Turing Tumble Progress Update #7: Our Pre-Production Sample Arrived!
over 6 years ago – Wed, Nov 08, 2017 at 12:48:08 AM

Hello friends! Today we have two fun bits of news:

1. We will release the virtual pack on Monday the 13th. For those of you who get the Virtual Pack as part of your reward level or as an add-on, we're going to "lock down" your order on BackerKit that same morning. "Locking down" your order means that you won't be able to add or remove items from your order from that point on. So if you'd like to add or remove anything from your order, please remember to do so before Monday.

2. Yesterday was a very big day - the first complete sample of the game arrived! Injection molded parts and all. Here's the unboxing:

I was anxious and excited - will the box look any good? Will the plastic parts work right? Will the game have a good quality feel?

LongPack Games already warned us of a few issues. Apparently the box was unavoidably scuffed when they stretched paper over it, so we will have to add a matte lamination to the surface to prevent that. Also, the injection molded parts aren't the correct color - they were made with some randomly colored plastic that the molder had on hand at the time. They are also still rough - they didn't remove the machine marks and they didn't add any texture yet.

I was surprised to see the spot varnish on the box. I expected that this version of the box would just be inkjet printed, but it actually looks like a final product.

I was shocked at how nice the box looked when I pulled it out. It looks and feels amazing! Here are some more pictures of it:

 When I opened it up, here's what it looked like on the inside:

You can see all sorts of machine marks on the surface of the board. Those will go away when they put the final touches on the injection molds. One real problem, though, is that the board is warped. If you look along the far edge, you can see the board bows down. That's likely caused by the injection molding process. When the plastic cools, it shrinks, which can cause it to deform. Fortunately there are things molders can do to reduce warpage, so hopefully they will solve that problem in the next iteration.

I pulled the board off the top and it looked like this:

The board supports will be black in the final version. Here they're dirty white and the rubber feet haven't been added yet. Also, you'll notice the circles in the top vacuum tray aren't cut out. You should be able to stick your fingers through them to pull off this layer. They're planning to do that in the next iteration.

 Down to the next layer. I took off the top vac tray and this is what I found:

The parts didn't stay in their spots, but I think that's ok. When the game is shipped to you, the parts will all be in bags inside the two big trays. It's only after you take out all the parts and put them in their individual holes that they could possibly shake out of their spots. Even so, I did my own shake test where I put all the parts in their spots, closed the box, and shook it around as hard as I could. Only a few parts came out of their slots and they didn't move far. Certainly the game could be stored on its side or even upside down and the parts would all stay in their places. You probably couldn't store your game in a paint mixer, though.

At this point, I started putting the board together and testing all the parts, so I completely forgot to keep taking pictures. But I did go back just now and take pictures with the old prototype parts inside (so the colors would be correct):

There are more than a few issues we'll need to work through with the injection molded parts. I think the molders were a bit conservative on this first iteration and made all the joints loose. So the ramps, for instance, wiggle around on the pins so much that they often fly off the board when balls run over them:

Crossovers do the same thing. One good bit of news is that the injection molded parts have considerably less friction than the CNC milled parts I've been using. This makes the gears and gear bits work like a dream. Here we have 5 gear bits connected in a line and they work perfectly. I'm sure you could add even more, but I didn't test that, yet.

Yesterday I put together a comprehensive list of about 50 changes that need to be made and I sent them off to LongPack. They've already started working on them. I suspect it will take 2-3 more iterations before we go into production. We'll find out soon how long they think these changes will take to complete.

Overall, we're very, very happy with how things turned out so far. It looks and feels like a high quality game or kit. And it's satisfyingly heavy at 6.7 lbs.

Thanks again to you all! More to come next week when we release the Virtual Pack.

Paul and Alyssa

Turing Tumble Progress Update #6: Virtual Pack Release Coming Soon
over 6 years ago – Tue, Oct 17, 2017 at 01:46:18 AM

Friends,

We are overdue for an update! First of all, let us just thank you again for making this possible. This has been one of the biggest, craziest, most interesting adventures of our lives. For example, this is the new normal at our house:

Here we have the game board set up on the kitchen table with a massive roll of white paper spread out over it for a backdrop. We had it set up with carefully adjusted lighting so that when our hand model arrived (one of our friend's kids who happens to have perfect hands), we could re-take some of the pictures for the back of the box.

On to the latest update:

We're very happy to say that things are still on schedule. Here's what's now complete:

• The box art is finished (and we really like it!)
• The book has been beta-tested and is ready to go

We're currently working on:

• Finishing up the final bits of manufacturing
• Building our website
• Creating an educator's guide

And we have an exciting bit of news, too!

Box Art

The box art is finished and we are very, very happy with it! Mackey had an illustrator create a highly detailed technical illustration of the game for the picture on the left-hand side of the front cover.

It was extremely interesting to see how the creative process works for something like this. It's a skill just to communicate what the art should look like. Mackey spent a long time with us trying to understand what we were looking for - partly in specific things we wanted to include, but also to get the general "feel" of it. They nailed it. Not because we were any good at communicating it to them, but because they were good at pulling what they needed out of us.

Coming from a science background, this was especially interesting to me. In science, it's a major challenge to translate complicated ideas into the English language in such a way that they can be easily translated back to ideas by the reader. But in art, you somehow have to translate your "feeling" that you want the art to convey into English in such a way that the reader gets that same feeling. You can ask Alyssa - I'm not awesome at that. :) Mackey's creative director was telling us that even when they give it their best effort, the communication sometimes fails along the way when they hire outside illustrators to do work for them. That made me feel a little better.

And here's the back of the box:

 Those big pictures will change a bit, but that's really all that will change.

Puzzle Book

A few weeks ago I had a little panic. I originally made the puzzles at a pretty good level of difficulty, but then somewhere along the way I thought, "Nope, those are too easy, I will make them harder." So I did, but I ended up making them way too hard. I had some beta testers try them out and they got stuck at about puzzle 15.

So I spent a long time changing around the puzzles and smoothing the difficulty curve. One challenge is that there's a surprising amount of depth to the game, and sixty puzzles isn't necessarily enough to give players all the practice they would need to be able to solve the later puzzles. We spent a long time thinking through how to address the difficulty curve. Should we split the book up? Should we add a bunch more puzzles to the existing book? Should we create more online resources to help?

We settled on the following. We adjusted the book's difficulty so that most kids and adults will be able to get through at least the first 30 puzzles. Through those puzzles, they'll learn binary (and why computers use it), logic gates, they'll get going with gear bits, and they'll understand the very basics of how computers work. Then the difficulty rises at a faster rate. You can see it visually in the following plot where I rated each puzzle with a star rating and plotted the difficulty as a function of the puzzle number. Here's what it looks like:

In addition to the puzzle book, we're planning to create a downloadable/printable practice book that gives players more experience making marble computers before they move on to the next puzzle. It may be a part of the educator's guide. One thing we've heard over and over again is that it takes time and practice to wrap your head around the bits. A practice book should help.

The good news is that the finishing touches have been added to the puzzle book and it's ready to go. In the far future, we may create multiple puzzle books for different skill levels. I'll be very, very interested to hear your thoughts on the puzzle book when you receive it.

Manufacturing

Everything feels like it's coming together at just the right time. We found out last week that all of the injection molds will be done by the 25th of this month (next Wednesday) and that some of the molds will be done even sooner. That's a week earlier than we expected. If only minor modifications are needed to the molds, we're hoping to start production at the beginning of November.

This week, LongPack is going to make a complete prototype of the game (minus the plastic parts) and send it to us. We can't wait to see it! It feels like the longest Christmas Eve ever.

Website

We've also started working on the website. We have our design nailed down for the front page and the forum is almost finished. The forum is actually the first part that needs to be complete (see why below).

Educator's Guide

You might not know it, but Alyssa actually has a degree in K-12 education. She's spending a lot of time now thinking how to best implement Turing Tumble in the classroom and what additional resources would be helpful in an educator's guide. We really want this to be a useful thing in the classroom, so rather than spend our time listing out all the standards it meets and sort of meets, we're just going to create a guide that focuses on how to use the game to teach what the game teaches best. 

Once the website is complete, this will be our next highest priority.

The Exciting Bit of News

Alright, now for the good news. We've been waiting to release the virtual pack (the CAD files and the electronic version of the puzzle book) because we weren't quite finished with them - we didn't want to have multiple versions of them floating around, mucking things up. But as soon as we go into production, everything will be finalized.

For that reason, and because we know that some of you would like to make your own copy of Turing Tumble to give as a gift this December, we've decided to release the virtual pack as soon as production begins, which should be early November. Hopefully that will be early enough for you to make your own copies of Turing Tumble before the holidays. Start warming up your 3D printers!

I think it would be wonderful if we could work together to discover how to build these things from home in an efficient way. For that purpose, I'm currently putting the finishing touches on a forum where we can share our experiences. I can't tell you how excited I am to see the amazing ideas you come up with. This is a freaking smart group of backers.

Just to be clear, when the virtual pack goes out, it will go out to anyone who backed at a reward level that includes the CAD files and the electronic copy of the puzzle book, and to those who added the virtual pack as an add-on. These reward levels include:

• Virtual Pack
• Turing Tumble++
• Turing Tumble Complete
• Educator's Pack
• The Philanthropist

If you didn't back at a reward level that includes the virtual pack, you're welcome to go back to the survey link and either switch reward levels or add the virtual pack as an add-on.

Thanks again!

Paul and Alyssa

Turing Tumble Progress Update #5: New Box, Beta-Testing, and Silicon Zeroes
over 6 years ago – Tue, Sep 19, 2017 at 07:10:04 PM

Hello friends!

Bit by bit, Turing Tumble is getting closer to being in your hands. :) Here's the quick summary of where we're at right now:

Injection molds: The molds are being built right now. They will be complete at the end of October and we'll get our first samples of plastic parts made from them.

Vacuum trays: The aluminum molds for the vacuum trays are being built as I write. They should be ready in a week and a half, and then we'll get a sample of the trays.

Box art: Mackey Creative hired an illustrator to create an illustrated picture of the board for the front of the box. They started work on it at the end of last week. Mackey also gave us a draft of the back of the box. It looks great, but I'll wait to show it to you until we finish some key parts that we need to fill in ourselves. By our next update, we will probably have the entire box design ready to show you.

The puzzle/comic book: All sections of the book are complete, but they need editing. We're adding finishing touches to the artwork and beta testing the puzzles now.

Our plan is to have everything ready to go by the time the injection molds are complete, so that we can go into production as soon as we're satisfied with the plastic parts.

The box

Yeah, I thought we had the box design all squared away, too. Then we got a white sample of the box and it was oh so close, but not quite good enough. Here is a picture of the box with the cover art taped on:

There are a couple problems with this design. First, the magnets aren't strong enough. It stays shut, but it doesn't hold very well. Second, this:

It only happens if you push the lid over to the side pretty hard first, but still. There are a couple ways we could solve the problem, but instead, while the manufacturer was finding stronger magnets, we came up with a new box design that we think is cooler looking AND sturdier. Here it is:

The top lid stops short, leaving a cool stripe of teal blue and giving you a place to grip the lid of the box. And here is what it will look like on the inside:

It doesn't have the magnetic flap, but I think that's actually a good thing. Magnet boxes tend to work better for small boxes, and this box is most certainly not a small box.

Silicon Zeroes

If you're itching to play Turing Tumble, but feeling impatient, this might tide you over a bit. :)

One of the big inspirations for Turing Tumble was a game I played a long time ago called "Manufactoria". You can still play it here. Well, Nicholas Feinberg, the author of Manufactoria, just came out with a new game today, and it's fantastic. It's called "Silicon Zeroes". It's a game where you take logic components, like adders, latches, multipliers, etc., and build little circuits to meet the requirements of each level. Eventually, you get to the point where you build a complete computer processor.

I think it's cool how well it complements Turing Tumble. While Turing Tumble takes you from the most basic components (switches) up to logic components, Silicon Zeroes gets you from logic components to a complete processor. 

Nicholas and I met during the Kickstarter campaign and he gave me access to a beta version of the game. I was really, really impressed. I had a good idea of how processors worked (I spent a lot of time programming microprocessors myself), but after playing, I feel like I could go out and build one. Anyway, if you're interested, you can get it here.

That's all. Thanks again! More to come soon,

Paul and Alyssa

Turing Tumble Progress Update #4: Turing Tumble VR?!?
over 6 years ago – Fri, Sep 01, 2017 at 01:36:47 AM

Thanks for filling out the post-Kickstarter survey! Ninety percent have done it, which is great! If you haven't done it yet, please fill it out as soon as you can. It's important because it's how we get your shipping address.

On to the update. And at the end I'll show you something really, REALLY cool. :)

Injection molding

It feels like we've made a ton of progress since the last update. One big step was a trip to GenCon in Indianapolis, where I met with LongPack Games (our manufacturers) to show them the prototype and talk through a variety of manufacturing details. I met with Cy, our project manager, and Dave Snyder, who has been sort of our account rep and injection molding consultant in one. Here they are:

We talked for two hours. Cy brought the prototype back with him to China as an example to show the engineers how things should work in the end. I brought a white copy of the book back to MN so I could take its measurements and finish designing the box.

We decided it would be smart to hold off on creating the injection molds until after that meeting and I think it was a good idea. The 3D printed version of the game they'd made didn't work right - I think the board was printed at a slightly different scale than the parts, so the parts didn't turn easily and there was some confusion as to how everything was supposed to work and fit together. Now that they have the prototype, they totally get it. Yesterday, we sorted out one final issue and creation of the injection molds has OFFICIALLY begun!

Packaging

One issue we talked about at GenCon was the packaging. Cy thought those pockets I had on the lid to hold the board supports wouldn't be very sturdy and he thought they would also take a significant amount of assembly time to glue on, which would slow down production. He thought it would be better to have a second tray that holds the board supports on top of the first tray. I resisted, but he convinced me. :) So I went back and changed it. Here's the new design, now also with the correct book dimensions:

The second vac tray shown in the picture above is glued to a chipboard separator. I think it will be quite sturdy. The holes should make it easy to put your fingers in and pull it out.

The following picture shows how the board will fit onto the top tray.

Tooling will be more expensive for these trays than we expected. Apparently, due to the tight tolerance requirements for the plastic trays, they're going to need to make the molds from aluminum rather than the plaster they normally use. I think it's worth it. I 3D printed sections of the bottom tray to make sure the parts fit correctly and can't fall out, even if there's a small gap above them. They slip in with such a satisfying 'clink'!

And here are four small sections of the bottom tray (mashed together) that hold the other four types of parts. They're not going anywhere.

Puzzle/comic book

I finished creating the other nine puzzles! Woohoo! Now there are 60 in all. Some of them lower the learning curve for the earlier puzzles a bit and the others add more challenging puzzles. Those of you who wanted more of the hard puzzles, you got your wish! 

Jiaoyang also finished making edits to the comics. The comics are complete now, though the text still requires a small bit of editing. They look *great* in print. I think you'll be impressed - she did a fantastic job. Here's a teaser of another page from the comics:

I also added a page about how the mechanical computer compares to an electrical computer. I still plan to add a page about Alan Turing (I'm reading his biography right now), but other than that, the content of the book is complete. And that feels good. Really good. Jiaoyang and I put a ridiculous amount of time and thought into that book. It's sitting at 116 pages now. 

Box art

As I said before, we started working with a company named Mackey Creative here in MN to design the box art. They've done an outstanding job. Last week they gave us six drafts of ideas for the front panel of the box. Here's the one we like best:

Now keep in mind that this is just a draft. The copy will also change. For instance, it's not going to say, "Code your own...", it will say, "Build your own..." and so on, but we like the feel of the design a lot.

Next, they're going to contract an illustrator to turn the image of the board and the hand into a highly realistic illustration that fades off on the top into more of an architectural/vectory/computery image. We're really excited to see what they make! It'll probably be a few weeks until we get the final image, but we'll be sure to show it to you. 

Mackey is also working on the back and sides of the box. We sent a rough design over yesterday with the copy we want and they're going to make it look better. Well, a LOT better. We're excited to see that, too. And Jiaoyang is currently illustrating a more polished version of the image of Alia on the front cover.

Turing Tumble VR

And now on to the main event. This is amazing. 

You might remember from a previous update Lode Vandevenne, who created a wonderful web-based Turing Tumble emulator. Now meet Tom Verdier, who created a virtual reality one. Tom is a backer from France, living in Paris and working as a freelance developer. He said he didn't want to wait until January to get his copy of Turing Tumble because he was "way too impatient to play it", so he programmed a virtual reality version of the game that simulates a 50-foot board. He sent me a video of him playing it. He wanted me to make sure I mention that it is just a rough, alpha version. He is thinking about making a variety of improvements in the future. 

So, without further ado:

In order to do this, Tom created his own 3D models of all the parts, which he gathered from the Kickstarter video and gifs, he created a user interface, and he used PhysX to handle the physics simulation. But apparently, he had to write a lot of his own code for the physics simulation because PhysX wasn't able to handle it quite right. I know I'm impressed! It could be a great way to share puzzles or heck, it could be turned into a full game. 

Here's a little information about Tom:

I was born in 1980, and started programing computers at the age of 7. It was basic GFA, on an Atari 520 ST. One of my grandfathers was a math teacher specially interested in logic and the other was creating electronic devices. Both taught me very early the boolean logic and digital electronic fundamentals.  

I later studied electronic and computer engineering (with a fair amount of math and physics), in a French engineering school. Computer programing has been my hobby or my job for a little more than 30 years. Language I speak are mostly : C, C++, Java, ActionScript, JavaScript, SQL, PHP, HTLM And also ASSEMBLY, but not fluently anymore.  

Last few year and until January 2017, I was a full time web developer, programing mostly in PHP and on the server side. I tried a VR headset on a friend’s PC in March 2016 and as been totally amazed by it’s fully immersive effect and by it’s potential at large, leading me to start and develop for VR high end headsets in January 2017.  

As I felt in love with TuringTumble concept and design, I programmed a VR simulation of it targeting the HTC Vive Headset and controllers, allowing me to play to this great thing few month before I could get it. My simulation is based on 3D Models I recreated from TT project page’s gifs and video, thus a little different from the original.

It's been so fun working on Turing Tumble the last couple months and getting to know some of you. Thanks again for making this adventure possible.

Paul and Alyssa

Turing Tumble Progress Update #3: The Post-Kickstarter Survey is Coming!
over 6 years ago – Mon, Aug 14, 2017 at 11:56:22 PM

Hello backers!

Today we will begin sending out the post-Kickstarter surveys. The survey is where you can enter your shipping information and answer other questions we have for you related to your reward level. You'll also be able to order add-ons or additional copies of the Kickstarter version of the game. 

If you thought our pricing system in the Kickstarter was tortured, when it got to setting up a system for add-ons and additional copies of the game, it got even more complicated. So today the survey will only go out to about 5% of backers. That way we can test whether things are a-ok and probably on Wednesday the surveys will go out to everyone else. Please check your inboxes for an invitation to take the survey.

Progress

As for progress, we've got a couple new things to show you. First off, it looks like we won't need to immediately fly out to China because LongPack (our manufacturer) is coming to GenCon this week in Indianapolis. I'm going to meet with them on Friday and go over the manufacturing plan in detail. They're also going to bring samples of various parts of the game/packaging so we can finalize the box design. 

I've been impressed with LongPack so far. I was a bit worried that, being based in China, communication would be difficult and things might move slowly. But they've communicated clearly and quickly, and they've gone the extra mile. This morning I woke up to an email about how they created their own 3D printed version of the game to get a feel for how it works before they build injection molds:

They're also going to bring a white-copy sample of the book so I can take a look at the quality and get its dimensions for the vac tray. It turns out the book is going to be spiral bound with wire instead of plastic. I guess plastic spirals are cheaper, but they take longer to install, so it will be less expensive to go with wire. Fine with me! Here's their picture of the white copy of the book:

The front and back covers will be made of thick card stock with a linen texture on both sides.

Box design

Here's what we have designed so far for the packaging (minus the box art):

We'll have the black, plastic tray on the bottom where all the parts will go. The book also fits in that tray. The holes for the parts are shaped accordingly, but they won't snap in. Instead, a chipboard separator will go over the tray to keep the parts secure in their places. And finally the board will lay on its back on top of the separator.

Also notice the underside of the lid. We're not sure yet whether this will be a possibility, but we're hoping to add pockets that will hold the board supports. You can see them better here, with the board supports slid out:

I like this way of doing it, but it might not be possible for LongPack to make the pockets with their manufacturing processes. So we might end up having a second plastic tray that would be glued to the chipboard separator to hold the board supports.

Once this issue gets sorted out, they're going to make a white copy of the entire box/packaging and send it to us for approval. Then we'll add art. We have a meeting with Mackey Creative where they show us their preliminary design ideas on Wednesday the 23rd. We're excited to see what their team came up with!

Board supports (version 999,999,999)

And yes, you might have noticed the board supports look different than in the last update. I found another error and spent a few days redesigning them one more time.

There's good news and bad news. The bad news is that I couldn't figure out a way to get multiple tilt angles to work - at least I couldn't get them to work well without a complete redesign of the board supports. It was a choice between having two tilt angles that were both a little rickety or having one tilt angle that held the board securely and felt solid. I'm sure it could be done with a more complicated support system, but it would delay things by at least a month and I also worry that a more complicated support system would be more likely to break. 

The good news is that the new supports are sturdier, they look cooler, they hold the board far more securely, and the rubber feet will now be glued in place instead of adhered in place. 

Sorry, backers! I thought that stretch goal was going to be an easy one. If it's any consolation, we found that multiple tilt angles didn't really add much to the experience, anyway. But we'll try and make it up to you. 

Question

Speaking of which, we have a question for you all: Besides the extra balls, we've been brainstorming ways to make the Kickstarter-exclusive edition of Turing Tumble extra special. One thing we plan to do is to individually number these games, like "543 of 4,198". We're also thinking of ways to make the box unique (e.g., gold foil lettering on the front?) and possibly even the plastic parts. 

What cool ideas do you have? Something where every time you have a friend over, you can bring out your Turing Tumble and make them insanely jealous of your first-run, Kickstarter-exclusive edition. I haven't asked LongPack about kittens, yet.

Thanks again! You made all this possible.

Paul and Alyssa