The Nyra Elemental Flame Deck Kickstarter did not fund. The physical print samples for Virelia and Nyra came back too dark — the colors I had spent months calibrating on screen did not survive the transition to card stock. The shadows swallowed the line work. Faces that should have looked luminous looked muddy. I could not in good conscience ship those cards to backers, and rather than push the campaign across the line on the strength of a few enthusiastic supporters and then deliver something I was ashamed of, I let it close unfunded.
I want to be honest about that, because I think the people who watched the campaign deserve honesty more than they deserve a polished press release.
There are things I got wrong, and they are worth naming.
I trusted the digital proof more than I should have. The screen version of those cards was beautiful. I assumed that beauty would translate. It did not — at least not on the stock and process I chose, and not at the saturation levels I designed for. A more experienced print designer would have pulled physical proofs earlier, on the exact stock, under the exact press conditions, before locking the art. I learned this the expensive way.
I underestimated how much the Kickstarter format compresses everything. A campaign is a three-week window in which you are simultaneously a designer, a marketer, a community manager, a logistics planner, and a writer of update posts. I spent too much of that window fixing things that should have been fixed months earlier. By the time the deeper print issue became unignorable, the campaign was already running.
I priced and scoped a tier that would have been hard to deliver well even if the print had been right. The $39 physical deck tier left almost no margin for the kind of careful, iterative print work that Virelia and Nyra needed. I would rather not ship than ship something I would not have wanted to receive myself.
So here is where Starfall Catastrophe goes from here.
Book 1 is paused as a physical product. Doctor Boon, Nyra, Virelia, Sel, Ember Glow, and Arkhelios Dragon will remain fully alive on the site — the play engine, the whitepaper, the lore, the card database. Book 1 is, and will remain, the foundation of the entire setting. But I am not going to attempt another physical print run for these six heroes. The cards that exist are the cards that exist. The world moves on.
This is harder to say than it sounds, but I think it is the honest call. Book 1 was the project that taught me how to design a card game. It was never going to be the project that taught me how to print one well.
The next physical chapter, when it comes, will be done right. Smaller scope. Real print proofs on real stock, weeks ahead of any campaign. Color and contrast tested in actual hands, in actual light, not on a calibrated monitor in a quiet room. I would rather take longer and ship one hero's deck well than rush six heroes through a process I have not yet earned the right to run.
I am not announcing a timeline today, because I have not earned the right to one.
What I can say is that the world of Starfall Catastrophe is much larger than the six heroes who appear in Book 1. Three thousand years pass between the events of The Last Ember and what comes next. The age of starborne champions ends. Something else begins — something I have been quietly writing toward for a long time.
When I am ready to show it, I will show it slowly.
Thank you to everyone who pledged to the Nyra campaign, to everyone who shared it, to everyone who played a few rounds on the prototype and told me what felt off. The game is not going away. I am just being more careful about which parts of it I ask you to pay for.
— Boon