August Update – Brexit Pledges Ahoy!
over 4 years ago – Sun, Sep 08, 2019 at 05:28:46 PM

This is the August update which i am late with, so it is going to be a short update (by normal standards) as I have been in the workshop all day sorting out packages to be sent out next week and planning the weeks work as well, and I plan to do another update once I have shipped the "Brexit" pledges to update you on what’s left to do.

We are slightly behind on painting the Master of the Dungeon sets, and large sets but we have made good progress on them, the reason for this is that we have been prioritizing our European Pledges as the deadline for the dreaded "Brexit" is coming up at the End of October.

While we are planning on having everything sent out by then, we wanted to make sure that we have everything sent to our European Pledgers well before that date, so there can be no issue with that at all.

We should have all the remaining Non-GB European Pledges finished by the end of this week, I just need to paint Some Reward sets and some Large and Small Pillar Sets.

We have 12 “Brexit” Pledges and they all need at least one thing finishing on them, but none of them need anything cast, and everything that needs to be painted is undercoated and ready to be painted this week.

Just to be clear that’s all European pledges that are NOT for Great Britain. Not to say we won’t get any US and GB orders done as well, its just that as I said we want to make sure the EU ones are clear and free long before the Deadline hits, and with all the crazy stuff that’s going on with the UK government at the moment, I don’t want to take any chances.

We have received a big box of Painted DA I and DA II Accessory sets and Gothic Accessory sets from Gordon, that I was waiting for so I can send out a bunch of pledges.

I was in the workshop at 6am today to pack up boxes and spent the day putting pledges together as far as I can, with what I have finished, and I shall be working long hours this week to get as much done outside the EU “Brexit” pledges as I can.

The workshop is a complete mess and at some point, I’ll need to tidy it up and make a few molds where they have deteriorated with use, but that’s par for the course when you cast so much stuff.

As I said at the beginning of this update, I will give a more substantial update when I have the “Brexit” Pledges sorted and I have managed to take stock of what we have left to cast, and where we are with the rest of the pledges.

We have got all of the Core Set pieces cast and the majority of them painted for the Non Master of the Dungeon Sets, and we have everything undercoated and at least base coated for those sets as well, I see no issue with all the Non Master of the Dungeon sets being sent out by the end of September, but I want to make sure I give you facts not just what I remember or think.

So Watch this space!

As always thank you for your support and understanding while we finish the KS off, we are definitely on the home stretch and very shortly we will have a huge amount of Pledges going out the workshop door to you fine folks!

Thanks

Andy @ DMB

June Update....
almost 5 years ago – Thu, Jul 04, 2019 at 03:50:59 PM

Hello everyone,

This update is late and I’m sorry about That, but June just seemed to disappear, I can’t believe we are at the end of the first week of July already.

June was hugely busy for us here at DMB, we had the UK Games Expo at the beginning, which was amazing as always, such a great show and such an awesome crowd. We saw several of our KS backers, those that have already received their pledges and those waiting to get them.

Feedback from those of you that have received them is amazing, very positive, and lots of people asking when they can buy more of the KS exclusive bits, to which we answered, October when we have finished shipping everything out to everyone.

Ill put some pictures at the end of this update so if you didn’t make it to the Expo you can see the new Sci-fi, Tavern and Brick Sewer boards we had on display, as well as some of the new bases and other accessories we had with us at the show, ill also be popping a little surprise in at the end of this update so make sure you scroll all the way down to the bottom.

On to the KS update bit.

What have we done since the last update

So apart from the few days we took to recover from the Expo and the few days I took off for my birthday at the end of June, we have been working hard, working on the next stage of the KS fulfillment timeline which was remaking of molds. 

This has been going well, but we have a lot more molds that need remaking than we thought, and we have also been making extra molds of crucial pieces like the Cracked Flagstone 4x4 and 2x2’s to ensure that we can speed up the casting of the remaining sets as obviously we can only cast as many pieces as our molds allow.

We have also been casting as much as we can, mainly Core set pieces and Door sets, so that we can keep the momentum going.

We used an extra £600 of our profits from the UK Games Expo buying Silicone to remake molds, on top of the money we had already budgeted to buy extra resin and silicone to replace the molds that had already broken. This means we can make lots of extra molds t help speed up production.

Speaking of speeding up production..

Changes to Rewards

Whilst looking at what molds we needed to replace, we have come up with a way to improve the room sets and speed up production.

When we originally designed the room sets that are in the Kickstarter we had to make the up using parts from the core set as we didn’t have the scope to add more pieces to the Kickstarter.

But now we are casting everything we can tweak things slightly. We are looking to make the following changes to Room and Corridor sets only, the Core sets will be unchanged.

L-Corner Wall Tile

We are looking to replace any outside corners of room or corridor sets with our L-Corner Wall tile. 

This tile forms a 2x2 L-Corner wall that sits round the outside of a floor tile. It’s the same as the 1.5 block and 2.5 Block wall you would have received, except that its one piece.

It speeds up set up by being placed as one piece, its more stable and it can also be used to place an upper floor as well.

4x4 Floor Tile

We are looking to swap out any floor tiles that add up to a 4x4 space and replace them with a 4x4 tile.

This helps to speed up set up as your putting down one tile in place of 2 and your also getting floor tiles that enable you to place large areas of floor at once if you use them in conjunction with your core sets.

If we make these changes it will speed up production, because we can use the core set molds to cast the core sets, and these extra molds that we will be making to make the room and corridor sets, rather than having to wait for the molds to be free from casting core sets.

I plan to do a KS video in how exactly this affects the room sets in the next coupe of days and may even do a KS live stream I can.

I keep saying we are planning to do this because I want your feedback on it, if you think it’s a terrible idea, and you don’t want us to switch we won’t, it just means it could take longer to fulfill as there is only so many T-Junctions and L-Corners we can cast at once, and it means you wont get the cool L-Corner Wall tile either, although they will be available to buy on the website should you want to pick them up.

Again these changes will only be made to Room & Corridor sets where it makes sense to, you'll still get the same room shape and size, just the tiles that make up those specific shapes (L-Corner Wall & 4x4 Floor Tile) will change.

Let us know what you think about us swapping those tiles out and whether you would be happy for us to go ahead and do so.

Kickstarter Timeline

In the last update I posted a timeline that we where hoping to be able to stick to.

10th June – 27th June - New Molds Made 

We have made the all of the molds that needed to be re-made and we are currently making additional molds based on the highest use molds.

1st July – 31st July – Cast Remaining Core Set Pieces for the Outstanding Master of the Dungeon Sets and Large Orders.

This part is underway with 8 core sets already having been cast this week, and more over the weekend.

1st August – 31st August – Painting and Finishing Tiles

1st September – 30th September – Packing & Posting Remaining Pledges.

So at the moment we are on track, actually we are slightly ahead of schedule. We have 14 Pledges almost ready to be sent, they all need something painting or felting on them, so the backlog is that there isn’t enough of me to go around, and that I can’t cast, paint, felt and pack all at the same time, I am currently slitting my week between those four activities, as well as finding time to work on the website and answer emails, and all the 1001 other things that go in to running a business.

I am slowly working my way through it, and I am hoping that we will have a huge slew of those pledges ready to be sent by the end of next week, but ill update you all again towards the end of next week with where we stand with those 14.

Just to make it clear and open, none of those 14 are Master of the Dungeon sets or really large orders as they take a long time to go through the paint mill, but I am also working on 4 Master of the Dungeon Sets, simultaneously, painting production line style where I can with those sets, they will be sent as soon as they are finished.

UK Games Expo Pictures

Thanks for reading the update, ill have another one out to you by the end of next week and then the July update towards the end of the month.

Thanks as always for your patience, support and understanding, it rally is appreciated.

See you on the Flip Side

Andy @ DMB

May Update
almost 5 years ago – Mon, May 20, 2019 at 01:17:28 AM

Hello everyone,

It’s been a busy month here at DMB.

We have been beavering away on the Kickstarter pledges and have churned out a mass of tiles in the past 4 weeks.

We have cast just over 100Kg worth of resin and painted about two thirds of that.

Just as a quick look at what we have cast as far as core set pieces are concerned this month

Walls Tiles

Floor Tiles

To put that in perspective, That’s 205 Feet of Walls, and 4290 inches of floor for the core set pieces alone.

That’s the length of 5 and a half London buses nose to tail in walls and enough floor tiles to tile 357 square feet of floor….

On top of this we have cast bucket loads of accessories and 5 Cavern Sets as well.

This month we have sent 6 Pledges, and have another 4 nearly ready to go this is due to needing the above pieces painted finished and felted before we can send more pledges out.

We have also painted all of the Magic Circle, Compass Rose and other 4x4 Detail tiles like the Crossed hammer and Eagle tiles needed for the campaign, and all of the Large and Small Decorative Wall pieces, these will be added to the Sepulchre, and Pillar Sets we already have ready to be sent when the Core Set pieces are painted and finished.

Casting this amount of tiles in one go takes a massive toll on the molds as the heat of the resin curing causes the Silicone to become brittle and start to break.

You can see here in this picture of the dungeon archway, how the first piece (on the right) and last piece has come out

This means we need to remake some molds before we can continue casting, which was expected, but obviously takes a bit of time, which leads me nicely on to the next question.

How much longer is this going to take?

I have been asked this question a few times and I don’t like giving the answer which is as long as it takes to finish, I don’t feel its good enough of answer even if it’s true.

So I have been looking at ways of speeding up production and also to get things sent out quicker and easier.

As mentioned above we need to remake quite a few of the Dungeon Core set molds as we have pushed them as far as we can, this doesn’t take to long to do, and should take us about two weeks or so to remake the molds. 

We will be remaking the entire core set for Cracked Flagstone and Gothic walls, as well as the Fieldstone wall molds, which seem to break down a lot quicker, probably because of the number of undercuts on the pieces. While making the new molds we will make extra molds of some of the more common used pieces, like the Walls and L-corners, to help speed up production.

I have also taken a couple of steps to help speed up production and painting of the Master of the Dungeon Sets and large pledges we have left to do

Firstly, I have packages up all the Accessory sets that need painting and sent them to our Friend Gordon Kennedy who resides north of the Wall in Sunny Scotland. Gordon is a great painter and has done commissions for other gaming companies like North Star and Nightfall Games before.

This means I don’t have to sit and paint all the accessories, which is a fiddly job, taking my time away from casting and painting tiles.

The box with the accessories went of to Gordon at the end of Last week so he should be getting them Today or Tomorrow and he will start work on them as soon as he gets them.

Secondly, I have changed the contents of some of the room sets, don’t panic, its not a huge change but it will help speed up production.

We are going to swap out the floor tiles where we can for 4x4 floor tiles to make up the rooms, and the wall tiles for L-corner walls that sit round the corner of the room, and are the same size as a 2 block wall and a 2.5 Block wall together making a 2x2 corner wall.

We have also exchanged smaller wall pieces for larger pieces where appropriate, swapping out 2x 2 Block walls for 1x 4 block walls etc...

Not only does this speed up production and painting for us, but it also speeds up the laying out of these rooms on the table while gaming.

For example, rather than 4x L-Corner floors and 4x 2x2 Floor Tiles in the Storeroom set you now get 4x 4x4 Floor tiles instead.

Just a couple of things to keep in mind with this change

1) Not every room set is affected by it, only where it makes sense to do so

2) This does not affect the Core Set pieces, they remain the same, it is only for Room and Corridor Sets.

If there is anyone who does not want us to do this to their pledge, please let us know, but bear in mind your pledge will take longer to finish.

Here is our new best guestimate timeline based on what we know at the moment, is as follows:

10th June – 27th June - New Molds Made 

1st July – 31st July – Cast Remaining Core Set Pieces for the Outstanding Master of the Dungeon Sets and Large Orders.

1st August – 31st August – Painting and Finishing Tiles

1st September – 30th September – Packing & Posting Remaining Pledges.

That Gives Gordon Enough time to finish the Painting of the DA I and DA II Accessory sets that I have sent him and gives us some wiggle room if something goes wrong.

You might notice that there are a couple of gaps in the timeline, specifically in June. Well that’s because there are two very important things happening in June

We have the UK Games Expo which is the largest convention in the UK and 3rd Largest in the world, at 31st May – 2nd June at the NEC in Birmingham. It’s a whirlwind 3-day event and one of our favourites, that takes us about a week to sort out the workshop after wards and catch up on admin and bits and pieces, which is why the mold making isn’t set to start till 10th June.

Also, at the end of June is my birthday and I actually plan to have some time off that weekend, which is why the Casting doesn’t start until the 1st July.

Throughout this whole time we will still be painting and casting the other bits we can, that don’t need replacement molds making, and we wills till be sending out pledges where we can, as often as we can, just because I have put August for when we paint and finish the tiles, doesn’t mean we wont be doing any painting or casting in and around those dates.

Please remember that these are estimates, and we do have some other conventions like Table Top Scotland and Fighting Fantasy Fest 3 that we are attending, during that period, and everyone other than me has another job that they do on top of helping out so that could push timelines a bit further.

UK Games Expo 2019

As mentioned earlier we are at the Expo in a couple of weeks, our stand number is 2-T4, and we are right by the hall 2 Entrance opposite CMON.

We are not offering Pick up at the Expo because I don’t want to confuse things by splitting pledges and confusing myself, anything that is complete will have been sent before the Expo.

We will however be taking a break from the KS stuff between now and the Expo so we can get some stock together, none of the KS stuff will be touched, and I am going to work on a couple of new display boards to show what we have planned for the end of the Year after the Kickstarter is finished.

For those of you who are going to be attending the Expo, you’ll get a chance to see the new Sci-fi Sets first hand, and we will hopefully have a handful of sets and some accessories for sale, assuming I can get them finished between now and then.

Pictures

Now on to the bit everyone wants to see, pictures of progress and cool things:

Thanks for reading this update and for your continued support and understanding, we are getting closer to the finish line, and it will only progress quicker from here.

Andy @ DMB 

April Update - Some Pictures, Actually a lot of pictures, might take a while to load.
about 5 years ago – Tue, Apr 16, 2019 at 11:06:08 PM

Hello Everyone,

I'm not going to waffle on too much today, because I have loads of pictures to show you of cool stuff.

I have taken some pictures of the workshop and the progress of the tiles being painted so you can see what I'm up to.

First I thought I'd show you the place where i do all the casting, the spraying and the majority of the painting. The Workshop (well its my Garage but its a close as it gets!)

The Workshop

The Workshop in all its glory, I'm painting an Ice set here. All the boxes on the Left hand side are sets being boxed up so they are ready to go in pledge boxes, when they are needed. Also it would appear i had sausage rolls for lunch as you can see the wrapper in the picture as well!

You can also see the mold storage shelves, with our molds on the top shelf and the original Hirst molds on the second shelf.

As you can see I have not managed to find a place for my old Punchbag or Lawnmower just yet, but the workbench and shelving is the important part!

Speaking of the racking, these are the boxes the hold the cast resin pieces, nothing fancy here, but they do the job! This is about half of the boxes we have in the workshop, all filled with Resin, for you guys!

I also wanted to show you that we hand draw, cut and apply the felt to every tile we paint, so i wanted to show you what that looks like 

Next My Work Bench..

I wanted to show you the volume of tiles i get through, so i took a series of photos to illustrate how much sits on my work bench. These pictures have been taken over the last 2 week period.

This is 4 Core sets worth of Tiles, all being painted Gothic Grey. This is about half the core set  tiles you get in the Master of the Dungeon set....!

This is a different pile of tiles, waiting to be sorted and inked. 

More tiles being inked, and highlighted. You can see the resin water cavern prototypes in the back corner as well.

This is my work pile. Once i have finished these pledges ill pull another 8 or so an work through them.

Tile Close ups

That's enough of my work space now on to some awesome tile pictures.

These are the Resin Puddle tiles, these have had their resin poured and are ready to be felted and packed up.

My painted Accessory Trays, a mixture of DA I and DA II in this shot.

Here are some of the Accessories that Jason has been painting.

The Finished Sepulcher. We remade this mold twice to make sure we got the flat flush finish needed for the piece to work, and we couldn't resist painting the coffin.

These are how the small pillar set pieces look painted up.

This is a Large Pillar Set, Painted in Old School Dungeon Grey. It Just needs its ink and varnish and its ready to go in the pledge.

This is the Double Door Set, ready fro Felting and packing.

This is a Reward Set, i just need to paint the 1x4 Floor Tiles and it can be put with the rest of its pledge.

This is a Prison Room Set, in Ice. at the time the photo was taken, I just needed to paint the doors and its done.

And this is what it looks like with one of the cells open.

Well that is it for picture updates, hopefully you get a sense of how much work i am doing to get the Kickstarter Fulfilled, i will do another update later int he month with with more on where we are with fulfillment and timelines etc.

As always if you have questions or comments let me know, and ill do my best to answer them.

Andy @ DMB

Update on individual Pledges and Revised timeline explination.
about 5 years ago – Wed, Mar 13, 2019 at 01:59:50 PM

Hello Everyone,

At the moment there is no update on individual pledge shipping, I am working my way through everything, and pledges are going out the door as quickly as I can get them finished, as I said in the last update it’s slow going because I am still recovering from my illness and it’s a lot of work for one person to do on their own, even with help from Jason, I am still doing the majority of the work on the Kickstarter on my own.

As soon as pledges are ready to be sent they are being sent. While I appreciate that it’s frustrating to not have your tiles, and believe me it’s frustrating for me to to not be sending them out to you as much as it is for you to not be receiving them, I can only do so much at a anyone time. I really appreciate you patience and I really do understand your frustration, but I am going as fast as I can.

As I have said before Individual pledges are going out of the door as and when they are done, and I am doing them as quickly as I can.

Project Timeline

We are currently running 6 Months behind schedule. We originally said June 2018, but as soon as we saw how popular the Kickstarter was we revised that date to October 2018. That date was set with the caster doing all the casting and me just having to paint, pack and ship.

Things didn’t work out with the caster which was unfortunate but these things happen, forcing me to have to cast a lot of tiles and remake a lot of molds that we didn’t have, as the caster was going to be casting the items.

As I have said before the caster didn’t do anything wrong, the volume of core set pieces was to much for them to run through their process and it would have been far to expensive for them to change everything around just for this Kickstarter, so I want to reiterate it wasn’t anything the caster or I did, things just where not as viable as we both thought they would be.

I was then Ill and out of action for almost 2 months, and I’m still not fully recovered, but no real progress was made on the Kickstarter during December and January.

So here we are in Mid March still working through the backlog of pledges, which I am not happy about and in all honesty if i had known it would have been me doing everything I would not have done the Kickstarter as I know how much work goes in to casting and painting a single set let alone the thousands and thousands of tiles I have already done and still have left to do.

I really can’t do anymore than I am currently doing and I am probably doing to much, as far as recovery from my illness in December, but I feel under a lot of pressure to get these pledges out to you, so I want to get them done as quickly as possible, so I’m using myself as much as I can.

I must sound like a broken record to you all saying the same thing over and over again in these updates, but i am in the middle of painting tiles for pledges to go out, as well as casting and packing, yet there always seems to be more to do.

Thanks for your continued patience and understanding.

Andy @ DMB