CC Releasing Commander’s Manual

I’ve been back from my trip a week and a half now and I’m still digging out…it was a great trip, but very long and of course, gonna be a while until I’m fully “dug out”.

In the mean time, continuing the CC Releasing of the Core Box Set materials…and we’ve reached the big boy…the Commander’s Manual!.

Grab the PDF file at here (you can also find it on the downloads page).

This month I’ll get to the final German ship illustrations, start to reveal the Italian ship illustration developments and hopefully some new fiction!

See ya next duty shift!

Randall

Art Development: Germans Part 5

I’m about to head out of town on a whirlwind trip to visit family…about 5,000 miles in 10 days. But wanted to get out a quick blog post before I’m off.

If you look at any of the French or Italian Recognition Cards, you’ll note the background sky for each ship has the same tone/coloring. This is particularly apparent when you take a look at the poster. Almost as if they’re all flying in the same sky “shot”.

This, of course, was done on purpose. Both to instantly provide a visual awareness of which ship is with which faction (even beyond the ships themselves), and ultimately to simply provide a cool look that sets the vibe for a given faction.

The Germans were no different…needed a new coloring/tone for the background, which J. embraced very quickly.

Here’s a screen shot of one of the German ships about 75% done.

Very static looking at this point, and not a lot of fine details…but those will come. And of course we’re currently having an internal discussion whether the coloring on the ship needs to be a little more unique to set the Germans off from the French and the British…

See ya next duty shift!

Randall

Captain’s Manual Excerpt Open Beta Test and Scenario Solicitation

Got two great things to expand your Leviathans enjoyment in the coming weeks.

First up, a new open beta test.

Catalyst Game Labs is developing the Captain’s Box; a stand-alone expansion to the Leviathans Core Box that will include a slew of enhanced scenario rules, from weather and wind to elevation, alternate movement and combat options, and more. Those rules have been extensively play tested to date.

However, the two rules in this PDF have come up for potential inclusion in the Captain’s Box. Instead of simply play testing them internally, however, we want to run these externally as well. So here ya go…put together some games, run with it, and let us know. Visit the forums at www.monstersinthesky.com. A “Captain’s Manual Excerpt Playtest” thread has been created and will be active for a few weeks. Post your feedback, comments and especially your suggestions for tweaks to the rules that you feel will improve them.

You can also find that PDF on the downloads page as well.

Additionally, we’re putting out a call for your scenarios! We’re working on several new PDFs to release in the coming months, and one of them will be a collection of scenarios and we’d love to get the community involved!

If you’re interested, click here and you’ll find an rtf containing the third scenario from the Commander’s Manual. Any scenarios you wish to submit MUST follow this template; simply take the rtf file and overwrite the pre-existing text with your new scenario. If you wish to include anything not in this scenario (for example perhaps the rules from the Captain’s Manual Excerpt Open Beta Test), that’s just fine and we love to see that…simply add it in, following the example of the other rules from the scenario template.

All scenarios must be received by April 15th; send them to randall@catalystgamelabs.com. Once they are received, Catalyst Game Labs will review the scenarios and any we wish to use we’ll contact the author to pay him a nominal fee, at which point the scenarios are 100% Catalyst-owned.

If anyone has any questions, feel free to post them here.

Good luck…and see ya next duty shift!

Randall

CC Releasing French Ship & Recognition Cards

As promised, here’s the printable PDFs of every French Ship Card and Recognition Card found in the Core Box and British Fleet Box.

Grab the zip file here (you can also find it on the downloads page).

See ya next duty shift!

Randall

Art Development: Germans Part 4

Okay…it’s been long enough…time to move onto the next stage of showcasing the development of the German art.

In the last blog, if you remember, J. had provided 4 different potential “directions” we could take…here’s the art direction I gave him based on those illustrations.

>>>>

Hey J.

So I’ve gone round and round in my head on this, and I’m settling on the #1 as the 95% German battleship.

The reason I say 95% is I’d like a few tweaks. Read the rest of this entry »

CC Releasing British Ship & Recognition Cards

First, apologies…didn’t realize almost a month had slipped by since my last post here…sheesh, 2013 is already flying by.

Next week I’ve got a great German Art Development blog post ready to start revealing the ultimate direction those ships will go…and we also might be making an open solicitation for scenarios from you guys, for inclusion in a cool future PDF…so stay tuned.

In the mean time, as with the Gazetteer we released at the end of the year, we’re continuing to embrace the Creative Commons nature of Leviathans by releasing printable PDFs of every British Ship Card and Recognition Card found in the Core Box and British Fleet Box.

Grab the zip file here (you can also find it on the downloads page).

It will release the French ships in the same fashion in the very near future.

See ya next duty shift!

Randall

Development Continued: Finalizing the Captain’s Box

So as we juggle things on the production end to determine what will be the next box we ship to print, I continued to iron out the list tidbits of the Captain’s Box.

For those who’ve been following me for a while, you’re well aware of this, but for some, this may be new. Originally the Captain’s Manual of “Enhanced Scenario” rules was simply going to be in the Core Box Set. Unfortunately, we crammed way, way too much stuff into the box as it is and we had to cut that completely, leaving us the chance to publish the Captain’s Box down the line.

Now a lot of the material was already done and playtested for some time. In fact, I’ve got a rough PDF of a first layout before the “cut” decision was made that contains the following rules (I didn’t think I’d covered this fully before…if I have, apologies…): Read the rest of this entry »

Art Development: Germans Part 3

In the last blog post on this topic, I showed off where we’d left the Germans with Doug Chaffee. In the summer of 2012 I’d begun the painful process of starting to look for an artist that would be able to step into some mighty big shoes.

It was logical for me to try J. Lonnee, since he’d done a fantastic job on the orthographics for the British and French based upon Doug’s work. His first concept sketch for a German ship came in and well…man, made me very, very nervous…

Read the rest of this entry »

Development Continued: Final Germans Vs. Italians Issues

It’s been a little while since an update…holidays, much less me being sick for well over a week at this point…anyways, finally coming back up out of the hole and felt a new blog post appropriate.

Both Bryn and I’s own playtesting, as well as some thorough playtest reports from other groups, have brought us to a new stage concerning the current status of the German and Italian fleets.

The Germans vs. the British and French work great.

The Italians vs. the British and French work great.

And even the Germans vs. Italians on 2 maps works very well.

The problem is when you put the Germans vs. Italians on 4 or more maps…things start to break down at that point. Read the rest of this entry »

Leviathans Online: Monsters In The Sky changes its course!

At Hyper Hippo Productions we strongly believe in building experiences with the help of our community. As the crowd funding landscape continues to evolve, we recognize the need for demonstrations of the game play in order to captivate fans imaginations. Additions like these require a new approach, so we have made the decision to remove Leviathans Online from Kickstarter. With this change our team will now have the necessary time to reassess the best approach to bring this great game to the digital space.

Leviathans Online entered Kickstarter on December 3rd with the intention of providing the community with an opportunity to engage in the early stages of development and join in on the process of building a great experience from the ground level. We still believe that if we can get a community to rally behind an already great board game and contribute valuable ideas about the experience they want to see in a digital version, that our team can develop Leviathans Online into an experience that completely caters to the fans.

Hyper Hippo Productions and Catalyst Game Labs would like to sincerely thank you for all of your support, for backing this project and for providing integral feedback over the past two weeks on Kickstarter!

Since so many of you believed in this project and took the time to learn what we were about, we want to keep you updated on our studios progress. Please send us an e-mail to info@hyperhippo.ca so that we can add you to our mailing list.

Thanks!

Hyper Hippo Productions Team