Pathfinder Pathfinder: The Dragon's Demand - Pathfinder 2E turn-based miniatures RPG from Ossian Studios

[Axel_am]

Ah, maaan. The hope I mentioned in my last post here has just evaporated.

 

[Roguey]

I knew it would be bad, but those kiddy monsters are giving me the pledger's remorse. The developers seriously believe that looks good????????

 

[InD_ImaginE]

They seems to aim for a "cozy tabletop adventure" feel which honestly is a mistake. The target market they are aiming with this kind of style would probably do fine even with more normal art style while the opposite market is actively being turned off by this.

Gameplay quality remains to be seen, but certainly the art style is really off putting.

 

[TheKing01]

First time I'm seeing the pledge video. Had no idea they were including the Dark Tapestry. Not only that but having it be the central plot of the PC.

It's an interesting choice I suppose. Opinions about the Lovecraft stuff has always been divisive in the Pathfinder community. Some don't like that it's literally Lovecraft with little to nothing changed while others find the whole idea of Azathoth being at the center of everything a unique idea.

Personally I've always liked the idea of the Outer Gods shitting on even Pharasma, so here's to hoping they keep the Lovecraft mythos as macabre and choatic as it should be.

 

[Infinitron]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ossianstudios/pathfinder-the-dragons-demand/posts/4378616

Update 16: Coins, Coins, Coins​

Special Note to Backers

Hi everyone, this is Alan Miranda, Ossian CEO and project director of Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand. I’m the one who organizes and often writes our Kickstarter updates since I oversee the progress of everything on the project. Before we get started on this update, I wanted to mention that for the past few months I’ve been taking care of my mom as she battles cancer. The extra workload has led me to being a bit behind with our monthly updates, so I wanted to apologize for that. But the rest of the team has remained hard at work on the game.



Greetings Demanders!

As the title indicates, this update is all about our coins. We’ve finally reached the point where North American Mint can start manufacturing them! It’ll take an estimated 6-8 weeks until we can start worldwide fulfillment and we’ll let backers know the final shipping costs within that time.

We were in the queue for over 7 weeks for the mint’s external die maker to make our coin dies, which are the round pieces of hardened steel that strike blank coins from either side. They are engraved with the inverse/negative of the image you see on the coin, so that when the coin is struck you get the correct positive version. Here’s what they look like:

With the dies made, the mint did a test run of all the coins to make sure everything looked good (including the silver piece we’d made for our Kickstarter campaign). They were struck in copper, which will be used for the plated silver, gold, and platinum coins. I got these samples in the mail just last week so I could do a hands-on review of them, and as a coin collector, I have to say they look amazing!

They’re just what we were hoping for when we designed our mockups (shown in the showcase image on our Kickstarter page), right down to the fine detail. Some detail is beyond even what the naked eye can see but can be seen using a magnifying glass or loupe (the eyepiece used by jewelers).

Our backers ordered several thousand coins (thank you!), half of which were the Absalom Copper Pieces, while the other half were the silver, gold, and platinum plated coins, along with a couple hundred pure silver ones. We did a test run of the plating process with the Absalom Silver Piece design (with the rampant badger) so I could check the results, and things turned out great! Here’s a shot of the original copper version alongside the fine silver plated version and the 24K gold plated version (aka the Blond Badger).

It’s worth noting that both the gold and platinum pieces are first plated in silver because gold and platinum bond better to that than copper, and then re-struck to accentuate detail a second time before their second plating. This is a process known as a “double-strike”, which North American mint pioneered decades ago before it become the standard in the minting industry.

Here’s a shot of the finished product within its double-pocketed flip, with the coin in one pocket and the certificate of authenticity insert in the other. To any coin collectors who may be wondering, we chose a high quality, unplasticized, PVC-free flip that can be used for long-term storage.

For our limited tier backers who are set to receive the Absalom Mint Set with the pure copper, silver, gold, and platinum pieces, and for all backers who will eventually get the opportunity to buy those coins (to be announced later), I wanted to update you on a couple of slight tweaks we’ve made to the 1/3 oz pure gold and platinum coins. After discussing our recent test runs with North American Mint, we found that making these coins in 30mm wasn’t going to be feasible because they’re too thin given our high relief designs.

So for the Absalom Platinum Piece, we’ve changed it from 1/3 oz to 1/2 oz of platinum, making it a thicker 30mm coin. This means it will cost a bit more but the alternative was to create 2 new dies for a smaller size coin, which wasn’t financially worthwhile. Our limited tier backers getting the mint set will be unaffected by this price change but it will be a bit more expensive for backers that want to buy a pure platinum coin.

As for the Absalom Gold Piece, with gold prices at their highest level in the past 30 years, switching to a 1/2 oz didn’t seem affordable. So instead, we’re changing the 1/3 oz coin from 30mm to 27mm, which is the diameter of a 1/2 oz Gold American Eagle. This will require us to make new dies for the smaller size, but we’re covering that cost, so this change won’t affect the price for backers.

It’s been wonderful to see our original coin ideas finally make it to finished products, but it was quite an experimental journey to get here, especially since we knew nothing about making coins. The traditional way of making coins is for an experienced coin sculptor to hand sculpt a plaster dish with the coin design, which is just a large-sized plaster version of the coin (see sample shots below). The term “dish” comes from the fact that it has some curvature, like an actual dish. This gets covered in epoxy that is pulled off to create an extremely hard cast of an inverse of the image, which is then put in a reduction machine that slowly scans across the surface with a stylus and etches a die at a much reduced size (the size of the coin). That’s the machine you see in the image above.

New technologies have allowed designers to cheaply transfer a 2D photo or drawing onto a coin surface but I felt this was a more modern, low relief style that wouldn’t be in keeping with something from the Pathfinder world. Yet experienced coin sculptors are very expensive. So we had the idea of 3D printing a dish instead, which would allow our own artists to sculpt the designs exactly how we envisioned them while also keeping the cost low. Here is a shot of the proof-of-concept test print we did.

However, even using a hard print resin, we ran into a few problems. Sometimes the dish would shatter during the epoxy process. Sometimes the epoxy couldn’t be pulled off. And one time the print melted and warped in the extreme summer heat during shipping! Despite the headaches, we were able to create a coin.

But a process with those kinds of pitfalls was really problematic since we had to do this 8 times for both sides of our 4 coins. That’s when the mint’s external die maker said that he’d successfully experimented with a digital-to-die process that could take our 3D file to make a die; no more 3D printing, no more headaches - yay! We were good to go.

I hope you’ve enjoyed our tiny tale of how we minted these Absalom coins, and I’m confident you’ll enjoy your coins even more. Until next time!

 

[Morality Games]

View attachment 62283

The best thing I can say about this art design is that it stands out. Maybe "just crazy enough to work" territory.

 

[Infinitron]

Dragonball Face: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ossianstudios/pathfinder-the-dragons-demand/posts/4415865

Update 17: Player Character Customization​

Greetings Demanders!

Customizing the appearance of your character is an important part of any RPG. From hairstyles to scars and tattoos, customizations help you create the visuals that express the personality of your fantasy hero. In this update, we’ll be showing you the kinds of customization available in Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand.

Before we could jump in and start making systems like tattoo overlays, we first needed to lay the groundwork for how character bodies were technically set up. This required us to develop an approach to standardize how textures and skeleton rigs worked and were organized so that we could transplant body/facial poses and overlays between different character heads and bodies across the various ancestries. It’s a semi-automated system that still requires some manual adjustment, but far less than if we had to recreate poses and overlays from scratch for every ancestry.

Each ancestry will have both regular and buff bodies for males and females, with a skin tone that can be selected from a palette with a variety of colours. We chose the human male as the test character to make first, and all of the shots below are ingame. Note the fashionable undergarment. That’s the default clothing for when your character doesn’t have any clothes or armour equipped, and is tintable to a range of colours.

As a stylized miniatures game, we want to be able to provide many distinctive faces in character creation. Our internal facial system (on the dev side) allows our artists to easily create variations on a base face, like adjusting brow and cheekbone prominence, eye spacing, nose size, and mouth shape, which are then saved as unique faces for players to choose. There will be numerous base faces for each ancestry, so that means lots of face variations. There’s also the ability to change eye colour, which includes two-tone irises so you can create things like hazel eyes. Facial expressions can be transferred between these faces due to our standardized character setup, and are kept as a separate library from body poses so we can mix and match them.

For further face customization, we’ve developed an overlay system that adds all kinds of cool things: freckles, scars, eyeliner, eye shadow, lipstick, stripe and extreme makeup, and face paints. The player can change the tints of all of these from a colour palette and can even mix and match the different types (example: scars + stripe makeup + face paint). Here’s a sampling of overlays we’ve made:

And of course we’ll have a great variety of hairs to choose from, for both hairstyles and facial hair, all of which can be colour changed. Facial hairs are modular (divided into pieces) so that they can be turned on/off separately for things like sideburns, moustaches, and goatees, or assembled together to make one big bushy beard.

Lastly, we have tattoos: head tattoos, arm tattoos, and chest tattoos are all options for players who want to ink their character’s skin. And not only can you change their colour but also their opacity in order to have them look subtle or faded.

Oh - almost forgot about nail polish! This can be applied to fingernails and tinted to a range of colours and glossiness.

Customization is something many players spend a lot of time on during character creation, so we wanted to make sure we gave plenty of choices for you to tinker with when designing your hero. Wait till you see what we have planned for armours – but that’s a future update.

 

[Ontopoly]

Video games provide the only context in which a naked man can be on my screen without it being gay.

 

[Fedora Master]

Looks like shit, Infinitron successfully worked his Hebrew Shit Midas Magic.