delayed Spitfyre: Aerial Combat in the skies of Panzerfäuste

[Orlando_the_Technicoloured]

That's a wrap! :)

Posted by Hysterical Games (Creator)

Well, that's it folks. SPITFYRE is completely funded, the Kickstarter has been a massive success! Just how much of a success has it been?  Well.  You guys loved the project so much, that we made ELEVEN TIMES our target goal.  We have MORE BACKERS than our original Panzerfäuste project, to all of our new supporters, welcome to our little corner of madness! We need to manufacture at least 1,032 Resin Dwarf War Eagles (eek!) We need to manufacture roughly 4,734 Airbeasts in total (eeeek!) We are massively pleased with how quickly support for Spitfyre has come about. In all honesty, we designed this, initially, to be a spin-off and one-off release. Now we have a whole bunch of different Airbeast models, an expansion pack and plans to release a whole lot more stuff on-going.  Speaking of which... Rob and Steve are going to start working on the Pledge Manager fairly soon (please bear with us, Pledge Managers are actually one of the hardest parts to handle for a Kickstarter project! Right now we don't know our timeline for it!). We received a few messages from folk saying that they would really like to have hit our final £12,000 stretch goal. Well, if we get another 10 Pilot Pledges to upgrade to Ace Pledges, then we will unlock the £12,000 Storch freebie model. We'll keep you up to date with whether this will be happening! We are also still busy behind the scenes. Our, very talented and absolutely awesome, sculptor, Darko, has been working on the last few 3D models for the Starter Box and all associated Stretch Goals, which are coming along wonderfully. The Kampfkondor is a real treat, but we'll hold fire for now until we've pinned it down. Hopefully you'll see that soon.  Will Beck, equally awesome and talented, has come back to us today with the initial concept sketches for the Kriegadler 110 War-Eagle and the Trog Bats which you will receive in the Torg-Baraz Expansion Set.    Thank you all again for your support. From the depths of our hearts, it means everything to us to see people band together and bang the drum for projects like this one. We'll be back soon with more updates once the dust settles.  Cheers again! Rob and Steve - Hysterical Games

[Darsc Zacal]

Glad this funded.

Hope to see it at retail someday.

[Orlando_the_Technicoloured]

In the words of Lance Corporal Jones, Don't Panic - Captain Mainwearing!

Hey there folks, Rob here reporting from our manufacturing & distribution workshop!

It's been a little while since our last update and a little while since we communicated on the Kickstarter - leading to a few strongly worded messages and comments! We're very sorry for this, sadly KS broke the link between our email and KS, so we got no notifications of any messages, comments, anything until today when I adjusted some settings and found out that a lot were being diverted!

Let me just update you!

PILOT SHIPPING
Just before Salute, we announced that we had started shipping and that we'd expect it all to be done very quickly. This has taken a little longer due to some staff holidays that I had completely forgotten about (Vince went and got married - hooray!) and the sheer weight of work we have had to do outside of the Kickstarter for our day to day contract casting work in between Salute and UK Games Expo for our clients. I can only apologise for forecasting this incorrectly, but I can confirm that all the Pilot Pledges are now packed and any that have not already been posted will be posted out tomorrow. If you are one of the unlucky few that are still waiting, you can safely expect them by the end of the week if you are in the UK, or by the end of next week if you are anywhere else in the world. If this doesn't happen, then please do email me on [email protected] and I'll be sure to chase it up for you!

ACE SPLIT SHIPPING
Now then, this has been a bit of a mess and it's gotten messier and messier. So, the first thing I did when I closed the Pledge Manager was to print off every single invoice, so we can start packing them up. We then pulled out all of the Pilot Pledges and set to working on those. We then went through and tried to find any Split Shipping pledges. We couldn't find any, so we went on the Crowdox platform and, sure enough, the Pledges did not have Split Shipping on them. We then dug around a bit more, got told about some more functionality that we weren't aware of and discovered that you can actually only find out who has wave shipping by individually isolating each order and checking. This has been a colossal miscommunication between Hysterical Games and Crowd Ox, which, due to their preference to using Skype (bearing in mind the issues of timezones) rather than simply emailing pictured instructions, has taken a bit more time than I would have liked. In the end, they stood up and did help us out, so that for future projects we won't have this happen again.

In the end, we have spent a while going through each order manually, finding the pledge from our paperwork and separating it into a pile. Sounds stupid, but this is a big undertaking for our small company to do. I still have to pay someone's wages to do that, it's not something we budgeted for and I'm a little disgruntled that we've had to do that after paying Crowdox for hosting us on their website.

Anyway, none of that is any of your problem, I just wanted you to know where we're at. We are just about to start shipping the Ace Pledges. I, foolishly, ordered a stock of books based on the numbers we thought we need for our first wave as the lower number guaranteed we would have them in time to start shipping before Salute. My intention was to order the next batch just before we start shipping the final wave, but we now know that we need a lot more than that for the first wave, so I am ordering another batch of them in! This will be the next delaying factor, but I will update as soon as it turns up.

Please note that some Ace Pledgers who have asked when their stuff will be arriving have actually not selected Split shipping. We are happy to split your shipments, just email [email protected] and we will send you an invoice for the postage costs. Just be advised that your pledges will be shipped after we have shipped the rest of the first wave.

EXPANSION PACK PROGRESS
Darko is just finishing a few of the final sculpts for the Panzerfäuste Kickstarter and then will be back to working on Spitfyre. We will share his progress with you as they come in. It's then up to us to mould them and cast them.

Let me close with huge apologies on my part for completely missing the messages you have left me. To say I was horrified to see some of the messages and comments this morning is an understatement. I am all about being open and honest with KS backers and would really hate for you to think we are purposefully avoiding you, or delaying more than we would have to.

As part of that, I want to say that we are going to take Spitfyre off of general sale from any of our trade stands or on our website until the first wave of shipments is completed. I cannot, in good conscience, sell this product whilst knowing that Kickstarter backers are waiting for their products.

Many thanks for your patience and support!
Rob and Steve (but mainly Rob)
Hysterical Games

 

 

 

 

i'm one of those caught up in the crowdox end of the snafu but i'm confident Rob will deliver as soon as the nessesary new rulebooks arrive

Edited May 28, 2018 by Orlando_the_Technicoloured

[Orlando_the_Technicoloured]

sadly this has popped up on facebook, more news as it appears

 

Hysterical Games

· 23 mins ·

Unfortunately we have some bad news.

Over the last few weeks it has become clear that Hysterical Games is facing a major cash flow problem and that we are now only left with the option of winding the company up. Exactly how we will do this has yet to be decided.

To say we are gutted is an understatement, the sudden nature of how this has swept up on us is still very hard to believe.

...

We are looking at various options at the moment and we are looking at ways for our games to continue. We believe the games and background are good enough to survive and going forward can flourish, the problems that have arisen are largely from other parts of the business.

We appreciate you will have lots of questions but trust you will appreciate that we will probably not have any answers for them at the moment and need to concentrate our efforts on seeing what can be done to salvage the game and sort out other problems, so please bear with us and excuse any immediate radio silence.

The webstore is closed and we cannot take any new orders at the moment.

Hopefully this is just a (rather large) bump in the road and that soon it will be behind us and we will be driving ever forward.

[Darsc Zacal]

Sorry to hear this. It was an interesting idea.

I’m changing the status to delayed as the project seems mostly dead. If that should change to all dead the thread will be closed.

[Orlando_the_Technicoloured]

although Hysterical games is now officially dead Steve is going to try and complete the KS as best he can using any profits generated from selling the Panzerfaust/Spitfyre minis etc under is Wessex games (note this is not his full time job so its going to be slow going, and KS backers won't necessarily be first to get stuff as new releases will have to pay for themselves at retail)

 

but all in all much better than we'd feared as he could have walked away and abandoned things which would have been a real shame as the minis/IP is cool (and backers would have got nothing)

 

so an update

 

Driven Batty...

Posted by Hysterical Games (Creator)

 

Hi everyone

First off a belated thanks to everyone who came and said hi at Crusade and bought stuff. Having sorted out the boxes of resin it turned out we had lots of SpitFyre and HurriKane wings, but very few bodies which meant we couldn't sell any starter sets but we still raised a bit of money to help progress things.

On that score Darko has sculpted both the Trog war-bat fighter...

and bomber...

I will be honest, I don't like sharing the 3D renders of the SpitFyre models as they look exaggerated compared to the physical models but given the KS problems I thought you'd appreciate seeing them now.

They are being printed for moulding and casting and Darko is now moving on to the Defier fighter wyvern with its unusual rear-facing guns.

More news on other stuff, including you being able to buy stuff and split pledge ordering soon.

Cheers

Steve

Wessex Games

 

(note comparing the 3d renders of one or two of the minis I've got totally backs up his statement about the exaggeration, those wings will look much better in the resin)