We have just under two months before we go live with products to sell. We’re excited about the pace of progress. We have an account with One Book Shelf, the people behind DriveThruRPG and its sister sites. We have only the contract to sign for Paizo, and we’re looking into Steve Jackson Games’ e23.

Our pool of freelance artists continues to amaze and inspire us with their creativity and interpretations. To provide a reference for the other artists, Joshua Pinkas provided a head shot of some of the races of Tunse’al. Here’s a preview into what the Kresh, an amphibious humanoid race of warriors, looks like.

Kresh - A Race of Warriors

I’m delighted to report that we’ve got progress on art and the behind the scenes areas of Obatron Productions.

We’ve got an official Obatron Productions, LLC bank account set up and a PayPal account to match. We’re thrilled to have a local credit union that works well with businesses of all sizes.

Our freelance artists wasted no time getting their heads around our loose art framework. We’ve seen sketches, ideas, and clarifying questions on the design briefs from four of them. What a great start! The ethereal dragon in flight, up-close Kresh face, and magic air ship look good and they’re just in the rough sketch stage. What’s all that about? They’re elements of Tunse’al RPG. The artists’ questions and suggestions on the world map and fairy folk have added to the story.

We now have some fae among the races. They just aren’t playable. Well, at least not as player characters. The game master gets to have all kinds of fun with them as non-player characters.

Our Tunse’al Master Guide is getting more and more complete. The energy behind this project just keeps building. To top it off, we saw the mocks of our Tunse’al logo from our freelance logo artist. Cool stuff. We’re just bursting at the seams with excitement.

In between everything else, we’re also planning our first three Tunse’al RPG releases. We’ll have the setting guide and two adventures. If we get the license we’re interested in, the adventures will show up as systemless and for a well-respected game system.

Obatron Productions has started the official process of becoming a Limited Liability Company (LLC). This gets us on the way to having our Employer Identification Number (EIN – something like a social security number for businesses) and getting us in position for other administrative maneuvers.

We are assigning commissions for art soon and have finalized our pricing structure for Tunse’al RPG releases. Tunse’al will be the debut product line with Obatron Fiction and Express Lines to follow.

In light of personal tragedies and travel plans, we’ve delayed our official launch until April 2012. In the meantime, we’re solidifying the back-end, finalizing content concepts, and moving to production.

That doesn’t mean we’ve been sitting on our thumbs! Nope! We’ve been busy behind the scenes.

Tunse’al has two official music tracks by Artem Bank. You’ll get a listen of those once we are ready to engage our marketing campaign for the RPG line.

Obatron Productions has bought the WebAsyst suite to run all of the background business components powering the company. It’ll handle everything from newsletters to the shopping cart.

While we plan to use OneBookShelf’s array of sites for our products, as well as Paizo and Amazon, we wanted to have the ability to sell straight from our own shop. That move allows us a greater profit margin on items we sell direct, plus it gives us flexibility in dealing with physical items and bundling products that might not be available through a single other source.

To bolster security of any transactions through our site, we’ve purchased a secure socket layer (SSL) certificate. We plan to use PayPal to handle our credit card needs, but we like having options and piece of mind. We figure our eventual customers will, too!

Keep a look out for more news in the coming weeks. Stop by our page on Facebook for any snippets too short to post here.