From drawings to steel

As we mentioned in our previous blog entry, the production of the first limited edition batch of our Hereticle crosshairs gadget has been in full swing for the past couple of weeks.

It’s been very interesting to see how the design of our aiming gadget, first just a collection of drawings, has been turning into a collection of a whole bunch of actual parts. Here, take a look for yourself:

Simplicity doesn’t come without challenges…

As you can see in the pictures above, the parts are pretty simple. They reflect the goal we set from the beginning, when we decided to self-fund this first limited edition batch: to simplify and streamline the design, so as to simplify and streamline production and assembly as well.

The process hasn’t been without hiccups and challenges. Some vendors dragged their feet. Others made promises they couldn’t keep. Yet others would assure us that everything was on track, they would even send us the first production samples – only for us to discover that what they produced has little in common with what we asked them to do.

…but eventually it wins out

All those little hiccups didn’t perturb us all that much. We knew that our relative inexperience with such production would result in all sorts of little delays and setbacks, and we were prepared to deal with them. When one vendor messed up, there was a better one to take its place, and deliver exactly what we were looking for. Overall we have to say that most of our manufacturing contractors were extremely professional. And again, the credit goes in large part to our creative team who has come up with a design that only included parts that were relatively easy to spec out and manufacture. In fact, the assembly is so simple, a cat can do it!

The guardian of style

Even within a small team like ours there are sometimes competing points of view. Our Restless One thinks that a bare bones crosshairs gadget is more than enough to get folks out there as excited about Hereticle as we are. But Iggy, our Guardian of Style, our Sentinel of Good Taste, our Gatekeeper of Awesome, our Warrior of Kick-ass, our… ok, you get the idea. So Iggy represents in our team those gamers that don’t just want to get their frag to the new level. They want to do it in style. Whether our first edition crosshairs gadget is able to strike the right balance between simplicity and style – you be the judge. Stay tuned for the first pictures of Hereticle in action!