Girl Genius - Adventures In Castle Heterodyne

A new shipping update.
about 1 month ago – Thu, Oct 17, 2024 at 02:45:00 AM

Dear backers. 

First of all, this is Peter and not Kenneth who has been the person keeping you all updated so far. Kenneth has been a real trooper and kept updates going for the last year, despite the fact that a lack of funding on our end saw him leave Rain for InkyPen half a year ago, meaning he did it all in his spare time. Seeing how long the whole process has dragged on and how it was wearing on him, I had to relieve him of this cruel and unusual punishment and take over in his place. 

So since I am new to most of you. Hi. I am Peter. The guy behind the Teslagrad games, and the original founder of Rain. 

Now first of all. Shipping is STILL ongoing. This means both that not all games are shipped yet, but also that there is continuously games being shipped. One of us at the office got his game last week, for example. (Yeah... We have no special priority.)

And yes, the pace of progress has been torturours for all of us. I have not been the person to do most of the communication with our partner for physical publishing until relatively recently, but I am taling to them and trying to sort the whole mess out. 

This does come in a time with a bit of difficulty for us. The Girl Genius game for Rain has not done as well as we had hoped. As we all know, the kickstarter brought in about $250k. But half of that is cost of physical goods, and the total development cost was $1 M. 
Now, there are sales outside of kickstarter of course, but not enough. This along with the current absolute drought in videogame funding has left us in some dire straights.
The situation is solvable, I think. But I have been running Rain for 14 years now, and I am rather loathe to let it all go under. This is a very large drain on my attention, and is a reason why I have not been able to hammer trough these shipping issues more efficiently.  It is also the reason that now that Kenneth is no longer doing it, it is far harder to keep up with communications. Rain is not a large company, and on this kind of administrative tasks, there is basically just me at the moment. 

Generally; Thank you all for your patience. I hope you can give me the time to figure this all out. By the looks of things, you will all get your games EVENTUALLY, though if I can get things rolling properly, I would like to see it happen sooner rather than later.

Remaining shipping parcels
2 months ago – Mon, Sep 09, 2024 at 11:58:21 AM

Dear Backers,

For those waiting for physical shipments, I have some updates regarding the remaining shipping parcels from the shipping center. They've had trouble with a machine that caused a halt in their processing.

There's about 400 parcels total left to ship, where most of these are parcels containing the Physical PC game, or combined parcel types e.g Switch game and Physical PC game. They are still shipping continuously, and I see that a few people are commenting now that they are finally receiving their shipping notifications for these parcel types.

Most (approx. 90%+) Switch copies have been shipped, or rather, parcel types not containing the Physical PC game. I've been following up with a few of you for missing Switch parcels, and I hope that they'll reach you safe and sound.

Yes, I'm acutely aware that the shipping for this project have been difficult and have taken a very long time, and I understand the frustration from those of you that haven't received your items yet. My deepest apologies to everyone for the wait on physical shipments. 

For those waiting for a reply from us on support requests; I've been under the weather a few days. I'll try to catch up with these asap tomorrow morning.

If your parcel type don't contain Physical PC, for example only Switch game or only Artbook, and you have not received your parcel or shipping notification on that yet, please notify me in the comments below or by DM and I'll follow you up since I expect almost all of these to be shipped. Please check your email and spam folder for tracking notification from IndieBox.

If your parcel type contains Physical PC or more items, as written above, they're being shipped continuously. They've not given an estimate on delivery time, only notified me that they're shipping continuously.

• Kenny

Shipping update
5 months ago – Wed, Jul 10, 2024 at 08:56:14 AM

Dear backers,

I spoke to the fulfillment center about shipping status.

• There's about 400 Nintendo Switch packages left to send out, so approx. 900-1k packages for Switch have been sent out.
• They are shipping continuously.
• Processing is a bit slow because they are shipping multiple large shipments at the same time, and we hit an unfortunate timeslot for shipping due to this. All projects they are shipping are affected, since they are distributing the workload across all projects, shipping continuously, rather than bulk. I did expect all the Switch packages to have been sent out by now, sorry to those affected by this.
• Please watch your email inbox for tracking info, also check spam folder. Once you receive this, it means they have labeled and processed your shipment, and it'll be shipped out soon.
• For those waiting for PC Physical, it is being produced. Please expect some time before these arrive.
• Artbooks shipping out continuously.

• Kenny

Happy shipping day!
6 months ago – Fri, Jun 07, 2024 at 08:25:28 AM

Dear Backers,

just wanted to tell everyone HAPPY SHIPPING DAY! Because today, our fulfillment center starts the shipping process.

Check out these lovely photos! Here's all our stuff getting ready to be shipped.

Information from the fulfillment center

• They'll start with the Switch shipments first.
• They have warned us that they have several large shipments going out at the same time, which may affect processing time, and that they will do their best to get our stuff out in a timely manner.
• They have about 75% of our total packages ready for packaging and labeling and such, so most packages will go out fairly quickly. Some packages with more complex combinations of items might take a little bit more time.

Switch players. Important info!

• When you receive your Nintendo Switch copy, it is very important that you update the game to version 1.0.1. So please make sure that you don't play offline immediately upon receiving. We did an important patch that fixed an issue where your savegame could get deleted under certain circumstances.

May the shipping gods bless our shipments, and that they arrive with you safe and sound with no damages, and that no other complications or weirdness occur.

• Kenny

Shipping Update
6 months ago – Sat, Jun 01, 2024 at 09:01:42 AM

Dear Backers,

TL;DR

there was an issue with the shipping. The issue is resolved. Shipping is to start on Thursday or Friday the coming week, with the Switch copies going out first.

Why oh why late?

On the shipping day, we received a large invoice for manufacture and shipping and all from the fulfillment center and manufacturer. They requested this invoice be paid before shipping would start. This wasn't communicated to me beforehand that this invoice would be received on that day, and that it would block shipping. Fair enough. I can't authorize large bills by myself, and need our CEO, Peter, to sign off on it. Peter was away on a business trip for a week, and got sick for a few days after coming back. There were some issues with this invoice that needed to be addressed. We've resolved those, and the issue is fixed. To add to the pile, the fulfillment center is stacked with several large shipments going out at the same time, ours being one of them.

Why didn't you tell us sooner?

Well. The stress got to me, and I took some emotional damage when this shipping didn't start when I expected it to. We're late, late, late and the DOOM BELL was ringing in my ears. I didn't want to communicate yet another sorry, and I hoped I could resolve the issue faster than this. I wanted to wait with communication until I had the issue resolved, and a guarantee from the fulfillment center on when they start shipping.

When?

The fulfillment center has guaranteed starting shipping on Thursday or Friday the coming week. They're super-stacked with shipments right now. They told us they will start with the Switch versions first and try to get those out as fast as possible first, since that's the one most people are waiting on.

Please don't yell at me

I'm doing my best, and I have the weight of around 1700 people expecting their packages on me. We've been hit by a bad streak of issues regarding this fulfillment of physical items. I've learned a lot, and if I were to do this again, I know what to look out for. After people have received their stuff, I want to make a few post-mortem videos on the bespoke nature of Kickstarter, to help other creators, and backers, know what to look out for when setting up for physical production and fulfillment for video games.

• Kenny