Seize the Bean - A Light-Hearted Deck Builder about Berlin!

Mini-Update for Early February
about 4 years ago – Tue, Feb 04, 2020 at 12:39:32 AM

Happy Monday everyone! Welcome to February, the month of Chinese New Year holidays and factories that sleep and party. :) 

As promised, our production team has been busy at work on the Variant Rulebook and are about ⅓ of the way done. We’ve had some feedback about providing ambiguous numbers in the past, so to clarify, that means we are about 20 pages into the 60 page Variant Rulebook. We believe the Solo Mode section in the middle is going to be quite chunky and give us the hardest time, but the end should be quite fast because the last few spreads are actually copied content from the Main Rulebook (a large list of quick icon references).

On related good news, Janna, our graphic designer, is back from holiday and working alongside our production team! Dylan and Eva were able to tackle some layouts and InDesign stuff themselves even while Janna was gone, but it’s great to have more people working to finish up this final file.

We’d like to reiterate that to everyone: we are on the final English file of the game! Hooray! When this is done we can submit the print files to our manufacturer for proofing, and then focus our energy on finalizing the translation for the other languages.

Regarding Chinese New Year, our factory should be back in business shortly. We’ll give more details on this in the next update, but we can confirm that by the time we are ready with files, the factory will be ready to start producing.

The number 1 question everyone asks is: when is the game going to be delivered? We really feel terrible not even giving an estimate here, but we truly believe that it’s best to be honest and stick to the plan of sharing an estimate once the game is in print. That way, we won’t misjudge any of the steps and leave all of you backers further disappointed. Please remember, it’s our first time doing a rulebook of this type and size, so it’s incredibly hard for us to be super accurate in our estimate. We’re learning and we greatly appreciate you being a part of this journey with us!

There have been a lot of questions about company resources in the comments and we’d love to address this topic. While we won’t go into deep detail now, we’d like to remind people that we are a small team even though our event presence can be quite large. Most of the team at Quality Beast are not full-time and almost all of us are still currently being trained in our roles. Despite this, we are all incredibly passionate about making games and everyone is focused and dedicated to finishing Seize the Bean. Even with the delays we are very proud of this product and so happy to have all the backer input that made it what it’ll be once done.

Whew! That was almost not a mini-update, but it was, because the title says so. ;) We’ll see you all in 2 weeks, and meanwhile please keep the comments, questions and positive energy incoming!    

Mini-Update for Mid-January
over 4 years ago – Fri, Jan 17, 2020 at 12:15:09 AM

Hello backers! We hope your January has been going well so far. Ours has been very productive!

As you know the rulebook is done and we are receiving bits and pieces of your feedback. We really appreciate all the input we are getting and for those that wrote us in the comments and via email, please don’t worry if you haven’t gotten a reply yet. All of your input has been forwarded to our production team and it’s mostly all being applied.

For those that did not submit feedback, or didn’t read the rulebook yet, we have a great news for you: the response has been very positive! We were so pleased to see only a few typos and grammatical changes (and often the same ones) being cited by some of the more active backers during their proofreading. In general, the response we are getting is that the rulebook is thorough, clear, well-written and heavily illustrated (in a good way). We sincerely hope that the bulk of you agree once you get a chance to look! In case you didn’t it’s at http://rulebook.seizethebean.com

Unfortunately, searching the rulebook text is currently not possible. This is because of the way we exported it. We were aware of this issue at the time, but we did not want to delay sharing the rulebook as we tweaked with export settings. In short, you will see a text-searchable rulebook in the future. Stay tuned!

The variant rulebook moves steadily forward! Even with our graphic designer on a short hiatus, we are progressing strongly with just the remaining 2 members of the production team. As soon as we have a finished document to share we’ll provide a link as we did with the main rulebook.

Chinese New Year is already nearly upon us and notifications are coming in from our manufacturer. This is fine, though, as we already disclosed in a previous update, we are well aware we would not get production done before Chinese New Year. How this effects the final delivery date we’ll need to share in a future update.

Those are the main topics for this mini-update, so for now we’ll say farewell but please keep the comments, questions and positive energy incoming! We look forward to seeing you in the next update in 2 weeks (or sooner, if we have a larger update meanwhile)!

Mini-Update for Early-January
over 4 years ago – Sat, Jan 04, 2020 at 12:34:19 AM

Happy new year everyone! And welcome to 2020. Yes, yes, we know, we know. It’s terrible to say that phrase and not have a copy of Seize the Bean in your hands. Luckily, we do have some good news today...

We are 100% finished with the English rulebook! This is massive for us. This has been a huge learning point in the entire project and one we take very seriously. Of course there will be learn-to-play videos and other resources, but without a good rulebook a game can be almost impossible (or at the very least thoroughly unenjoyable) to learn and therefore play.

You can download the rulebook at http://rulebook.seizethebean.com. We highly recommend you actually download it, and not view it in the browser. Secondly, we also recommend that in your PDF viewing software, you turn on “two page” mode, or any setting that shows the pages side-by-side, as that is how they were designed to work (as though you had the rulebook splayed open in front of you).

Rulebook feedback? Some backers were asking if they can give rulebook feedback. Of course! But please, if you have some input, let’s try to keep it organized. Feel free to email us at [email protected]. It would be best if you sent any thoughts to us in English (for now, for other languages we can explore possibilities later, once those rulebooks are done) and it would be very helpful if you marked your email subject line with something obviously related such as “Seize the Bean Rulebook Feedback”. That will help us not bury the emails about customer support topics. For those worried about further delays, although we are open to feedback we do not plan to make any major changes to the rulebook, so please do not worry.

We are knee-deep in the variant rulebook. Currently, we are finishing up the diagrams and graphics for the variant rulebook. Unfortunately one of our main graphic designers is away for a few weeks, so we need to see how we restructure in order to complete this without too much time passing. In our next update we’ll report back on how this going.

Translators are being set up for the final stretch. Also in the next update we hope to have some news regarding the estimated completion date for all translators. With this we can finally give a target date of when we plan to hit print.

Thank you everyone, we hope you had a wonderful holiday season, a happy new year, and look forward to seeing you in the next update in 2 weeks (or sooner, if we have a larger update meanwhile)!

Mini-Update for Mid-December
over 4 years ago – Tue, Dec 17, 2019 at 01:11:57 AM

Bring on the holidays! As promised, we’re trying mini-updates every 2 weeks to stay in touch without bogging down the team. (Keep in mind that bigger updates will now come when ready, and not on a set schedule.)

We are still preparing language files to submit to our manufacturer. We mentioned 2 weeks ago that we had some English files prepared and we were beginning to update them for each of the languages. We are still working on this and do not have them submitted yet. We’ll keep you all posted the moment those go in.

We are still wrapping up the main rulebook. During the final feedback we found a large structural change we wanted to make. It’s been made so we are cleaning up the results of that. Due to the holidays, we’re moving slower on the main rulebook than we would like. We’ll share news once it’s ready to be submitted to our manufacturer.

Cards are being audited and submitted this week. With the major changes done on the rulebook we are moving our attention to the cards. Again, with the holidays this may move slower than we like. We’ll keep you all updated with our progress as usual.

No other topics to report at this time. We are wishing you all a happy holiday season and look forward to getting this game out to you in 2020!

Thank you everyone, and see you in the next update in 2 weeks!

Mini-Update for Early-December
over 4 years ago – Tue, Dec 03, 2019 at 01:38:42 AM

Welcome to December! As promised, we’re trying mini-updates every 2 weeks to stay in touch without bogging down the team. (Keep in mind that bigger updates will now come when ready, and not on a set schedule.)

 So far, all of the English files we uploaded to our manufacturer have been approved! This is absolutely huge. We still have a lot of files to go, but this milestone means this week we are copying the approved English files and beginning to fill them up with the non-English language content. Incredibly exciting for us all!

We made it completely through our graphic design pass of the main rulebook. All feedback is over to our graphic designer, Janna, and she is smashing through it as fast as she can. With this out of the way, the only graphic task we’ll have left will be the variant rulebook polishing as well.

Cards are updated but not yet submitted to Panda. We’ll also be trying to get these tidied up for submission this week but it looks like we won’t have them and the rulebook done in the same week. Therefore we’ll focus our energy on attempting to push past the finish line on the rulebook first.

Translations continue to move forward, without much to report. We know people are eager to see the content in their language. As noted in the last mini-update, we can’t promise this yet, but if we’re able to we’ll surely try to release content before hitting the final print button.

Lastly, shipment date is not further solidified. Hang in there as you shop for the holiday season and we’ll be updating you as soon as we know more.

Thank you everyone, and see you in the next update in 2 weeks! (And let us know if these mini-updates are working well for you, please.)