Titans Terrain

The home stretch!
over 2 years ago – Sat, Dec 11, 2021 at 06:30:22 PM

We are now in the home stretch with only 5 days left in the campaign! We are so humbled and thankful for all the support and we are excited for all the post campaign activities we have coming up! During this last week we will be showcasing the terrain during the live battle reports on our channel. You can check out our recent games or tune in for a live one. 

After the campaign has finished we will be updating you regularly on the manufacturing progress and timelines. We will also be showcasing our expansion pack as it comes together (the new buildings are looking amazing!). We also plan to bring Titans Terrain with us to many of the big events and tournaments we attend so you can see it in person. We will update you with a schedule once we lock it down. 

But the campaign is not over just yet and we are asking for your support to help us get to our next goal of $300,000. You can support us by sharing the campaign on social or with your friends. Better yet, if you have been holding out, now is the perfect time to back us! 

Thanks again for all the support!

New stretch goal announced!
over 2 years ago – Wed, Nov 24, 2021 at 09:37:22 PM

We know a good idea when we hear one. That’s why when a backer told us about this, we decided to make it our first stretch goal. If we raise over $300,000 we are going to add 2 half tiles free into every copy of our expansion pack.

It might not sound like much, but this empty half tile unlocks enormous creative opportunities. Using this tile tile allows you to offset the position of all the tiles in a row. This allows you to create or close fire lanes and break the grid to create hundreds more unique layouts. You can learn more on our campaign main page or see it in action in our live battle report. 

To celebrate over 1000 backers let’s show you some behind the scenes
over 2 years ago – Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 12:20:28 AM

We just crossed the 1000 backers number which is a major milestone for us! We thought you might be interested in how a pop-up terrain tile gets made. Let’s go through the process of making our favorite tile called “The estate” which is a traditional L shaped building.

Step 1 - Board layout

Before we knew which buildings to make we had to decide on how many tiles there would be and what the size of them are. While we tried around 20 different layouts we settled on 3 possible ideas. One was using 6 rectangle shaped tiles. This had the advantage of allows you to reposition tiles and big tiles means big pop-ups. The downside was the tiles couldn’t be rotated 90 degrees, so you loose variation. It also meant that there was no terrain in the middle of the board. The second used 5 of the same sized rectangle tiles with 2 smaller tiles. This fixed the previous problem of having no terrain in the middle, but still lacked the ability to rotate tiles. The last layout we tried was using 12 tiles that were all square. This allowed for lots of terrain in the middle of the board and allowed them all to be interchangeable and rotated for maximum board configuration!

Step 2 - Building ideas

For this step we needed to decide what buildings we wanted and what shape they would be. For this we looked to our favorite terrain sets that we had in the studio. We knew we wanted 2 of each terrain piece so the board could be symmetrical if desired. This would be ideal for balanced games of 40k. We settled on a large L shaped building, a U shaped building, a small L, a dense ruin, and a crate style structure. We started making foam core prototypes of each tile and playing on them to see how it felt. This is an example of the large L shaped building.

Step 3 - Finalize dimensions

Now that we knew roughly what buildings we wanted, we needed to settle on the details. This is much harder than it looks. You need to ensure that the building is large enough to work in game, but small enough that models can move around them. We took typical models like 40k transports and bigger things like knights and make sure there was enough room to move around. We also wanted to make sure we made our buildings work with modern 40k rules and were tall enough to be obscuring for example. You can see the dimensions of the large L building here.

Step 4 - Concept art

This stage is the most fun. It is when we get to start creating the look of our new world. We wanted to make the board feel at home in the 40k universe as well as in a more fantasy world like Age of Sigmar. We also wanted the board to feel like our favorite terrain sets we have made before. We decided on an overgrown city and started working on the concepts. You can see here many of our early building ideas. Several of these went on to become the final buildings.

Step 5 - Paper engineering

Making pop-ups is far more of a science than you might think. While early in the project we created our own basic pop-up prototypes, we knew we needed a real expert to take it to the next level. We hired one of the best in the world and showed him our concepts. He quickly created white paper prototypes that we’re exactly on point. It was at this stage that we knew we were going to make this work!

Step 6 - Texture painting

Now we had a final pop-up design it was time to finalize the artwork. The paper engineer provided a document with cut out lines and instructions for our artist. The artist then got to work painting the final textures. This process had a lot of experimentation and took by far the longest of any stage. During this process we also created 3D renderings to see how the textures were coming together.

Step 7 - Prototyping

Now that we have final art it was time to print it all out and see how it feels. For our first prototypes we printed out the buildings ourselves, cut and glued them by hand. It is very challenging as making these buildings is quite the puzzle. From here we can make sure that everything works well and looks great. We noticed small issues that we fixed to create a finished building.

Step 8 - Manufacturing

Just because you have a prototype, doesn’t mean it can easily be made by a factory. We worked with several different companies that specialize in pop-ups and board games to see how best to create these. A couple factories said that they couldn’t make these, but eventually we found the perfect partner, someone who had made thousands of the worlds biggest board games and even some pop-ups! We sent them our files and after some back and forth in details we finalized our tools and created some prototypes.

Step 9 - Kickstarter!

Now that we had solved all the questions it was time to finally unveil all our hard work. Creating a kickstarter page is a huge amount of work, from photos and trailers, to details on shipping and graphics. We worked hard to get it together in time and only finished our kickstarter page the night before we launched. It was a long night. 

About Tabletop Titans and Upzone
over 2 years ago – Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 09:46:18 PM

We’ve been seeing a lot of questions about Titans Terrain and Upzone and we wanted to address them as there seems to be some mixups. 

1. Upzone did contact Tabletop Titans about previewing their product and we did agree to do that. We decided to support their product because we thought it was cool and we wanted to see it succeed. Thats it.
2. We had decided to make our own branded terrain around 2 years ago and looked at many ideas. We were inspired by some old D&D pop-up terrain to explore making our own pop-ups. We tried and created simple prototypes prior to the launch of Upzone.
3. Titans Terrain was done as a hobby side project for fun. We worked on it slowly and we were not very serious about it or sure we would launch it until very recently. At the time we previewed Upzone, it seemed like a long shot that we would decide to make sell our own terrain. That is why we didn’t make a big deal about disclosing that we had explored this concept. There was no ill intent or desire to compete. We only wanted to help promote Upzone.
4. We previewed Upzone once during a live battle report, we said how much we liked it and that people should back it. We then put it on a shelf and didn’t think about it again. Our own explorations in pop-ups were different and we didn’t feel compelled to take any ideas from Upzone during our explorations. Remember this was a creative art project for us, not a plan to take another teams ideas.
5. When we decided we might want to make this for real, we hired contractors who were experts at paper engineering and digital art to make the final product. Neither of these people had ever seen or heard of upzone and their product did not factor at all into our final design.
6. It has been pointed out that the name of our expansion pack and the title of Upzones terrain both have the word Cathedral in it. It was not our intention to have a similar name. We simply didn’t notice the similarity until someone told us after launch. Again we were not looking at Upzone at all during our process, so it wasn’t something we would have seen. We would have happily picked another name if we had known.
7. We think pop-up terrain is the future of wargaming and we wanted to have fun creating something that we would want to use. We love Upzone and are sure they will continue to succeed. We also have our own ideas and we hope people like those too. We expect to see other teams make their own pop-up ideas and we welcome those. Our product was in no way based off of, or improved by Upzone when we promoted their product. 

Let us know if have any questions about this issue as we are happy to answer them. 

Titans Terrain was funded in just half a day!
over 2 years ago – Thu, Nov 18, 2021 at 03:45:42 PM

We want to say thank you to all the backers that made Titans Terrain successful so quickly! We hit our funding goal in only the first several hours of our campaign and we are so grateful. 

We hope to see the campaign grow even more as we expect to order a large batch of Titans Terrain. So if you haven't already, please consider sharing Titans Terrain with your friends or community. 

We will be keeping you up to date with progress in the campaign and work on the project, so watch this  area for regular updates!