WarStages Update #18

Dear WarStages Backer,

You should have received a letter from Mireille a few weeks ago telling you that the Pledge Manager was open.
If you didn’t get it, please check your spam folder to make sure you are able to receive important communications from us.

It’s time to select your rewards!!!

If you haven’t made your selection yet, make sure you head to http://warstages1ks.com/ to select your rewards.
At this time we only have 45% of WarStages backers who finalised their pledge in the Pledge Manager.
Because of the way the manufacturing of this project will be done, we need at least 80% of the backers to make their Reward Selection before we can launch production.

So please go check out the pledge manager and make your selection :)

When we are at 80% we will be able to finalize the manufacturing schedule and then give you the manufacturer's delivery commitments.

New PDF accessories

So, have you already built some WarStages accessories using our PDFs?

We would love to see what you’ve done with them.

On her end, Claudia is going really crazy with it and she has added an extra touch to the ladder system we originally promised.

At first it was supposed to be only a simple strip of ladder “texture” that you could cut to your desired size.

But it was not enough for Claudia, oh no…
So she came up with that really cool extension you can plug to each end of the ladders. These mini platforms allow you to secure the positioning of your ladders at the top and the bottom of nearly any structure. This way it works perfectly with our cisterns and containers system, as you can see on the photo below.

But it was not enough yet.

So she made several variants of the ladders so that the color of their lighting system would match the colors of your containers or cisterns.
Is she spoiling you or what? ;)

Off course, you don't need to use the platforms if you don't need them or they are not practical for you. You can just attach the ladders directly to a wall's surface using double-sided tape, glue or blue tack depending on if you want to attach them permanently or not.

The Column Centrepiece

This is another nifty addition to the PDF set. It is a great piece of scatter terrain that can be used as an objective marker for a "capture the flag" scenario.

It can also be used as that type of place you have to take and hold with absolutely no cover, making you a sitting duck in the middle of the table.

Yet the column and platform partly block the line of sight, so if you are super smart, you might be able to reach it without taking a hit...

Well, in summary, it's a really cool piece to use in many types of settings. And it is here for our WarStages original backers, for free :)

Please note that you will receive links to these free files ONLY if you are eligible, that is, if you pledged during the Kickstarter Campaign at the SMALL Cathedral level or higher.

You will receive a private Kickstarter message directly in your inbox within the next 48h with the link to these files, to the previous PDF files (in case you missed them) and to a set of instructions on how to use them.

Late pledgers are not eligible to the free PDF files.

The Making Of WarStages - Part 4

After having done the set of textures in Photoshop, and having modelled our Cathedral in a “flat 3D” structure that recreated the cardboard parts we had conceived, we assembled it in Unreal, the video game engine that is used for most popular video games.

Suddenly, we could walk inside the building! It was awesome!

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We were torn apart between the need to show it to you in a realistic way, as close as possible to what the final product would be, and our desire to stage it in an crazy environment, to put great lighting and some cool special effects like fire, tormented skies and thunderstorms.

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We could have done both, but we were running out of time, the Kickstarter campaign was approaching fast. So we stuck with simply making “product” images as close as possible to the final real object.

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We also used Unreal to test many different layouts.

The original project was only the medium-sized Cathedral, but we knew some of you would want a smaller one and some would want a bigger one and even a much bigger one!

Laying out these designs in 3D was great, it allowed us to try many different options, test assembly ideas and so on.

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Once we settled on 4 specific designs, we did some renders to present each Cathedral models in the most effective way.

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We didn’t have a lot of time to “play” with our “videogame” cathedral but this short dip in the world of video game engines left us with many ideas. Be sure that you will one day see this cathedral and some other WarStages / TGG environments in other context and board games and miniatures...

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Having all these 3D assets allow us to think up all kinds of creations...

Anyway, now that we had settled on the exact shapes and sizes of the cathedrals, it was time to move to the next stage: Printing, cutting and assembling… Oh boy, if you knew how much time you are saving by buying our cathedral ready-made!!!

We’ll tell you that story in the next Update.

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White Cardboard Behemoth

When we started assembling the XL white cardboard Cathedral a few weeks ago, we thought: this is too good to make in just one update. That thing is extraordinary in every way - and we don’t even have the textures printed on it yet !

So we’ve decided to give it a proper coverage and record the process as much as we could. First we hoped to make a timelapse recording of the whole process, but our offices are currently too small to do that properly (more about that below) because filming such a big object means having much more room that what is needed to contain the object itself. And also to have a space dedicated only to that while we are working on it. And once again, this was not an option.

The solution was to start building separate blocks of the cathedral, exactly like we suggested with our original Stages concept and then, bring all the Stages together in a one big final cardboard orgy that would give birth to the giant XL WarStages Gothic Cathedral!

Guilhem and JR assembling the White Cardboard Behemoth

Of course this has the added bonus of taking advantage of the modularity of the Stages concept: once all these Stages / Modules will be assembled, it’s possible to create an infinite number of variation and so an infinite number of Cathedral / Fortress / Gothic Urban Environment / Space Ship Interiors / Labyrinth, etc…

Below are a few of the very first Stages we’ve assembled.

Some Stages that are part of the XL Cathedral put together as some kind of small fortress.

A completely new Stage created by Guilhem. And, oh... doesn't it looks like there is a new part here that you never saw before... Well, we'd told you we would upgrade a few things, didn't we?

But then we stopped, because...

We’re moving - Setting up our own new WarStage!!

Yes, the Raging Heroes offices have become WAY too small! There are boxes and boxes of miniatures everywhere and with TGG3 approaching, it is clear that there is no way we can cram more new stuff in there.

Since we’ll be at our new place in about 2 weeks, it made no sense to continue building up the cathedral, then take it down to build it up again. So it looks like the next images you’ll see will have been made in our new lair…

And a truly astonishing lair it is!

We started office-shopping about two years ago. It was a long and sometimes painful process. Buying a house or a building in France is way more complicated than in many other countries. I won’t go into the boring details but in any case, it can not be done in less that 3 months. And that’s when you are very lucky!

Anyway, after visiting many different places, last year in June, just one year ago, we visited an amazing house that had been on the market for quite some time. It was big, nuts (it has 5 fireplaces, a totally 70’s firepit in the living room, some medieval looking glass doors (what?!?) and a few other crazy stuff) and had been abandoned for 7 years.

The garden had gone so wild that we could barely see the house from the outside and we could not even walk across the garden itself. Inside, there was a sickening smell of mould and the old tapestries were soiled by the leaking roof. But for some nutjobs like us the potential was amazing and the price was crazy low!

It took us nearly a full year to close the deal as all the people involved, seller, bankers, real estate agents, and various types of administrative personnel acted as if they were hellbent on making this fail.

But in the end, we’ve got that amazing place for a monthly payment that is lower that what we would have paid for a new regular office building in a depressing office area. This is amazing.

And after one month of renovations it’s starting to look crazy good!

Bruno, our Communication Specialist, was visiting from Montreal last week. Here he is at the new Raging Lair, completely turned upside-down by the coolness of the place!

So why are we telling you this?

Well, first, because this is a big change for the company and we like to share that kind of events with you. And then because we think that this place is going to allow us to work differently. And one of the thing we should be able to do is cool videos in an awesome setting to share with you more behind-the-scene stuff, more cool tips, more making-of and, of course, more game-related information.
And one of the first videos should be about the massive WarStages XL Cathedral!

So stay tuned for more!