You need to know when to hold 'em...

Playing our best hand, without having to fold 'em...

We’ve been very silent.

And we know that sucks. We started this year with a grand ambition to grow a community the could watch us build a game, and … well, things happened. That’s always the excuse, even to the point where it’s not as much an excuse as an explanation.

Let me explain… No, there is too much. Let me sum up…

Frontiers is an incredibly ambitious project, which we cannot tackle within the timeframe for an end of year crowd-funding launch. We’ve therefore put Frontiers on the back burner and moved to crowd-funding a game we’ve had waiting publication.

Stepping stones

Andak is, for all of us, a part-time job. We put as much passion and blood into it as a full time job, but in truth, it doesn’t pay any of our bills. It hardly pays its own at the moment.

This mean we need to be intentional and careful with our investments. We need to try things out, then we can take the next step.

Let me give a practical example. The game Stellar Empire: Skirmish. I had a game concept, it was similar to the classic card game War, but was based around bluffing and strategy over luck. I wanted to make this game, and I knew it would cost more then Andak had available to produce.

So instead, I took a sub-set of the mechanic and built another game, simplified, and sold that. The game, ‘The Coup’ was born. I played, fought, tested, revised, gave away copies, sold copies, swore, and finally realized I had a core mechanic that I could use for Stellar Empire.

But I had to be careful, I was only going to get one chance to launch a Kickstarter and I needed to make sure the game worked. So, by sub-setting the game, I was able to produce a product that sold and offset its own cost, while building a better adjacent product.

That is what we’re doing with Frontier.

We need experience building bigger box games. Every Andak game to date has been a card tuck box with playing cards and some components in it. We need to take the ‘next step’ to boxed board games. So our first step is to take a game we have fully developed mechanically, and use a crowd funding campaign to fund its production and final artwork.

This gets us closer to understanding costs, production line, storage, assemble, etc. for a larger game - all things we’ll need to master in order to bring Frontier as a line of games (it’s after all an entire series).

Introducing Light Racer

So, let me introduce our ‘stepping stone’ project; Stellar Empire: Light Racer.

We decided to take the established game (a Tron light cycle style game) and set it in our own intellectual property. The concept of light cycles driving and crashing is fairly sci-fi generic. With this in mind, we introduced the game to the Stellar Empire lore and dug into our own intellectual property.

This has the practical application of not only protecting us from a large mouse coming after us, but also helps include the game in our established universe. We are able to grow the Stellar Empire franchise (something we already planned on doing), and make a great game at the same time.

We still have a lot of art assets to produce for the crowd funding launch, but our goal is to have the campaign live to follow starting September 1st, with the actual month-long campaign beginning October 1st.

Backers who follow us in the month of September will receive an exclusive set of racers that are ONLY available to those who follow the campaign from the start, (the true Early Birds, so to speak).

That’s all for now! Look for other Stellar Empire: Light Racer updates coming soon!