gaming sessions.

Mark and Penny’s meeples will be very glad to return home to their soft, safe pouches after their exhausting #meepleholiday. Here is Red Heart Meeple, ready for opening night at Teatro alla Scala in Milan, Italy.

In other Kickstarter news, we wanted to shout out to our friends at Heart of the Deernicorn, who are working away at their next title. Best Friends Forever is a roleplaying game about a group of young friends hanging out, having adventures, and exploring how our friendships change and grow. The system is inspired by their previous game, Fall of Magic, which we made metal tokens for back in 2015. Awesome work comes out of the folks at Deernicorn, so check ‘em out!

Stay tuned this week for a continuation of our Making a Meeple story. Plus, our secret meeple is waiting at the $20,000 stretch goal, and is very eager to meet you!

Best,
Jackson, Andre, Mark, & Penny