Bullet Ship Status & Project Postmortem
almost 3 years ago
– Sun, Apr 25, 2021 at 05:44:01 PM
Greetings friends!
Here's the news on Bullet♥︎!
This will be the last weekly update for a while, so please take a moment to check it out and to read our thoughts on the project, and leave us yours.
There's still a little bit more to do, but we won't be filling up your inbox every Friday going forward. ^_^
We've got Canadian Pledges fulfilled now, completing the bulk of fulfillment for Bullet♥︎! There are about 9 or 10 pledges in Canada and a few more in the USA that we're untangling, and we also have a number of Prototype pledges still to resolve. Those are in the process of being worked out.
We've updated a few expectations to account for our estimates of the delivery of shortfall items.
But TL;DR: the bulk of the project is now complete! Hurray!
MISSING ITEMS?
There are a few known late items (we should have emailed you already about these). If you haven't heard from us and you are still waiting on your package anywhere outside of Canada and Asia (and not one of the foreign language editions ES, CN, or JP), now is the time to send us a ticket so that we can follow up.
REPLACEMENT PARTS
If you're waiting on Deluxe Bullet Tokens or Adelheid's heroine board, I'm happy to inform you that we've received extra supplies from our printer, and those are now going out. Please give us another week or two to sort and ship all these out.
BULLET ORANGE
Thanks so much to everyone who pre-ordered Bullet Orange via the Launch 99 Program! You should have already received an email with more information about that.
If you're late to the party, you can still pre-order Bullet Orange, with the note that:
1) You will no longer receive the Launch 99 bonus (a steam download code for Acceleration of Suguri 2).
2) Items will ship from our USA Warehouse rather than a local fulfillment center in your country (but if you're in the USA, that's the same thing!).
3) You can add on items from the rest of our catalog, and things will ship together once Bullet Orange is in stock.
CHINESE LANGUAGE EDITIONS
Our Chinese Language Editions are on the way to us. We expect to ship those orders as soon as they arrive.
SPANISH LANGUAGE EDITIONS
The Spanish Language Edition is in pre-production right now. We've passed on backer data to Melmac Games so they can fulfill these pledges once they are ready.
JAPANESE LANGUAGE EDITIONS
The Japanese-language editions are in production and Asobition will be shipping them out to backers as soon as they're ready.
WINDING DOWN
Since we're done with the bulk of fulfillment, I'm going to stop posting weekly updates, and instead keep in contact as-needed to share announcements about the project and the future of Bullet.
I hope that it's been a fun project for you and that you're happy with the results of your pledge! If you have any feedback or comments for us, ideas to improve, or just want to share some warm wishes, please feel free to share them via DM or our service contact form.
POSTMORTEM
As we reach the end of the project, it's useful to take a few minutes and talk about the lessons we learned.
In Bullet♥︎, we experimented with a new style of project. Lighter, simpler (from a production standpoint), and faster to deliver. On the whole, the project was a big success. Delivery began on time (but was still delayed a bit by COVID port congestion), and fulfillment was largely painless.
We did encounter a few pain points with fulfillment of add-on items. It may still take us a few months to clean up the debris of missing add-ons in the far corners of the world. We also had inventory issues with a few add-ons that sold faster during 2020 than we expected, and embarrassingly became oversold between when Bullet launched and when it delivered.
For Sakura Arms, Empyreal, and other projects going forward, we've resolved ourselves to make everything in one factory, so that we can be assured that it all reaches the same place at the same time, and there's no risk of selling anything that's not guaranteed to be in stock.
We also encountered difficulty with small items and multiple versions of items. Our fulfillment partners had some difficulty parsing which boxes came with deluxe tokens, deluxe tokens and posters, posters only without deluxe tokens, or neither. In most cases, we ended up giving out "upgrades" to the version with tokens or with the poster (or we had to ship posters across the world at high expense).
Going forward, we're keeping the projects simple and eliminating variants to improve the ease of delivery. If there's a set of Deluxe Tokens or a Poster, those items will come in their own boxes with their own individual SKU codes.
Despite these small setbacks, we felt that Bullet♥︎ was a big success for our development and delivery teams. Doing a medium-sized game and delivering on time has been a much more effective strategy that doing tons of stretch goals and delivering a year and a half late. Who would have thought?
One big success of Bullet♥︎ was in pre-Kickstarter development. Having the game finished and the art complete before we started the KS project contributed greatly to its success. Moving forward, our goal is to be ahead of the curve on future projects in the same way.
We look forward to putting these lessons into practice to deliver our upcoming projects—Sakura Arms, Bullet Orange, and Empyreal—on time and on budget.
WHAT'S NEXT?
If you're happy with Bullet♥︎, we would love to share Empyreal: Spells & Steam with you. Empyreal has all the luxury of a deluxe game while still being lightweight and accessible to players of all skill levels. I hope that you'll check it out when you get a chance!
I wish you a great weekend and, as always, Happy Gaming!
- Brad
