Hello Netrunners! Extrac here, back with another update from the production team at Null Signal Games (still getting used to the new name). It’s been a wild month over in Parhelion production town, so here’s the latest from behind the curtain.
The big focus over the last few weeks has been setting up our art production for the set to ensure we have everything in place for the templating and print run in the coming months. To that end we’ve reconfigured the Art Team somewhat to allow people to apply their time where their skills are strongest. Matt has taken a creative consulting role, focusing on lending feedback to artists’ drafts and sketches. Conrad “Banknote” has stepped in as Interim Art Director to coordinate creative vision and logistics.
This reconfiguration combined with an open call within the organization for contribution to art briefs (the specs that the artists will use to produce conceptual sketches and eventually the final artwork) has seen a surge in progress on production of Parhelion’s art, giving us a lot of confidence in our projected December release date. We’re currently at 100% art briefs finalized, 100% artists assigned and contracts issued, and 60% of the cards having initial sketches returned. We project that we will have most if not all final art back by our deadline of October 14th.
In parallel to this, our Rules Team has been hard at work finalizing the card text to ensure it reads consistently and aligns with the overall rules readings for Netrunner. Progress has been good on this front and we’re looking forward to the handover point to Translation so that we can line up our localized SKUs.
Looking further forward, once rules text and card art are complete, we move on to templating to combine the two, before we step up to finalization and sending off to the printers. As mentioned before, we’re working with a few distribution partners to enable a middle ground between pure print-at-home and pure print-on-demand as options to get the cards to players, so we have opted for a slightly longer time allocated for the proofing and MPC/DTC uploads to accommodate this.
Once the cards are proofed and the release pipeline enters the final phases we begin our scheduled spoiler season. The duration worked really well last time in terms of striking a balance between building a flurry around the release and minimizing the gap between the cards being in a fully ready state and being available for purchase, so we will be repeating this pattern in our upcoming spoiler season. The keen eyed among you should keep a lookout over the coming weeks for a few sneak previews to scoop prior to the official spoiler season!
That’s all from us for this month! We’re extremely pleased to see that the workflow alterations we’ve implemented have been successful in their goals, and we look forward to sharing Parhelion with you in early December, based on our current projections.
