It has been 11 months since our Kickstarter ended and we are basically all done with delivery to all backers! We are very proud of our successful and well received delivery, and are very aware that we rank in a minority of Kickstarter projects that have delivered huge plastic products on time and without sacrificing quality
There are a few outstanding tasks to complete the rewards for our biggest backers, and about a dozen of you have not claimed your rewards, although we've been trying hard to let you know! If you have an outstanding reward, as before, simply sign up at
maelstromsedge.com with your kickstarter email address and then you can use the pledge manager.
The Kickstarter was always going to be the launching point for Maelstrom's Edge, but never the only thing we do. Your funding allowed us to make Maelstrom's Edge better, with more content, lower pricing and a wider installed base and for that we are extremely grateful! This update is meant to be a general update with regards to the past, present and future of Maelstrom's Edge.
Maelstrom's Edge was born from three frustrations. First, we were no longer enjoying the games and direction of other major sci-fi ranges - nothing worked in quite the way that interested us as list builders and gamers. Second, the last season of Battlestar Galactica frustrated us so much compared to the outstanding quality of the first season that it seeded a lot of discussions about doing something better (along with the end of Firefly, good Star Trek, etc). Third, the web traffic at dakkadakka.com had reached such a high point that we really wanted to be able to do something fun with it, but not just plaster the site with adverts.
These three frustrations eventually boiled over and Jon and Jim (owners of DakkaDakka) started talking about their ideal structure for a game. The immediate point of agreement was that the fluff came first. We believe that mashing fiction around models leads to a weak universe which is simply not engaging to imagine compared to making models that fit the fiction. We then started hashing out universe ideas with friends, and after a lot of back and forth ended up with the core concept of the Maelstrom's Edge universe, along with four factions. The Epirians and Karists were born at this point, but the other two factions ended up getting refactored and merged into the Remnant Fleet. From here, we incorporated (Feb 2012) and found our two in house writers - Stephen Gaskell and Tomas L. Martin as well as operations, art direction and other staff.
The development of the rules and game began in earnest, so that we could determine how and what to create for the miniatures. With the Epirians and Karists being the most matured in our fiction, they were our first port of call for design. Mixing the original design work for those two factions, along with the flow of design for the rules, models and scope of the game as a whole was a big challenge, magnified by our decision to work entirely in HIPS plastic - the most difficult of all wargaming materials to manufacture due to strict technical limitations on part size, shape and complexity. We used three different sculptors to get three different Karist Troopers created but none were quite right and none were viable for plastic production. Our fourth sculptor was able to work in plastic, but took a lot of training to be able to get details from the artwork replicated perfectly. It worked, but because the plastic tool for the Karist Troopers was shared with the Karist Tempest tool, we were unable to get it cut until the Tempests were done. This led to a bit of a chicken and egg situation in that we could not start the rest of the range until the Tempests were done as well, so that we could be sure that our on screen designs would match the reality in plastic. After a few months of slow progress, we finally got there and were proud to have our first models created. Unfortunately the timespan from concept to creation for these models was in the region of 18 months, which was clearly unsustainable for an entire range, so we were forced to find additional manufacturers and sculptors so that we could work on multiple models and ranges simultaneously. Every time we added a new sculptor and manufacturer, there was a long delay and complexity involved in the design stage as we tried to adjust to each other's expectations, with the Terrain, Karist Troopers/Tempests and Epirian Contractors all being the 'first' models we made with people. It is very easy to see the massive leaps in quality and engineering that subsequent models had after those first few when you compare the build process of a Karist Trooper with a Karist Shadow Walker, or an Epirian Contractor with a Scarecrow as we started utilising sliding core tools and just got better and better.
An aborted, early Karist model sculpt attempt
...compared to the final Epirian Hunter
Our artwork and aesthetics blossomed in this period, thanks to our talented art director, and our fiction and wider universe were taking solid shape which was great to finally see after so much planning. Our main timesink was always model design and production, with 18 months remaining the standard timespan from concept to plastic sprue, though with consecutive production we were able to make a lot at the same time, ending in the 12 distinct plastic sprues making 13 distinct model types and terrain that we have now. As we laid out the sprues, we found different manufacturers had wide variance in what they were able to produce, and so some of our estimates for what we could fit on the sprue ended up being inaccurate. This led to a lot of interesting situations which the rules, cards and game had to adapt to, and explains the odd extra parts found on some of our sprues! Nowadays we are a lot more learned about plastic sprue layout so are able to plan much more efficiently.
The Small Shadow Walker Sprue
The strangest sprue we have is our next release. During the Kickstarter a backer mentioned 'hey guys, you should make an expansion sprue with extra parts on it'. Amusingly enough, that was actually part of our production contract with one of our manufacturers. We ended up with a sprue worth of spare space on one tool (thanks to the shadow walkers sprue being so small), and that meant that we were able to fit in an extra sprue worth of parts. Unfortunately for us, we were not able to use our existing sculptors for this, and we had to turn the entire design side around in 10 working days to fit it in to the production/tooling schedule of the manufacturers, or it simply would not happen. Going from 18 months for a product to 10 days was quite a dramatic shift! Thankfully we had quite a lot of art concepts sitting around, and we had contact with a very talented sculptor who was willing to turn things around very quickly for us. Due to prototyping and production timings, it meant that we could not add any additional poses (legs, arms, etc) to the sprue, but we were able to add some alternate hands, heads and weapons, as well as lots of bits of decoration for conversions, bases and general modeling. All parts had to be modified from existing parts for the sake of time, so there is nothing too dramatic on there. Our biggest mistake with this sprue was not adding another Shadow Walker head, but there is another bare Karist head which would serve as a possibility for those models. We've got a massive list of stuff we'd make on a new expansion sprue if the situation every comes up again, but due to the timescales involved, that one was locked to a pretty strange and specific set of requirements. Regardless, our next product will be that expansion sprue (as it exists already!) along with a number of alternate units that can be created using the parts from it combined with our other sprues which should open up all kinds of new tactical options in your game. Keep watching our website and facebook page for news on that release!
This leads us neatly into the present... Maelstrom's Edge has been picked up by a good number of retailers and distributors, so if you are in an English speaking country, you can ask your local gaming store to get a copy in and they can generally find it at major distributors now. We are slowly but surely expanding on that front, and our numbers have been very positive which is very encouraging to see! The Maelstrom's Edge website has a fully fledged online store with all of our audiobooks, models and the main box set as well, and if you backed us at $30 or higher, you have a multi-year discount to all orders there if you are signed in. At the moment, it is the only place you can buy individual models, but we are rolling those out to retailers and distributors, starting with our terrain sprue in June.
Right now Maelstrom's Edge is doing well, we are nicely profitable and are well into development of our future ranges. The Broken and The Remnant are in active development with some big names attached to their design which will not fail to impress! We are as desperate as you are to see two more playable factions created and are looking forward to getting our hands on them. We are also developing a whole pile of additional units for the Karists and Epirians which will allow all-Angel armies, massive tactical flexibilty for the Epirians, and much more. Our end goal is to have three very distinct force types wrapped up in each faction, so that you can see an all Robot Epirian force battle against an all Angel Karist force, Epirian Contractor forces fight Karist Military forces, or an all Epirian SecDef force battle a Karist Priest force, and any mixture in between. All of our models are being developed consecutively again so that we don’t end up with massive gaps in our release schedule, but we are not going to release anything until it is done, and we will shelve anything we don’t think is high enough quality, so we are unable to commit to specific release schedules for our future models right now due to those variables in the creative process, but they are coming as quickly as they can be produced, and all in real plastic once again
We will always have a fairly slow release schedule but that is because we are working over a very long time span to ensure we don’t expand too far, too fast and kill ourselves with costs.
The Broken resist
We've got three new books practically ready for release, including the compilation from all of the top sci-fi authors we mentioned during the Kickstarter. Right now we are chatting to publishers about print copies which is the main delay, but if that talk goes nowhere, we'll be releasing them throughout the year.
We've been working on some heavy revisions to the Maelstrom's Edge card game based on the excellent feedback we've received to date and will be updating the rules for that in the moderately near future that make it into a really great game.
We've had our first minor errata update for the rules, which are reflected in the digital rulebook already, and just provide clarification on a couple of minor typos in the rulebook. Thankfully nothing game changing!
We are exploring an additional production channel for resin named character models, but it is still early days on that front as we have to take design resources from elsewhere to make that happen.
We've got a detailed 'learn to play' document coming very very soon to make learning the rules a bit less intimidating, as well as a series of 'learn to play' videos in production.
To maintain our focus on the Maelstrom's Edge 28mm game, we are not looking at any spin-off games in other scales or media until we are fully capable of developing multiple ranges at the same time, so you don't have to worry about us losing focus - Maelstrom's Edge is our baby and the whole team are obsessed with seeing it grow larger and larger.
The Remnant Approach
The future of Maelstrom's Edge is bright. Spiral Arm Studios is structured in a way that we can operate with next to no costs, funnelling all income into future product development, giving us a massive advantage over the limitations of traditional companies in wargaming. Maelstrom's Edge is something we love doing, and we love seeing people enjoy the models, game and universe. We'll be working on Maelstrom's Edge for many years to come, regardless of any external factors, and we thank you for your early support, consistently inspiring us to improve, and your amazing appetite for new Maelstrom's Edge products. Here's to the next 12 months!
