We’ve made the decision to delay the crowdfunding launch, with an updated date coming soon. We know everyone is excited for this project, and we sincerely apologize for the delay. Our commitment remains to ensuring that backers of this campaign will be supporting a project they believe in.

This comes down to art production, particularly the cover art. We recently brought on Shun-san as our Art Director, and getting him fully onboarded and aligned across the project has taken additional time. At the same time, we had to make a change in cover artist, and the new artist won’t be able to complete the covers within our original timeline.

We are also committed to using human-made art from Japanese artists. That commitment is important to us, but it does mean longer timelines due to scheduling, coordination, and working across teams internationally.

We are not comfortable launching without finalized cover art, and we want to make sure backers have the information they need to confidently support the project. For us, that means choosing quality and completeness over speed.

We are taking steps to make sure this stays on track. We’ve added additional support on the art production side, and we’re traveling to Japan this month and will be meeting directly with Group SNE, Shun, and the broader art team to ensure alignment and keep everything moving forward smoothly.

We are very confident in the direction of the art, and this decision will result in a much stronger final product rather than a rushed one.

The other possible silver lining for this delay is that we are also in ongoing discussions with Yoshitaka Amano-sensei’s studio about the possibility of including his work in this project. This is one of the biggest requests we’ve received for art for Sword World and we are very excited about the chance to work with such a legendary artist. It is not finalized at this time, but we will share more details if and when it comes together.

We also want to acknowledge the timing of this update. We were pushing to have cover art ready to share, and when that became unlikely, to lock in a revised schedule before announcing anything. When it became clear that the art wouldn’t be possible in time, we started working on a new launch date, but when we realized it might cause our art team to make decisions they weren’t confident in, we decided it was better to update you now without the new launch date rather than wait any longer.

Our overall production timeline remains intact. We are still aiming to launch the crowdfunding campaign as soon as we are ready, and we are still targeting completion of the core rules and starter set by the end of the year. While the cover art affects the timing of the campaign, the rest of the project is continuing to move forward.

Our mission is to bring Sword World to you in the best possible form. We know all crowdfunding projects experience delays, and when we came to the fork in the road we decided we wanted to choose the quality and fidelity of the work on the project over timelines. We will always choose to take more time rather than ask for your support before the project is ready.

Thank you for your patience and continued support. We’re excited to share more with you very soon.

-Shawn & Ai

P.S. Followers of the project can view a timelapse below of some Sword World art from one of our Japanese artists working on the project. You can see what a process this all has been from the development of this one single piece of art. Thanks so much for your patience and understanding. We’ll have more to share soon.