Roll For Your Life

October update!
about 1 month ago – Mon, Oct 14, 2024 at 03:25:16 PM

Hi everyone, 

Lots of news to go over in this update: plenty of exciting progress along with a few challenges. 

Timeline challenges

First, let's start with our delivery timeline. It's become clear that we will miss our original delivery estimate of November 2024. We worked hard to try to meet the November deadline, but the reality is we are a small team with a limited budget and we want to make sure everything is polished and up to the standard we promised during the Kickstarter. We are hard at work to get the book in your hands as soon as possible, and it is coming together beautifully. 

Your support has allowed us to pursue Roll For Your Life in the way we originally envisioned: a book bursting with full color art, thoughtful and fun descriptions, and big tables with a smorgasbord of outcomes to help get your creative juices flowing. Good things take time and we are striving to make something great. 

Below is an outline of the newly revised delivery schedule. Be advised, these are estimates but we will do our best to get all of your rewards to you as soon as we can.  

• October-November. Complete the outstanding art assets for Secret Agent, Evil Mastermind and Raygun. Finalize all text documents, layouts and additional design features (cover, frontmatter/endmatter, etc.) and format for printing. 
• November. Deliver print files for Roll For Your Life and character sheets to the manufacturer. 
• December-January. Receive pre-production proofs from printer, review and make any needed adjustments then begin mass print production.
• Spring 2025. Receive printed copies of Roll For Your Life and begin the fulfillment process.

I understand this puts us several months past the original delivery date. We so appreciate your continued understanding as we close in on the finish line. 

Digital copies of Roll For Your Life are coming! 

Now for some more exciting news! Digital copies of Roll For Your Life will go out to backers as soon as they're ready, in advance of hard copies. 

Additionally, we are going to give all Kickstarter backers from the Roll For Your Life Digital Book tier and above a digital copy of the book as soon as it’s ready so you can break into it on your computer, phone, or tablet! This means that we are extending the digital PDF reward to the Roll For Your Life Hardcover book tier as well.  

All digital copies will be distributed through Backerkit. More information about the digital distribution of the Roll For Your Life PDF to come, stay tuned! 

Illustration progress report

Since our last update Conor has continued to produce stellar pieces of art week after week. Check out some of the newest illustrations below! 

Check out these scallywags from the Pirate chapter:

A peek into the Robot chapter: 

Excerpts from Wild Westerner:

A Glimpse at some of the Starship art:

Alright, that's all for now! Please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any questions. 

Onward!

-Dakota

July update: so much art!
5 months ago – Tue, Jul 02, 2024 at 02:21:30 PM

Hi Everyone! 

I hope y'all are doing well. Here’s a quick update regarding our progress as we cruise deeper into the summer season. 

We have all but 3 of the 15 chapters formatted into final layouts (only Ray Gun, Evil Mastermind and Secret Agent remain) and Conor continues to produce new pieces of art every day. Check out some of the newest illustrations and layouts below. 

There will be over 150 pieces of original full color art within the pages of Roll For Your Life, and while we are working diligently to stay on schedule and deliver Roll For Your Life this coming November, there’s still a fair bit of work to be done. 

With that in mind, if the delivery date has to be revised we will make sure to communicate those details as soon as we know them. We should have a clearer picture of a delivery date for the finished manuscript and the manufacturing timeline sometime next month. Until that time we will continue to work on Roll For Your Life and make it the best possible version we can. 

We are so very excited to get this book and all the other campaign goodies in your hands. We appreciate your patience and continued support. 

Onward! 

-Dakota

Thoughts on creativity and showcases
7 months ago – Wed, Apr 10, 2024 at 11:20:30 AM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

First update of the new year!
10 months ago – Fri, Feb 09, 2024 at 01:32:56 PM

Hi everyone! 

I hope the new year is treating everyone well so far. 

Things are going well on the Roll For Your Life front! We are in the thick of illustrating the chapters: Conor Nolan is doing an absolutely incredible job bringing the creatures, characters, and locations of this book to life. 

Each chapter has a ton of original full color art, and these pieces take time. Conor is moving through these assets at a great clip but there’s still a good ways to go. We will make sure to update you on things as they roll out!  

Here’s a sneak peak at some recently completed mutants and detectives: 

Also, the custom Roll For Your Life dice have arrived! Our limited edition dice from Q-workshop have arrived and they look incredible. The numbers match the font in the book! Check ‘em out: 

We love the look and feel of these dice and can’t wait for you to start rolling up some characters with them. 

Behind the Scenes: Artwork 

For those interested, here’s a little more in-depth look at the art development side of things. 

Chapter style and inspiration

The artwork of Roll For Your Life is a big part of the experience. The swampy wizard towers and regal alien monarchs invite you to explore each page more closely and consider all the ways your imagination could take flight. Not only does it complement the text and provide inspiration, it also helps show the reader the specific version of each chapter’s "world” that we held in our minds while creating it. 

Roll For Your Life is here to send you to the far reaches of your imagination, but when it comes to the art direction we tend to want to focus in and choose one “look” for the chapter's subject. For example, for Alien Species, there are a ton of different alien aesthetics in fiction. We could go with something cold, dark, and biomorphic like the Xenomorphs from Alien or something a bit retro and cartoonish like the invaders from Mars Attacks, but for this chapter we were specifically inspired by the sentient non-human people of Star Wars and Star Trek, and we wanted to capture that lively, diverse space opera feel for this chapter. 

Coming up with the assets 

We start thinking about the art before the first word is on the page, we can’t help it, but things really come together once we’ve completed all of the text. We comb through each category, determine which outcomes we’d love to see brought to life in vivid detail, and begin to stockpile a long list of prompts and ideas.

Types of illustrations

When putting together our list of assets we need to consider the three classifications that the art assets fall under.

• First, we have our sepia or “legend” images: these are used most often to convey a full spectrum of outcomes. 

• Next we have what we call “focused” pieces: isolated character drawings, locations, and objects done in full color with no background.

• And finally we have our big splashy “key art” pieces: highly detailed character work, larger scenes with multiple subjects and detailed backgrounds–some of these span entire spreads! 

This isn’t an exact science and there’s wiggle room between each of these categories, but this gives you an idea of our art hierarchy. 

Fitting the pieces together 

With the chapter fully formed in our mind we roughly block out each page, considering where each block of text will go and how much space will be allotted for illustrations. There’s usually between 8 to 12 assets per chapter. Sometimes an idea we have for an illustration will dictate where the text blocks go, other times we need to figure out how to fit art around the text.

Once that preliminary layout has been produced we pass it along to Tom Howey (our layout designer) with all the text from the chapter and all our notes about art. Tom formalizes everything, provides invaluable feedback and, once we’ve tinkered a bit more, creates the final layout, which will serve as a blueprint for Conor’s artwork. 

Conor takes over

Once we have all the layouts prepared and art prompts written, Conor takes over.

He jumps in for the first pass and sends sketches back to us for review.

Once we’re all happy with the sketch Conor moves onto inking and coloring the assets.

Once all of the artwork is completed it’s uploaded to our shared server where Tom downloads it and puts together the final version of the chapter and voilà, that’s a chapter completed!

Conor Nolan’s style perfectly embodies the look we always envisioned, and in our opinion elevates Roll For Your Life from an approachable and replayable creative activity to a gorgeous artbook worthy of the place of honor on any display shelf or coffee table!

Alright, that's it for now, thanks for tuning in! Excited to share more news about our progress in the coming months.

Onward! 

–Dakota

New free chapter for backers!
12 months ago – Thu, Nov 30, 2023 at 03:38:45 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.