Dear Backers,

Today we’d like to announce that additional modders have joined the modding team! Modders Stan “sbobovyc” Bobovych and bugmonster.

Stan “sbobovyc” Bobovych, the creator of the modtools for Jagged Alliance: Back in Action. Stan cracked open the code and created tools enabling users to modify Back in Action.

bugmonster from the Russian community, author of the JA2'005 modification for Jagged Alliance 2 who also did some interesting things with 1.13. He will also be one of the first people from the Russian community who’ll be able to confirm that we indeed are not going to discriminate Russians as the evil ones in Flashback ;-)

New Tiers & Tier Changes

We’ve decided to add a new Top Tier and a special unique Tier as well as making a change to the $1200 Tier.

Tier Changes

$1200 Tier will now be:

$1200 So you’re a bad guy Tier: For the right price you may just play along, so you get:
All previous rewards + Help co-design an enemy in the game, who can be recruited to your team if persuaded in the right way. (Appearance, Nationality, Gender, Name) (ONLY THIS TIER) Limited (5)

New Special Tiers

$600 Woody Woodpecker Tier: You just can’t enough of all that wood, so you get:
All previous DIGITAL REWARDS + Become a manic woodcutter (Help co-design the woodcutter + co-write 3 responses) Limited (1)

$10000 Oily Business Tier: It’s messy but you’re swimming in black gold, you get:
All previous rewards + Become the Oil Baron of the island (Story NPC) and have your very own small oasis with a deluxe Bedouin Tent, surrounded by oil fields (ONLY THIS TIER) + Have a in-game statue or monument made in your honor and to your likeness + Become an honorary member of the development team and be credited as such with a framed certificate and thank you picture (PHYSICAL) + A very special Thank you in the game credits + 50 extra digital copies of the game. + Top tier forum Badge for the official JAF forum + Gift bag of unique items + Meet and greet, enjoy a day with developers, before the day of the official launch party (which you’re invited to as well (accommodation paid, transport not included)) Limited (1)

On a final note we’ll be making it possible for the ALL DIGITAL $600-$650 Reward Tiers to add the physical add-ons if they please.

VFXs For the Diorama

(Please note that these pictures shall just give you an impression on the VFXs, not the Diorama itself. The pictures displayed may be subject to change and is currently work in progress)

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and here we (for fun) have the gun for Shanga

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That’s it for today’s update, we’ll keep on brewing on the Diorama and stuff for your eyes to enjoy.

Have a nice Tuesday :D

The Full Control JAF Team

Dear Backers,

What a day, with a mention from our friends at Obsidian in the Project Eternity update we’ve gained some momentum and we can’t thank them enough, they’re an awesome bunch!

4000 Backers - Next Secret Sector Reveal

As promised we would like to reveal our “secret” once we reach the 4k mark, which is that we’ll be making a special Bear’s Pit Sector and instead of adding new sectors for every 1k backers we’ve decided to lower it to 1 new sector for every 500 backers. Therefore the Bear’s Pit Sector will be unlocked already at 4500 backers!



The Bear’s Pit Sector will be inhabited by wild bear’s who have a taste for hamsters. Just kidding. And we’ll make sure to place some unique elements, “easter eggs” and possibly also add a special mercenary unlock for the sector, so there should be enough juicy content for the pit to enjoy :)

Production Plans for JA:F

So a lot of people have been asking what happens when the Kickstarter is successful. Will the game suddenly appear out of nowhere after a month and what does pre-production mean?

I just wanted to take the chance to give you a quick overview of how games are made.

In very! broad terms you have the following phases:

- Idea conception

Where you sit and throw ideas around of what would be cool to do, the overall settings, making some concepts and pulling things apart and reassembling them. You also need some business sense here to spot what you can actually sell and make a living off.

- Pre-production

This is where JA:F is right now.

Here you sit down and produce concept art, write overall story, settle on the major game mechanics as well as produce production plans. Who does what when, how much money is allocated to the story writing, who to hire for level design and so on.

- Production

There is a slide into production then, where more and more people get added to the production team. Artists will start taking the produced concepts and create core art assets (terrains, trees, houses, a few characters), level designers will start blocking out levels with boxes, coders will implement basic core functionality like movement and camera.

In production you have (we do at least) 4 sub phases

* First up there is a core asset production. Tons of art created and code created in isolation of each other - mostly using placeholder art or code/art from earlier games

* Then we assemble this into a vertical slice to get 1-2 sectors/levels totally playable with an ingame UI

* After that we produce a lot of sectors/levels

* Lastly it then gets assembled as a complete game

- Polish and testing

Ongoing and especially at the end a lot of polish is added, the vertical slice gets tested by early alpha testers. The adding beta and external testing. Alpha testers will get access to very early slices of the game and be able to give feedback based on these to the team before we mass produce content. Beta testers will get access to almost content complete builds.

- Release

Party time!! Beer Time!!! Time to freak out!!! Time to think about adding more content!!! Realizing that it wasn’t such a great idea to drink that much beer!!!! Using way too many exclamation marks!!!!!

- Post launch support

It doesn’t stop here. Usually you had to cut a lot of features to make the deadlines. So there is considerable effort post launch to support the game, fix bugs that get reported, add features - and then start to think about making expansions.

So what specifically happens with JA:F after Kickstarter success?

First - the JA:F team will take a week of vacation :-)

Then we will resolve the Humble Bundle pack distribution of the Classic game pack, as well as calculate in detail what the final development budget will be. Kickstarter and Amazon are taking their cuts, we have obligations to especially physical tier pledgers that costs money.

Then we can turn our eyes onto the game itself.

As we’ve said, we are in early pre-production - on purpose! We want to engage with the modders and with the old JA2 crew to make the final designs and talk openly with them (and you) about what we want to do, scope it all into budget constraints and so on.

We plan to run pre-production through summer and into September’ish with a small 2-3 person team. And then gradually move people from Space Hulk production onto Flashback over the fall.

Production will then run until sometime next Summer/Fall 2014, where we can then enter into polish/testing/release to get you the game end of 2014.

Thats the current plan - and if there is one thing that is certain, it’s that plans will change as we look deeper into numbers, resources and features. Especially the unknown amount of Space Hulk sales will influence a lot, as we can then funnel money from that into the JA:F production.

We also want to engage you as a community ongoing through pre-production and production. Both as content creators, pledge rewards making mercenaries, name pools etc.etc. Keep you in the loop all the way - as backers you have the right to know how things are progressing.

Will be an interesting ride with you, and we look very much forward to it! So let us get this baby funded!!

Best

The Jagged Alliance Flashback Team

Dear Backers,

After having reached an impressive ~ $25,000 yesterday, making it our second best day to date, we’re hard at work to keep the ball rolling.

Stretch Goals

Although we made an update on Stretch Goals a few days ago and have reached $200,000 + opening up the Stretch Goals Box, we would like to add it to this update for all eyes to see. We know there’s still some ways to go before we reach the initial goal ,but we’re A.I.M.ing for a race to the finish.

Stretch Goals

New $425,000 Stretch Goal:

The new stretch goal will be a small tourist island off the coast and have approximately 10 sectors. The player will be able to travel there by boat and there will be two fishing ports located on the island. Additionally, there will be a small resort located on the island, making it popular to tourist. Players can gain an economic advantage by visiting the island as well as being able to discover so called “easter eggs” along with special unlockables.

Bear's Pit JA:F Events and Contests

As promised we wanted to give the Bear’s pit competition a mention, so here’s their hamster happy meal.

SPREAD THE WORD CAMPAIGN

Anyone can be the next San Cristobal bartender/gas station owner just by helping with spreading the word about JA:F Kickstarter: Rewards $125, $200 and $650

Follow this link for more info

WRITE A MERC ONELINER AND WIN

Also our generous friend gdalf just spruced up his $220 reward for best merc/enemy one-liner by announcing STRETCH GOALS! Yes, he's going to add even more goodies to the pack, just join the fun and give us your line!

Follow this link for more info

Tribute Sector

As a thanks to our friends at Obsidian, we’ve decided to make a special sector in their honor. The 5000 backer sector will be an Obsidian mine, where a secret cult of scientist resides and are trying to develop a new formula to become immortal, called “Eternity”. We thank the community for coming up with these awesome suggestions :D As Jesper is still hard at work finishing the diorama the visualization of the sector will have to wait, but we’ll get it up as soon as possible and also come up with the 5500 sector.

Diorama Screens

Javier has been hard at work on an RPG for the diorama, here’s the result:

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That’s it for today, we’ll be sending out the press release for the diorama tomorrow, so you all get to see it :)

It’s great to have so many new backers here, hopefully you’ll all share the news about this Kickstarter project to friends and family, we need your support for the final push!

Until next time!

The Full Control JAF Team

Dear Backers,

Once again it’s Friday and as always that means Friday specials. However, we’d like to start out by focusing on the project that has taken up a lot of our time these last few weeks - The Diorama.

Diorama

We have finally released the diorama scene, which depicts a combat scenario that takes place in a jungle/ruins setting. The scene can now be downloaded and explored, although it should be noted that Jagged Alliance: Flashback is currently in pre-production and both the style and core features are subject to change.

To navigate the scene simply press space to jump to different camera points. You can choose between 3 different zoom levels by pressing 1, 2 and 3. To exit the scene simply press ESC :)

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You can download the scene in the links below:

PC Build Mac Build Linux Build

Please note that the Linux build has not been tested, so we don’t know if it works properly.

Friday Specials

We love guns and and we want a lot of them in Jagged Alliance: Flashback and a few people from the community have mentioned the weapon smugglers, arms dealers and a black market, so the natural follow up would be to create the following Tiers:

$650 Gunneck Rampage Tier: Howdy, I got a bullet with your name on it, but you still get: All previous DIGITAL REWARDS + Become an arms dealer (Help co-design the arms dealer and the name of the shop + co-write 3 responses) Limited (3)

Friday Special

$850 Slim Shady Business Tier: You got some sweet rhymes, so you get: All previous rewards + Become the weapon smuggler in the game and have him named after you. (Co-write 5 responses of your choice) Limited (1)

Did you miss it?

As a big thanks to Obsidian and inXile for their support throughout this Kickstarter, we want to give you the chance to re-discover their great projects. If you somehow missed out on Project Eternity or Wasteland 2, then please give their “slacker backer” a look.

http://eternity.obsidian.net/

http://wasteland.inxile-entertainment.com/

Have a nice weekend!

The Full Control JAF Team