A Definitive Relaunch of the Multiverse!
about 3 years ago – Wed, Apr 07, 2021 at 12:15:20 AM

Greetings, Sentinels!

It’s been a tumultuous couple years since my final update here, which I titled “You've not heard the last of me, heroes!” At the time, I intended it just a clever usage of a villainous monologue line, but little did I know how true it would be.

I’m writing here today to talk about Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition. Last week, we launched a new Kickstarter campaign, and the hows and whys can be found both on the main page of that campaign, as well as in this news post I made at the start of this year, announcing this project. But I’m not making this update to convince you to back the Kickstarter. It’s the job of the announcement on the GTG website and all of the words and images and videos and updates on the Kickstarter campaign to sell you on why Definitive Edition is happening. I’ve linked those, so I’ve done my due diligence there. Feel free to check them out, if you want.

Rather, I’m here in this update to explain a little of what happened between the launch of this OblivAeon Kickstarter over five years ago, and now. One of the first lines in this Kickstarter mainpage is “The Multiverse began five years ago, and now we're back on Kickstarter to go out with a bang!” and that was all very true. OblivAeon was the intended end of the Multiverse, and that’s absolutely still the case. We conducted a MASSIVE Kickstarter campaign with all of your help, and reached astounding heights. Following that Kickstarter, everything was bigger and took longer than expected, but over the next two years, we finished making all the things, got things printed and shipped to us and then subsequently shipped to you. Sure, there were delays and missteps along the way, but OblivAeon hurries for no man. By the end of 2018, the process was just about wrapped up, with only a few of the shipments still straggling through a beleaguered postal service.

So! In Spring of 2019, when Adam and I sat down to look at all we had created, it was a beautiful moment. What a game! So much content! All of these heroes, villains, and environments that made up the pages of Sentinel Comics. It was a truly heroic accomplishment, if I do say so myself. But, in that accounting, three things were true. First, that the 10th anniversary of us starting this massive undertaking was only a couple years away. Second, that new people were still being introduced to the Multiverse all the time, and their introduction was based on the first product we ever made. And third, that though this was Greater Than Games’ longest standing product, and the most successful thing Adam and I had ever made… now, with almost a decade of experience under our belts… we could do better.

Sentinels of the Multiverse continued to be a successful evergreen product for us, and it showed no signs of quietly slipping away into the mists of time. With that in mind, didn’t it deserve a chance to look, play, and feel its best? If this thing was to be our life’s work, didn’t we owe something to ourselves, to the work, and to all those who would play it, engage with it, and share it with others? Popular games have follow-up editions released with great regularity, and many of them in far less than ten years from their initial release. Perhaps Sentinels of the Multiverse had earned a similar treatment.

So, in mid-to-late 2019, we began discussing what a rerelease would look like. All new art, certainly — Adam has grown in massive leaps and bounds over the last decade, and a new version of Sentinels should show his best work. We have a team of talented graphic designers on staff now at GTG, and we’d love to involve them as well, sprucing up the templates and layouts and icons and tokens and… well, everything you see in the game! But would we change the play of the game? The game text? The flavor text?! Surely not, right? Just a graphical overhaul would do!

Then! In 2020, Adam and I sat down with our first deck ever created for Sentinels: Legacy’s hero deck. And we started going through the deck, card by card, to talk about how the art would need to be updated. We noted that we’d talked a lot on our Sentinel Comics podcast, The Letters Page, all about the Legacy family and the powers they’d gained over generations. One of those powers was “keen vision”, and it was odd that it wasn’t specifically called out in the deck… and this was the seed that started the massive overhaul that became Definitive Edition. Not only had Adam grown as an artist in all that time, but I had also notably grown as a writer and designer, and we were far better storytellers than ever before. 

Back in 2010, when we started creating the thing that would some day become Sentinels of the Multiverse, we knew everything there was to know about Sentinel Comics, as we were the ones creating it. Don’t get me wrong: we’d created a TON, but over the many years since then, we’ve continued to create and iterate and expand… and there’s so much more to tell now, both in breadth and depth. Could a new version of Sentinels of the Multiverse accurately represent that? Could we do it in a timeless way, so we’re not doing it again in the future? We wanted this to truly answer those questions, and hold strong as an accurate look at EVERYTHING in Sentinel Comics, not requiring additional updating or expanding.

The steps between that vision and what exists on the Sentinels of the Multiverse: Definitive Edition Kickstarter are the answers to those questions. We feel so strongly that we’ve succeeded at telling the DEFINITIVE story of the Multiverse that we’re even offering a full money-back guarantee for it. If you try it and aren’t happy, send it back. We’ll pay you back, in full. But we believe that the Definitive Edition of Sentinels is the best the Multiverse has ever looked or felt, and that it deserves to stand in the place made for it by the products that came before it. We’re not here to throw out the old version. Think of this more as a very worthy successor. Original Edition Sentinels of the Multiverse would be proud to see how far the Multiverse has come.

So, that’s why we’re back. I hope you can understand the incredibly earnest place we’re coming from here. We wanted to make sure this in no way felt like some kind of money-grab, hence the money back guarantee and lack of gimmicks on the Definitive Edition Kickstarter. Just a very straightforward experience, showcasing the improvements we’ve made. I just yesterday posted an update comparing a couple of the previous hero decks to their Definitive incarnations. If you’re interested, it’s worth checking out. It should give you some insight into what we’re doing with this. If you have any questions, I’ll be hanging out in the comments section here for the rest of today, and I’m happy to provide additional answers.

Regardless of whether any of you back the Definitive Edition Kickstarter — that’s truly not my goal with this update — I want to thank you again for making OblivAeon possible and helping the Multiverse reach new heights. Without the support of all of you, we’d never be where we are now.

Thank you for making the Multiverse what it is.

-Christopher Badell

You've not heard the last of me, heroes!
about 5 years ago – Tue, Mar 05, 2019 at 11:54:21 PM

Hey, everyone!

It's me, Christopher. It's been a genuine pleasure to get to talk to you all over the last few years of this process! OblivAeon has been a major series of ups and downs, with shipping and communication issues on our part as a company (as very well explained by Paul in last month's update), an arduous and draining but ultimately rewarding design and development timeline for me, and a lot of stress and drain on our awesome warehouse team with the size and complexity of this product... but! With all that said! Sentinels of the Multiverse: OblivAeon is out! It's fun to play! It's got a TON of exciting content! So, I can't help but ultimately be pleased. 

As many of you noted in the comments last month, the life-cycle of OblivAeon as a product is not unlike that of OblivAeon in the pages of Sentinel Comics: brutal, world-changing, but also informative, and in an odd way, cleansing. Greater Than Games is stronger for having survived OblivAeon, and so is Sentinel Comics. We have the roleplaying game that just finished on Kickstarter, the Sentinels of Freedom video game is in development right now, and OblivAeon itself is coming to the Sentinels of the Multiverse video game soon! So, even with the Multiverse coming to the end, the future of Sentinel Comics is brighter than ever!

As a result, this will be the last regular update to this campaign. I might post here again in the future when there's notable Sentinel Comics news that I think you'd be interested in, but for now, let's put this to rest. 

Don't hesitate to reach out to us if you need anything! You can always e-mail us at [email protected], or follow us on Twitter. And speaking of Twitter, please reach out to me on my account with any questions about OblivAeon, or to share your experiences in the world of Sentinel Comics!

And, as always, thank you all so much for saving the Multiverse!

-Christopher

Reflections on OblivAeon by Paul Bender
about 5 years ago – Wed, Feb 06, 2019 at 11:43:13 PM

Greetings OblivAeon backers, this is Paul Bender, CEO of Greater Than Games. I want to share with you a series of thoughts on and lessons from the OblivAeon Kickstarter. This update has been quite challenging to write, and I’ve started and discarded my progress a number of times in search of the correct way to frame it. In the end, I opted for loquacity; we’ll see how it turned out!

Demographers often talk about how the post WWII Baby Boom generation forced institutions to change throughout the west due to its size. First childbirth and childcare, then schooling, then work and homeownership, and now, finally, retirement and senior care. At each life stage, social institutions were forced to expand and adapt in the face of this massive cohort. In this way, OblivAeon was Greater Than Games’ “ Baby Boom Generation”. It was so massive that, at every stage of the project, we were forced to change and adapt in ways we did not anticipate. Since you Kickstarter backers were the initiators of this whole enormous project, and since a number of these challenges impacted you negativity, either directly or indirectly, I wanted to share with you my reflections on the project now that it has drawn to a close.

The first major challenge we encountered was in art, playtesting, and design. We had developed a number of Sentinels expansions over the years, some quite complex in their own way, and we were confident that we had a handle on how long it would take us to develop OblivAeon. We were wrong. Not only did we inflate the volume of work by unlocking a huge number of stretch goals, but the design of the most complex mechanics we had ever attempted, coupled with the challenge of properly ending the multiverse storyline, was an undertaking like no other. Throughout the process, Christopher struggled with writing burnout and Adam suffered a repetitive motion injury in his drawing hand. Going forward, we have learned to be more judicious with our stretch goal unlocks during a Kickstarter campaign, and to better factor the time cost of complexity into our release projections.

We began to work on the production of the most complicated component for this Kickstarter, the Collector’s Case, in parallel with the design of the actual game. This was a fortunate decision, because that process was beset with production problems. Before launching the campaign, we had commissioned a prototype and gotten a quote for the Case from some factories in China. We would up going with a factory that has a lot of experience making fairly complex cardboard items, and we were happy with both the prototype and the quote that they sent us. Unfortunately, in their initial quote, the factory wildly underestimated the amount of labor it would require to build the case at scale. After months of back and forth to get the details correct, the unit price of the case was twice what we’d been quoted at the beginning of the campaign. After several more months of negotiation, we got the factory to drop the price slightly for this initial order since the initial quote was their error, but the price was still substantially higher than we’d budgeted. This compromise got us the case we wanted, but left us and the factory both in a situation where we lost money on every single case. Due to the number of problems we had with the Ultimate Collector’s Case, we learned that we cannot reasonably make a product of that type again, both for production reasons, and due to issues of shipping (which I’ll talk about more in a bit).

The size of the OblivAeon Kickstarter, in particular the volume of the Collector’s Case, caused several warehousing and shipping problems. We knew going into the fulfillment of the campaign that we would need more warehouse space than we had available to move all of the product. Fortunately, we were able to negotiate with the factory to send the OblivAeon items pre-packaged in shipping boxes for fast turnaround. Unfortunately, we ran into several problems with this otherwise excellent plan. The first was that, against our instructions, the factory sent us the mini-expansions first and separately rather than packing them in the pre-packed boxes. This along cost us hundreds of hours of labor and delays. Rather than labeling cartons as they came in and immediately shipping them out of our warehouse, we were forced to open every single carton, put the required mini-expansions inside, and reseal it, turning a 3-person task into a 6 person task. Second, the factory underestimated the effects of volume on their production process, meaning that the product arrived at our warehouse in staggered waves several weeks apart, stretching out fulfillment and resulting in delivery delays for a number of backers. Finally, the products in these waves were packed in a very efficient way, but as a result arrived at our warehouse in a different order than we were originally told. This lead to some confusion and frustration on the part of backers, as product arrived and was shipped in an unanticipated order. Once again, most of these problems were caused by the volume of the Collector’s Case and the factory’s understandable inexperience dealing with a product of that size. However, by far the biggest source of delay and expense for GTG was the erroneous early shipment of the mini-expansions.

The other shipping problem we encountered relates to how FedEx and other shipping companies bill parcel shipments. Back in 2016 when we ran the OblivAeon Kickstarter, there were several shipping services available that charged for parcel shipping based on the actual weight of the parcel. For example, if the Ultimate Collector’s Case weighs 6lb when packed in a box, they’d charge a shipping rate based on that 6lb weight. Unfortunately, in the intervening years, all of those services switched over to dimensional weight rating, which takes into account volume and charges based on the size of the box. As a consequence, that 6lb Case, due to its size, would now be rated as something like 32lbs. As you might imagine, this represents a significant increase in shipping charges. The other shipping issue related to the interpretation and enforcement of VAT in Europe. Since 2016, EU customs has clarified their interpretation of European customs law to state that customs charges must be paid on the actual purchase price of a good (and NOT the manufacturing or wholesale cost), PLUS any charged shipping. We are not happy with this ruling, but there is nothing we can do about it, and it cost us many thousands of additional dollars when fulfilling this campaign. Both of these issues were unforeseen corporate or governmental policy changes that dramatically increased the price of the campaign. We will now take them into account going forward, but they serve to illustrate the kind of problems that can crop up and severely damage a campaign’s budget.

Once we started fulfilling orders, we discovered another major problem; our customer service solution at Greater Than Games was woefully underprepared to deal with all of the problems that naturally arise when shipping over 12,000 parcels. As customer service issues started coming in, they built up much faster than our system and personnel at the time could handle. Compounding this problem was the fact that Gen Con pulled nearly everyone out of the office during the beginning of fulfillment, and then kept nearly everyone in the warehouse packing boxes. As a consequence, we did not learn the full extent of the customer service catastrophe until we were months into the problem. Since that time, we have managed to clean up our backlog, put several new policies in place, and dramatically reorganize that aspect of our business (including hiring Katie, who has been a tremendous help with this process!). However, from the perspective of any backer who had problems with their shipment, this was definitely the biggest problem with this campaign, it was definitely GTG’s fault, and we want to sincerely apologize for any stress or issues that it caused.

The final issue that OblivAeon caused is more subtle, but ultimately quite significant for GTG as a business. Due to the amount of time it took to design and fulfill all of the items from the OblivAeon campaign, our release schedule suffered a dramatic setback. You might notice that we released very few new products in 2018; this was due to a lack of development time in 2017, when nearly all of our resources were devoted to finishing and producing OblivAeon. A nearly complete lack of new releases in a calendar year is obviously problematic for a game publishing company, and is a situation we are only just now starting to rectify.

OblivAeon was an incredibly valuable project for our business from an educational standpoint, and we are very pleased and satisfied with the project we produced from a story and gameplay perspective. However, I think it is very important to state that, if we had been a smaller publisher with less other revenue, it would have bankrupted our company. Very small errors in estimating timelines, labor requirements, or shipping costs can have catastrophic consequences when a project reaches this scale, and this project suffered from all of them. Those errors and delays not only caused cash flow problems, but also a lot of delays, which negatively impacted you as backers. Those delays, combined with our customer service problems, ran the risk of severely damaging our company’s brand and reputation with you as consumers. Ultimately, the OblivAeon Kickstarter Campaign was an exciting but dangerous event in the history of Greater Than Games. Fortunately, I feel that it has made us a much stronger and more professional company as it moved through each department, and I hope that, for all of the frustrations, the final product was worth the wait.

~Paul Bender

Customer service and news from the world of Sentinel Comics!
about 5 years ago – Tue, Jan 29, 2019 at 10:21:42 PM

Hey folks! Maggie here with a quick little update on the OblivAeon reships and replacement parts, as well as some exciting exciting news from the world of Sentinel Comics!

Reships and Replacement Parts

As some of you may have read online, we officially hired a customer service manager. Katie started with us in the middle of January and hit the ground running. She has responded to most of our outstanding messages and, in tandem with our warehouse team, has been able to get the number of replacement parts and reships for OblivAeon to below 30 orders. All of which will be shipped out this week!

There are a small number of people who we have reached out to ensure their orders were fulfilled that we are waiting to hear back from. Aside from those, we will be done with the OblivAeon campaign officially by the end of this week!

If you have an outstanding issue and you have not heard from Katie or myself, please message [email protected].

News from the world of Sentinel Comics

Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game officially launched on Kickstarter today! At 10 AM CST we hit the go live button and before 11 AM rolled around we were fully funded and working on our first stretch goal thanks to all of our amazing fans. 

What is Sentinel Comics: The Roleplaying Game?

This is a game of powerful heroes, terrifying villains, and the conflicts between them in a world of comic book storytelling. The years of Sentinel Comics storytelling that Greater Than Games has produced have all lead up to this point, and now it's time for you to take the reins of your own heroes and bring evil to justice!

Are you ready to be a hero? Check out the Kickstarter to learn more!

Check back next week for an OblivAeon retrospective update from Paul!

-Maggie

Improvements to our customer service!
over 5 years ago – Fri, Dec 07, 2018 at 06:58:45 PM

Hey, folks! Maggie here!  

I wanted to post a quick update to let all of you know: we are hiring a full-time Customer Service Manager!  

Your feedback helped us realize that it was time to find someone that would be 100% dedicated to responding to messages from our awesome fans! We are hoping to hire someone within the next month or two so they will be able to get integrated before our next big project!  

Click here to learn more about this position.  

Have an amazing weekend!  
Maggie