This update shares ongoing Vault of Miny Things development, including testing a functional mockup of a content-complete Vault in actual-play environments. No action is required.
Progress Report
No action is required… other than reading a bunch of text, if you’re so inclined. Vaulter, so much has happened since the last update. We’re delighted to be able to announce that the Vault itself is finally content art-complete. What this means is that all of the printed pieces that come in the Vault of Mini Things have front and back art. Marshall Short has been burning the midnight oil to get to the end of this massive art journey and he’s earned a well-deserved rest… which he’ll get to take AFTER he completes the last few remaining pieces of art for the add-ons.
He’s just completed some gorgeous art for the Graveyard set and is working on finishing up the ruins map tiles now. It’s worth repeating: while we are still working on the final few pieces for the Graveyard and Ruins terrain add-ons, all of the artwork for the contents of the Vault of Mini Things (and the other Add-ons) are in the hands of the manufacturer. Now that they’ve got all of our files we’re able to proceed to hashing out the particular details necessary for manufacturing, and examine factory proofs with final art. In other words: we’re getting very close to being able to hit “go” on the print run.
Graveyard Gander
It just so happens that one of the final pieces of art & engineering work coincides with the Halloween season. Let’s take a look at some of that work: the Graveyard Gate. Marshall’s art featured that classic Victorian ironwork we all associate with spooky cemeteries–probably due to Disney’s The Haunted Mansion attraction. We wanted the fine details of the ironwork to pop out–it seemed a shame to just print a black field in the void space between the bars, because it’d change something visually delicate and elegant into something clunky and plain. However, die-cutting such thin elements would be structurally unsound. So how to preserve the look without compromising quality?
Our solution is to invent a new process that sandwiches a thin printed acrylic sheet between two half-as-thick-as-usual punchboard pieces. This process shows off the ironwork while still giving the durability and heft of the rest of the terrain pieces in the Vault product line. We think the result is fantastic. Take a look:
Original art on left, sturdy-yet-still-beautiful art on right
The Graveyard add-on also got its own wall clip style that replaces the column artwork with a physical column wall clip. How cool is that!?
Look at these Graveyard wall clips!!
We expect these final bits of terrain to be complete in the next few days, and then we move on to packaging design. That work is greatly aided by the production and assembly of a:
Functional Prototype
Through the magic of 3d modeling and 3d printing we’ve been able to produce a functional prototype of the Vault’s external box and internal organizational components. This allowed us to load up the Vault with all of the components, thereby creating a dimensionally-accurate, content-complete, fully armed and operational Vault of Mini Things for live-fire testing a real game of Dungeons & Dragons. This step is crucial because we wanted to ensure that we can physically fit all of the content into the box, but also test that the content is easy and pleasurable to actually use in a real game.
We needed a working, usable prototype in order to be able to actively use the Vault in real D&D sessions. Doing so lets us test and ultimately improve the user experience. Are creatures and props easy to find, easy to deploy, and easy to put away? What about the terrain pieces? Map tiles? What are the pain points? How can we remove or mitigate them?
The 3D printed version of the box with our physical prototype contents within! We use this for playtesting at our team campaign D&D nights.
The upper box section removed from the outer box. Note the helpful notches in the large box shells for ease of getting to the interior boxes.
The upper box components spread out. Dice tray, bases and base art inserts, standee organization boxes.
Note that this functional prototype is the most recent in a long line of, shall we say, less functional prototypes. Previous iterations showcased some flaws in our original plans, or highlighted opportunities to make things better. For example, we discovered that our concept of swappable trays for terrain was just not going to work the way we originally intended. They created failure points and expensive complexity that just weren't justified for the convenience we were trying to provide. Our solution was to instead create vacuum formed trays for terrain specific types, and nest them internally. This gives the functionality we wanted to provide (the ability to customize a Vault's "loadout" for travel) while eliminating points of cost and structural failure.
The outer box components spread out. All terrain, wall clips, large standee pieces.
Real-world Playtest
We’ve been playtesting the Vault, with Tinker Lane as Dungeon Master starting a run into the Dungeon of the Mad Mage. We figured this was the perfect adventure to test the Vault because it’s a classic dungeon environment with a myriad variety of monsters and dungeon features. It's about as perfect as an ideal test scenario for what an actual customer would experience at home with their own Vault, and we figured it'd be a good stress test for our purpose.
Boy, were we right. Tinker Lane had prepped the first three encounters, as outlined in the book, but of course the game immediately went off the rails when our party succeeded on an improbable search check to find a secret spyhole, and then used a combination of a tiny Bat familiar and Mage Hand to open a one-way secret door from the inside. Off the party went in a completely unexpected direction, and Tinker Lane had to scramble to find and deploy map tiles and creatures on the fly. The good news is, the Vault’s Creature Catalog organization system let him quickly find those unexpected creatures and deploy them to the dungeon. Honestly, it was as perfect of a “real world” use case as we could have hoped for and we were all gratified to see the Vault come to the DM’s rescue.
Here are some as-it-happened-at-the-table snapshots of the first combat encounter. Note this wasn't a photoshoot of a well-lit, well-staged engineering session; the purpose of the playtest was to do it "live" and use the Vault in real-time just as any Dungeon Master would in their home game.
There were some useful takeaways at the end of the session from both the Tinker team and our volunteer testers. We’re changing up the card sleeve material so they’re less “slippery.” We’re taking another look at the divisions within creature types so they’re more useful. We’re creating a master index of every creature (name and Tab info) and deciding how to include that in the box as a second and complementary way to find the storage location of the exact creature you need. We’re examining the user experience of post-session cleanup, and experimenting with mechanisms for keeping track of where deployed creatures came from and “saving” the game state for instant and easy deployment of all entities at the start of the next session. The test game also revealed issues witherrors in our assumptions about quantities of bases, and how those will be stored inside the Vault. But we were very please with our casino chip-inspired storage system for bases and terrain pucks.
—
We’ll wrap up this update with wishes for a wonderfully witchy Halloween, as welcomed by these wicked wretches:
