Bark, sniff, and lick your way through the apocalypse to save the hoomans you love!
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Custom Dogs: Proofing pass and final call for address changes!
almost 5 years ago
– Thu, Jun 27, 2019 at 01:46:35 AM
Hello hoomans!
We have some important information, so we are jumping right into it.
Address Updates: Final Call
If you’re a custom dog backer and you only read one part of this update, please read this section!
We want to make sure we have everyone’s up to date address for the custom dogs. If you’ve changed your address since filling out the backerkit survey, you can help us in a big way by making sure we have your most up-to-date address here. If you’re not sure if you’ve moved in that time frame, go ahead and fill out the address update anyway - we want to make sure we get it right!
This will help us make sure your new address is the address printed on the custom dog envelopes before they ship!
If you’ve already emailed or messaged with your new address, we encourage you to fill out that quick address update anyway: it’s just one more way we can cross our t’s and dot our i’s. We’ve tried to keep up with all changes and requests, but this will help us double-check to make sure we’ve got it right!
Again, here's that form.Please enter responses by Tuesday, July 2nd to make sure your card(s) get to the right place.
Dogs are all laid out! Onto the proofing pass! (Woofing pass?)
We’re thrilled to announce that the pre-production work on our custom dog forms has come to a close this week. Now, all our dog pictures have been cropped, placed onto painted backgrounds, and matched with their unique bios on the printing forms.
There’s over 1,000 of these good doggos!
What’s next is a careful look-over of every single one of these forms. We want to double check as much as possible before printing these cards—and each one has a lot to check. We’ll be looking out for:
Missing pictures, or pictures with quality issues.
Proper matching of dog photos to their character cards.
Formatting errors in the text.
Special requests we received from some backers.
We’re eager to get these cards to the printer, and this is the final step that we can’t rush. The original eight dogs for the base game had multiple passes for accuracy and consistency—now, we’re going to extend that same care to the hundreds of unique cards we’re making for our backers.
Thank you all for your patience and enthusiasm. Your kind words and attention have been a huge support for us as we continue our work :)
Until next (walk)time,
Evan, Brian, and Hannah
Custom Card Text Edits Complete!
almost 5 years ago
– Wed, Jun 05, 2019 at 06:44:16 PM
Hello hoomans!
We’re excited to share that the text flow and editing for all $75+ level custom cards is COMPLETE and our designers have finished their Photoshop art pass on all of your pups’ photos!
Emma, Cedar, Mr. Meeseeks, and Felix ready for their cards!
What comes next? Photo placement!
As mentioned in a previous update, the next step is matching these photos to their cards. InDesign’s data merge feature was a big help in flowing the survey text into the card templates, but while data merge does support image placement, the combined size of the files (many, many gigabytes worth of doggos) makes it too difficult to automate this work. Fortunately, we’ve tagged each one of your photos with the pup’s name, your last name, and with backer ID numbers, which will make it easy to match each photo to the correct template.
This represents the final step of getting all your GDBZ custom doggos in to the printer, and we couldn’t be happier!
Up next: printing and shipping!
Yes! Community Printers needs all files in-hand to begin their printing work, so we’ll be handing the InDesign files off to them after every single dog has been placed. We think we can make quick work of this process. The slowest part will be making sure we go over special or irregular orders with a fine-tooth comb. While it was easy to automate the flow of text onto the templates for standard $75, $150, and $300 backer levels, it gets a little trickier when we get into add-on dogs and folks who are ordering duplicates of the same card(s). Those survey answers get stored in a different place in Backerkit, and we have to do a little more manual work to make sure that text gets placed on the right sheet.
Every card got a special editing pass so none of your pup's names got cut off. Sometimes that took a liiiittle more work than we expected!
We’re beginning the work of placing each of your pup’s photos on their cards today. We’ll have another update out to you when that work is finished, to keep you in the loop and let you know how it’s going. We expect it will take roughly a week for all the photos to be placed and we’re ready for a final review, then these are off to the printer, and then into your paws!
More soon,
MBT (Brian, Evan, & Hannah)
PS Just a reminder we are sending out the Unlikely Ally stands at the same time as the custom dogs, so those are still to come!
Custom Cards Update: $75+ Edits Nearly Complete! And a Breakdown of Your Favorite Pup Powers
almost 5 years ago
– Fri, May 24, 2019 at 07:30:48 PM
Hello hoomans!
Before heading into the weekend, we wanted to share a quick update to let you know text edits on all 700+ single pup cards in the $75-backer level are nearly complete! As mentioned in a previous update, the single dog cards represent a bulk of the cards ordered, but because they don’t include the three extra pups and twelve hoomans, work on these has gone quickly! Here’s a quick video scrolling through a few pups in the single-card templates. Note: the video scrolls between the front and back of the template somewhat rapidly. If you're sensitive to flickering images you may want to avoid this one.
Video: We zoomed in a little to protect your address information, but you can see that the single cards use the same template as the 4-pup 12-hooman sets, just with the extra assets removed!
We anticipate all single card editing will be finished by Tuesday, and our designers should also finish their filter and art pass on your cards by that time. When we have your pup’s photos filtered and ready to go, the final step is placing them on your cards and giving the cards one last readover to make sure all the text fits and looks great! We’ll send another update after that step is underway!
A Breakdown of Your Favorite Pup Powers
One thing that’s been fun to see as we work with your card data is the breakdown of abilities you chose. Here are all the abilities there were to choose from:
Play
Snuggle
Stand Guard
Make Trouble
Protect
Be Grumpy
Hunt
Smell the Air
And (drumroll), here’s a breakdown of favorite abilities from the Backerkit surveys, by percentage of backers:
A breakdown of pup powers by % of backers.
Stand Guard came in as the favorite ability—you all have very alert pups! Play and Snuggle followed closely behind, then Make Trouble and Protect, then Smell the Air, Be Grumpy, and finally Hunt.
It’s been a delight to read the custom names you’ve given for these abilities, and we’ll share some of these in the next update. In the meantime, here is Waine (one of the base game dogs and Hannah’s pup), whose ability—just like her real-life ability—is Be Grumpy. Though of course, you wouldn’t know it here. :)
Waine, being Sleepy. A good ability for a future edition?
Unlikely Ally Stands
We have these in hand now, however, we are going to send them at the same time we send the custom dogs. Doing a bulk shipment like this will save us both money and time. Thanks for your patience on that front—we just wanted to reassure folks those are still coming, and we’re planning to send things in one big batch.
Have a great weekend, we’ll be back soon with more!
Best,
Brian, Hannah, & Evan
Custom Dog Cards Update: $150+ Edits Complete and Photos of Your Pups!
almost 5 years ago
– Fri, May 17, 2019 at 12:03:37 AM
Hello hoomans,
A quick update to let you know we’re making good progress on your custom cards!
Text editing is complete for all $150 and above backers. The $150 and $300 levels represented a huge editing project, and we took on the challenge! While there are many single cards in the $75 level, the $150 and $300 levels each have 4 dog cards and 12 custom hooman cards per sheet (around 1,200 dogs + 3,600 hoomans total), so we wanted to tackle that work first!
Here’s a few things we pay special attention to when editing your cards:
Sometimes quotations or tildes don’t translate well from the spreadsheet to InDesign. We keep an eye out for these and work to fix them on the cards before they go to print!
The tilde needs to be corrected here!
Whoops, those quotations won't do. Fixed!
InDesign does a pretty good job finding overset text, but we still go through each of these cards personally to be sure they look great and that the text flows well. That means we resize or rearrange text that might be flowing off of the card, because of too many words or characters!
We want to make sure we can fit the dog names and all the text on this card!
And here’s what one of those full spreads looks like, sans images:
A pack of 4 pups and 12 hoomans, edited and ready for images.
We’re excited to finish the text layout for all single dog cards and to move on to the last three steps of this process: matching your pup’s images with their cards, sending these off to the printer, and sending them off to you!
We’ll update again when all $75’s are complete and when we’ve started placing your pup’s images in their templates! We anticipate these will be off to the printer in about two weeks.
Until then, here’s a yip yip hooray for nearing the finish line and we hope you’re enjoying spring! Here’s some of your very good doggos enjoying the outdoors:
Hershey loves a forest bed!
Korra playing hide-and-seek!
Jimmy is a very good boy!
Gary is skeptical of this nice weather. Same, Gary. Same.
Best,
Brian, Evan, & Hannah
PS - Don't forget: While we work on your cards, you can download a bonus playable pup, Sandy the Loyal Golden Retriever, here!
Bonus Pup: Here’s Sandy! And a Short Video of Our Custom Dog Spreadsheets
almost 5 years ago
– Tue, Apr 30, 2019 at 04:27:13 PM
Hello hoomans!
We’re writing to update you on our custom doggo progress, and to share Sandy with you, a bonus playable pup for your GDBZ games!
Custom Card Progress
We’re working hard on your custom cards every day! The cutout process is finally finished (cutting out over 1,000 dogs, phew!) and we’ve moved to the art phase, where we do an artistic filter pass on your pup photos in Photoshop, and then drop those photos onto an illustrated background.
Hello, Coco! Coco is just one of over 1,000 custom pups that got a special cutout pass. Now, off to Photoshop!
As we mentioned in our last update, we’ve hired additional help with this part of the project so we can get your cards to you as soon as hoomanly possible. Our additional designers have said that they’re able to help with the art pass as well, and we’re grateful for their skilled support!
At the time of writing, this puts us about two weeks behind our to-print deadline, but we’re making swift progress on these, and with every card we work on, the process gets even faster.
Tallulah, Lola, and Fidget filtered and placed on illustrated backgrounds! Next step is placing these puppers on their cards.
While our small design team helps us finish the custom pup photo layout, we’re working on flowing all the data from your surveys into InDesign to lay out your custom cards. The spreadsheets we’re working from are a marvel to behold! Check out the video below, where Hannah walks through the spreadsheet for the $150 and above custom content—a sheet with over 50 separate tabs!
Here’s Sandy, the first bonus playable pup we created for you all! We’ve tested Sandy a couple times, but we’d love your help testing her ability, BE LOYAL, more fully. After you’ve had a chance to play a game with Sandy, let us know how your game went! If you test out Sandy, we’d love to hear your feedback via email:[email protected].
The idea behind Sandy’s Good Doggo power is something we didn’t get to include in the base game: an ability with a “choose an option” feature. The design concept behind Sandy’s ability is that while each individual special action (move to any dog and herd it, or move to any hooman and howl) is not as powerful as a normal Good Doggo ability, having the additional option to choose whichever effect is best at any given time is a powerful ability in its own right!
So go ahead and print out Sandy and be one loyal pup!
