Return to Dark Tower

Road Trip! -and- Updating Your Address
almost 4 years ago – Sat, Jul 18, 2020 at 01:00:28 AM

Just a very quick update to let you all know that I'm heading out on a road trip for the next two weeks. (We're renting an RV to visit the in-laws so we can minimize any virus risk, and I kinda feel like it's the logline for Hangover 4.) I won't be able to do a meaningful update while I'm on the road. In the interim, we're in the middle of a playtest cycle and still refining the engineering and tooling on the Tower. I'll post another update when I get back.

I've also received a few messages from folks who wanted to know how to update their mailing addresses. Obviously, we're not shipping until early next year, but you can update your address any time in BackerKit. Just go back into your survey and make the change. There's nothing to update in Kickstarter. No worries about doing it now; I'll post an update when we get ready to begin fulfillment with a final announcement to update shipping addresses.

Hope everyone is doing well and staying safe and healthy.

The Dog Days of Summer. Who Wants To Playtest?
almost 4 years ago – Thu, Jul 16, 2020 at 06:28:12 PM

I know it's been a little bit since our last update, but there's not much to report. We're still in the early stages of engineering and tooling as we talked about in our last update. (Right now, we're testing speakers!) Importantly, we are rapidly approaching our print lockdown date.

The rules continue to undergo iterations and refinement, but we're getting close. In fact, we really need to do one last big playtest push before we send the print files out. (We'll keep playtesting afterwards to test and refine the app and the data that lives there.) We'd been trying to get a new round of playtesting done for the past few weeks, but we did hit our first virus-related hurdle. It seems as though the platforms are taking quite a bit longer to approve new apps because they've been having issue with scam apps posing as virus contact tracing apps. We just did a major revamp on the app and only just now got it approved.

For this round of playtesting, we are working exclusively in Tabletop Simulator. We will not have print materials available. On the plus side, you'll be able to playtest while maintaining appropriate social distancing. You'll also need an android or iOS device to run the app while you're playing and access to some videoconferencing platform that allows screensharing, such as Zoom or Skype. So....

If you are interested and able to playtest via Tabletop Simulator over the next few weeks, please sign up using this online FORM.

(We did send emails out to folks who had signed up before. If you already received one of those emails, you do not need to sign up again on the new form.)

Happy to answer questions about the status of the project, but I probably won't have a significant update for another few weeks or so.

Beauty Is More Than Skin Deep: A Design Diary by Tim Burrell-Saward
almost 4 years ago – Sat, Jun 20, 2020 at 03:31:56 AM

The last time our lead Tower designer, Tim Burrell-Saward, stopped by, he took a nice long look at the aesthetics of the Tower design. This time around, we're stripping off the swanky shell and taking a nice long look at the guts of this thing. Take it away, Tim:

When I posted my last tower update back in January we were coming to the end of the Kickstarter and beginning to gear up to actually start making the game. After the frantic whirlwind that was the campaign, everyone was looking forward to a slightly more relaxed period of work. But then the world decided to slide into the toilet and Normal Operating Procedures went out the window, so things didn’t quite go according to plan. Because you’re not truly suffering for your art until you’re juggling an incredibly complex mechatronic project with an international team (operating across borderline incompatible timezones), whilst also trying to navigate the end of the world. We are indeed living in interesting times.

Nevertheless, a lot has been going on in terms of tower development. Here’s an update.

In February we put the tower prototype under the microscope and started to do all of the detail work needed to get it ready for manufacture. This part of the process is called design for manufacture (DFM), and involves a great deal of collaboration with engineers in our partner factories in China, to ensure that the design we take to production is as reliable, strong and safe as possible. DFM is a fraught-yet-satisfying part of the manufacturing process, as you need to balance artistic desires with the cold hard realities of Making Things Real. Every decision becomes a balancing act between opposing forces. Form vs function. Time vs money. Spectacle vs reliability. Magic vs physics. Every game you own, film you watch and book you read has been through a similar battle. The fight is great and terrible, and I love it and hate it.

To give an example of the DFM process, let’s take a look at three specific parts: the gearboxes, the rotating drums and the doorways.

A large part of DFM is about identifying potential failure points and designing them out, and It’ll come as no surprise that the gearboxes were top of the list of Things That Could Go Wrong. When making prototypes, you tend to make a lot of decisions based on the components and fabrication methods you have to hand. Things like tiny gears may not 3d print very well, which can result in creaky, groaning mechanisms that, whilst sounding very atmospheric, aren’t particularly reliable. DFM allowed us to redesign the gearboxes for mass manufacture, in this instance balancing factors like size, cost and rotation speed. The same is true for the gearbox housing, which holds all of the gears nice and tightly in place. With the prototype we designed a housing that allowed us to adjust the position of the parts, so that we could make changes on the fly. During DFM we lock the gears in place and design the housings to keep all the parts exactly where we need them to be, to make sure the gears don’t skip or jam. We test motors to make sure they’ll last as long as we need them to. We adjust gear ratios to give us the exact rotation speed we want, and we choose the right materials for each part to make sure they last. This process will continue over the coming months to make sure that the mass-manufactured parts perform as well as we want them to, so watch this space for more news as it happens.

For the rotating drums, the challenge was to find the most robust and reliable way of keeping track of the drum rotations throughout the game, to make sure the app always knows which glyphs and openings are facing which direction. For the kickstarter prototype we used tiny microswitches, which were tripped by a system of ramps attached to the base of the drums. Each time the switch was tripped the tower knew that the doorways were aligned, and would instantly stop the motor. This system functioned absolutely as we needed it to, but we were concerned that a lifetime of flicking those little switches might end in them breaking. So although we technically had a viable solution, the potential risk of failure was something that we felt we could design out.

The solution we’ve ended up with was to switch to something called a photo-reflector, which is a tiny optical sensor consisting of an infra-red LED emitter sat next to a receiver, both pointing in the same direction. The LED casts out infra-red light, some of which bounces back onto the receiver generating a current that we can measure. We’ve installed a photo-reflector above each drum (pointing down) and have created a pattern of reflective stripes directly below it on the drum’s lid. When the drum rotates and a reflective stripe passes underneath the sensor, the amount of infra-red light bouncing back to the sensors changes, letting us know that a trigger has been hit and the motor needs to stop. This gives us the speed and sensitivity we need to make sure the drums stop in the right place, but without any physical wear and tear on the switch. Magic!

Finally to the doorways, where the challenge was to remove any chance that skulls might become trapped and cause them to jam when the drums rotate, which to be frank is something that happened more than I was willing to accept with the Kickstarter prototype. This demonstrates the importance of prototyping designs before they go to production - so you can test and iterate as you go. Sometimes things look like they’ll work fine when you look at them on a screen, but it’s only when you have them in your hands do you have the full picture. So with the drums, the answer was to go back to the drawing board and completely revise the way they interface with the outer shell. And because we’re dealing with some very precise tolerances, a change to one part can quickly snowball into a whole heap of extra work. But we’re confident the risk has been mitigated, and will keep testing and revising until we’re certain it has been.

These are just three examples taken from the hundreds of revisions that have taken place since the Kickstarter ended. And alongside all of the mechanical design changes we’ve also been focussing on getting the electronics ready for production, working with our factory to find exactly the right combination of components to keep those ever present opposing forces in check. We figure out where all the wires need to run, to make things as easy and foolproof as possible for the factory workers to assemble and test on the production line. We stress test the infrared sensor at the top of the tower to make sure it consistently recognises when skulls are added. We go through multiple revisions of the main PCB until we get to the magic point where the factory says “yup, that’s the one”. Lots and lots of minor tweaks and adjustments made to the tower’s dark heart that most folks will never know have been made, but without which it just wouldn’t beat as strongly.

Sound and light are worth picking out here, as Charlie (our resident genius-brain electronics engineer) has put in a lot of time here in particular. For sound the balance has involved trying to get the highest volume and best quality audio out of the limited physical space we have to play with. The speaker is located right at the base of the tower and pointed upwards, causing the body of the tower to amplify the speaker’s output. The small space means we can’t have a huge speaker, so we have to be clever with the components we use in order to maximise its potential. It’s also powered from the same supply as the LEDs, which means that Charlie has had to do some additional wizardry to make sure there isn’t any electrical interference that translates into weird audio noise. A little later down the line we’ll share some footage with sound, just as soon as we’re ready to add audio to the app (the development of which is progressing along nicely, but will have to wait for another update).

As for light, we’ve been working on maximising the light output from the 24 individually addressable red LEDs dotted around the tower, to give the most atmospheric light show we can give without draining the batteries too fast. Work is still ongoing but we’re really happy with what we’re achieving here, which when coupled with the light, sound and rotation sequencing that we’ll start on soon, is really going to bring the tower to life.

So what’s next? Well, we’re coming to the end of the DFM process now, but there are a few things to finish off before we can start making the tools needed to injection mould all of the parts. We need to do some skull distribution testing, to make sure that the probabilities we worked out previously still hold true. The outer shell needs to be textured, to give the gnarled, weathered look we want to achieve. We need to decide on colours and transparencies (a personal favourite step of mine). Firmware needs to be tidied up and lingering bugs need to be squished. Packaging needs to be progressed. And then there are the other thousand-and-one things to cross off the list. But once these are all done, which shouldn’t be too much longer, we’ll be ready for the really, really fun bit: making things real.

To finish, here are some photos of a tooling model, which are made at our factory in China to test the integrity and functionality of the design as it goes through DFM. This particular tower is made from completely transparent plastic for testing reasons, so please ignore the colours and transparency of the outer shell. Also the outer shell is still to have textures applied, so it looks a little flat right now. Also also the cable runs are still all done by hand, so forgive the spaghetti going on inside. Those caveats aside, we hope you’ll agree that it's all coming together rather nicely indeed.

That’s it for now, I’ll be back soon with more updates. As always we’ll be hovering in the comments to answer questions.

Thanks for reading and stay safe.

RETAILERS: Inadvertent Card Charge
almost 4 years ago – Fri, Jun 05, 2020 at 12:33:39 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.

Retailers: Last Week Before Lock Down
almost 4 years ago – Wed, May 27, 2020 at 06:48:15 PM

This post is for backers only. Please visit Kickstarter.com and log in to read.