Folks,

    Happy Monday all. Hopefully the week is starting off well for you. If it isn’t, well, then the week hopefully will have nowhere to go but up! Today will be a busy day at the studio, and we have a number of fun things in the works for this week.

   First, we will be doing a video update, followed by a Live Q&A with me at 1PM Eastern Time/10AM Pacific Time/6PM UTC today. The subject will be mage armor! Michelle and Sandra did their usual outstanding job with the early concepts, and after we show it to you, I’ll be hanging around to do the Q&A. Head on over to our Twitch channel (http://www.twitch.tv/citystategames) to see the presentation and then the Q&A. After the Q&A, the video will be available on YouTube here.

   Secondly, within the next day or two we will run a stress test for our IT folks. I’ll be sending out an email to our IT Backers to confirm the time and date, but all the signs are pointing to the stress test being a go either late today or tomorrow. If the stress test goes well, we’ll be moving this code branch over to our Wyrmling server. We’ll then invite the Alpha/Internal Testers to see if they can break the build. The Pre-Alpha Build will then also have a lot of the neat features that our IT folks have seen for weeks.

    As many of you saw last week, we’ve knocked out a lot of the items for the P.A.T. Checklist #2. We are nearing the closing of that list and the opening of a brand new list. FYI, some of the team will be beginning their P.A.T. #3 checklist items this week!

   We are also getting close to the much-requested reopening of some of the non-sold-out Reward Tiers for our Founders. As the folks on the forums know, we needed to write some code to keep track of the limited tiers, and to make sure that they worked nicely in concert with the current system. Hopefully, that work will be done this week. Once that is done, we’ll turn to our Builder’s Tiers.

   The t-shirt survey is almost complete, and as of this morning, concept A is the clear winner. We are investigating what will be the best way to handle manufacturing and fulfillment in a way that doesn’t punish our non-US Backers for living in their own fine countries. Right now, the current plan is to open an Amazon shop in the US and Europe, and have the t-shirts manufactured here and abroad, thus letting Amazon pick, pack, and ship. We are thinking about a Print On Demand shirt as well, but those are quite expensive when compared to the more common silk screening/pre-order method, so that wouldn’t be our first choice. Again, this is a tentative plan, so if you have some thoughts or suggestions, I’ll start a Something To Think About discussion on our forums.

    We’ll be sending out a second survey this week that will deal with preferred sizes, styles, and quantities. Therefore, if you want to buy a t-shirt, please respond to the survey. We really want to get the number of shirts and sizes as close to accurate as possible. So please, if you want to make sure you get a t-shirt or two, respond to the survey! FYI, as I said during the Kickstarter+, a portion of the profits from the t-shirts (and other swag) will go towards developing the game. The rest will go into the general CSE coffers and be used to produce other swag and pay for merchandise returns/bad debt/etc. We’ll let you folks know all the numbers (cost, plan, etc.) once we pin them down after we get the feedback from the Backers in the coming weeks.

   That’s it for today. Have a great Monday, all!

   And as always, we thank you for your support.

-Mark