Hello! Extrac from the Production team here with another product update.
It’s been an exciting month for us here at NISEI. As we approach the release of Midnight Sun, we’ve crossed several milestones off our to-do list, including:
- We’ve planned out our preview season, both internally and in partnership with community content creators. Midnight Sun previews will run for two weeks immediately preceding the release of the set.
- We finalized flavor text for the entire set.
- We have received finals for all of our art for the set. These are now being added to card frames and will be given final proofing passes before being sent to print.
There’s still a fair bit of work to do in the run up to the release, but we are confident in these steps being completed in time. Our current projection is that Midnight Sun will be released on Friday, July 22, 2022!
As you can see from the above chart, while we’re a good slice of the way to completing all release steps, there’s still a few that need to be closed off:
- Our Translation team is hard at work so that we can provide a simultaneous multi-lingual release. This is progressing well and on target.
- Our Standard Banlist team has completed the draft of their new list and should be signing this off in the next week or so. This will be announced during set previews and will go live alongside Midnight Sun’s release.
- We are beginning the process of templating our art. Our artist partners send us full- sized digital images, and it’s up to our internal teams to scale and crop these appropriately to fit our card frames.
- Cards need to be uploaded to Jinteki.net and NetrunnerDB. Although Jinteki.net is not a NISEI site, we do have an ongoing dialogue and partnership with them. As we prepare for a set’s release, we aim to coordinate with them to facilitate a smooth online play experience. Since Jinteki.net draws information from NetrunnerDB, and we anticipate people will want to browse the new Midnight Sun cards there and use them in decklists, we want to have a plan for adding the new data to NetrunnerDB as well.
- Proofs have to be requested from our print-on-demand partners. We need to make sure these cards print well, without any misalignments or blurring. This takes some time as the cards need to be sent to us to physically examine so we must build some safety to allow for this.
- Our Community team has to write, edit, and prepare the articles that we’ll share on our site during the set previews.
- Finally, when all the above are complete, it’s the final go/no-go. The big red button is agreed on and pushed, and the set is released!
So still plenty to keep us busy here over in NISEI HQ! As above, however: we still remain confident in our projections for the end of next month and cannot wait to get these cards to you after much anticipation. We’re extremely happy with how this new release process has progressed since its inception earlier this year, and expect to largely repeat it, with minor adjustments, for Parhelion later this year.
That’s all from us for this month. Please join us here on NISEI.net on July 11, 2022, when Midnight Sun previews begin!
Editor’s note, June 25 2022: An earlier version of this article listed “rules explainer text” for the new mechanics as a completed task from the last month. This was actually completed the month before and covered in the May 2022 production update, so it has been removed. Added the note that flavor text has been completed.
