SLA Industries - Development Diary

27/09/2019

Don't forget, our 2nd Edition Kickstarter is live!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nightfall/sla-industries-2nd-edition?ref=1o1ga2

The long awaited 2nd Edition for SLA Industries is here. Featuring a new rules system, new playable races and beautiful art.

04/03/2019

Hi, this is a quick reminder to go check the Nightfall Games and SLA Industries pages for updates now we are in the final stretch. Development updates will be posted there until SLA:CS1 is complete.

04/10/2018

Hi, it's Jared here again, just to show you more of the behind the scenes stuff that we're up to.

Here's a sneak peek at the A5 version of the *SLA Industries: Cannibal Sector 1* skirmish rules. The PDF version will be ready within a week, all going well, with the print version following on as soon as we can get it sorted.

As per the earlier version, it's not supposed to have art in it, but where there are gaps, how could I not put art in?

09/04/2018

Hi, Jared here again.

This diagram is Dave's art progress chart. Orange squares, the largest portion of the map, are all pieces of art that have been produced for the "SLA Industries: Cannibal Sector 1" kickstarter, including card art and, mostly, interior art for the big book. The remaining stuff to do is as follows:

Grey: Environments
Blue: Combat scenes
Red: Chapter headers
White: Cover

The cover and chapter headers are referred internally at Nightfall as "The Nine Bastards" and they won't be started until the writing is finished. The writing? I'd say we're almost complete on rough text and well past the halfway mark of finished text. It's looking good.

The art was, of course, the biggest piece of this project and has all been done in-house by Dave Allsop, working almost every day since before the project was announced.

Yes, this is taking a lot longer than anticipated because, as a miniatures game, everything needs to be designed. Everything. No longer could we get away without having even a full body picture of a Shaktar in the big book, because you can't make miniatures without full pictures. Or, as Dave put it amusingly one day, "everything has to have an ass. I've been designing asses."

So, with every gun needing designing, every armour type needing putting together, every creature miniature ready, and a lot of aforementioned asses, this has been a massive project. Adding to the workload was the fact that every picture had to be full-colour, which takes a lot longer than our usual monochrome art as you need colour so you can see how to paint the miniatures. Still, we're on it and it'll get finished, but don't expect it this week.

As this took longer than anticipated, this impacted our other careers, with rent/mortgages still needing to be paid, but luckily, we're committed enough to this project here at Nightfall Towers[1] that we're still filling every spare hour doing this.

While the Kickstarter is obviously our main focus, we can hopefully release something RPG-related to keep fans of the RPG happy before the year is out. If nothing else, take solace in the fact that the vast amount of art serves as a style-guide for future SLA books and that there will be a lot of RPG stuff in this massive new miniatures rulebook, even if the A5 "no fluff, just rules" book is miniatures-only.

[1] If you imagine a bat-filled tower, with cackling witches and lightning strikes, you'd be … well, let's be honest, it's nothing like that - more like a Glasgow flat and Scottish village bungalow, but they're not as romantic-sounding.

14/02/2018

Hi, it's Jared again, with another update on the design work that's going into SLA Industries: Cannibal Sector 1. This is a bit different, though. After hammering out the design for the A5 booklet (coming soon, nearly ready), we realised that the design we used for legibility at the reduced size of the A5 rules would transfer to the full-sized core rulebook for Cannibal Sector 1.

So, we gave it a go.

We've included a two-page PDF so you can see what it'll look like if you print it out. The cover is just for fun, of course, but there you go. One critter with revised RPG rules (The SLA logo instead of the CS1 logo shows that those are RPG stats, not skirmish stats) and one of the hundreds of illustrations that will be in the finalised book.

Grab the PDF here:https://cdn.23x.me/nightfall/Puddle%20Hermit.pdf

03/02/2018

Hi, Jared here to show you a work-in-progress. As part of the SLA Industries: Cannibal Sector 1 kickstarter, we offered an A5 book with just the rules in it as a reference. As this amuse bouche of a book nears completion, I thought I’d share some early images of the interior.

As this is a smaller book than the huge monster that Dave and I are still writing, there are a few design decisions that are dictated by the size. In that respect, you can expect the final SLA Industries: Cannibal Sector 1 rulebook to be vastly different, even if you’l recognise some of the flavour in this smaller book.

Originally, the A5 book was specced out to be black and white with no art, just to get the rules into the hands of the players, but as I started laying it out, I couldn’t get away from the fact we had all this beautiful Dave Allsop art just lying around, over two hundred and fifty pieces, and, apart from making books look nicer, art makes books so much easier to navigate. You’ll remember the rules for shooting things in the face are near the picture of the FEN AR, or that the section on Patrols has a Shiver in it.

So, I’m sorry we’re not going to deliver a boring quick reference guide, but instead, we’ll let you enjoy some lovely art with your crunch. And maybe a bit of fluff …

09/12/2017

A weekend retreat for Dave and Jared to nail down all the bits of the SLA Industries: Cannibal Sector 1 book that still need writing. Lots of productive stuff that gets the huge book nearer to completion.

After this, they will return to their respective caves and get back to writing.

23/06/2017

FISH MOOEYS

Hi, Jared here. We're busy here with CS1 with nothing we can share yet, so here's another "Tales of Nightfall" trip to the past to fill the time.

In August 1993, or there abouts, SLA Industries came back from the printers and at the release party (we even had a famous 2000AD comic artist turn up. Lit AF) in Glasgow's west end, I claimed the very first copy as my "production proof" and asked people to sign it. Everyone who worked at Nightfall signed it and I've shared their messages below.

The spilled liquid is some red wine we were drinking used to christen the book. We might not have been 100% sober at that point and Chippy signed his art with those splashes while Jim and Morton filled out BPNs. Anne found a blank bit, Dave did a doodle while Beel changed the cover text.

Anyway, here's hoping that next time we can share some CS1 development tales.

26/04/2017

Just thought I'd nip by and make a quick update. The Cannibal Sector One Skirmish Game is going to have an updated background the the most hostile region on Mort, with lots of new background info and colour art. It's also going to have a fully illustrated weapons and equipment guide covering all your old favourites (and quite a few new ones). The art list alone for this section has 89 separate items, and that list is growing.
This is going to be a big book.

Here are a few new samples I have to show you. I'll be back again soon with another update.

Dave

08/04/2017

"Everything we did, however terrible it may seem – was worth it to see The Root Dogs die”

As you probably know, "Hunter Sheets: Issue 2" will soon be heading off to the printers and will then wind its merry way to your local game shop (although you might want to mention this to your lovely nearby retailer, in case they don't know this) and end up in your clamouring mitts.

Part of the process for this is taking the old PDF-only version and resizing it for print, with CMYK-converted images and other tweaks here and there that you just don't need to think about when doing PDF-only layout, and that's the bit I'm slogging through right now. It's great to revisit the work at a much less frenzied pace than the original non-print release, and I'm noticing little gems and moments that I'm genuinely happy those of the "print only" bent will finally get to enjoy.

There are some ugly moments of overkill and creepiness that will draw the players deeper into their worlds and leave them a little less clean and happy than when they arrived, but a lot more experienced and informed about what it is that makes an operative's life. You owe it to yourself to pick up a copy.

- Jared.

04/03/2017

And so it continues. The next six.

03/03/2017

Jared here,

Dave is visiting for a creative weekend and, while he doesn't have his computer to paint, he still has to fill the spare hours with art. These are pieces for cards in CS1 done in the Headshots style, traditionally pencilled and inked and coloured in photoshop later.

Can you tell what they are?

01/01/2017

Hi, Jared here with another nostalgia trip.

In Volume 2, issue 2 of Roleplayer Independent, back in the days when we had at least three UK RPG monthly magazines, I was asked to give a rundown on SLA Industries to coincide with the release of Karma.

I'd forgotten that I'd written this, but was reminded during a Cannibal Sector 1 rules meeting when Dave and I visited our Edinburgh team where they presented me with three issues of RPI with SLA stuff in them including a review of SLA that I will share in the comments.

Enjoy.

25/12/2016

Entry 8: Nostalgia and reprints.

Hi, Jared here.

Nostalgia rambling time, I'm afraid. Stick around, there's a picture at the end.

Working on the SLA Industries reprint forced me to look at the old art as I scanned each piece from an original first print (and a really good second, as a backup), with the black and white ink work, including the work by Stuart Beel, Clint Langley and Pol Sigerson, being really easy to scan and the pencil work by Dave Allsop, James Worral and Adrian Smith being much trickier.

I was taken back to 1993, when I scanned the originals, using an Atari STe running Retouche Pro, trying to keep the zip-compressed 8-bit TIFF files under 1.44MB. Art was done at 1.5x times (well, 1.414x, the square root of two) and scanned in halves for the full-page pieces (A3 for A4) and sideways A4 for the half-pagers. With 4MB of RAM (until we got the Atari Falcon with a 65MB hard drive and 14MB of RAM) and two floppy drives, rotating an image from portrait to landscape took rather a long time. Many an evening ended with myself or David Boylan shouting "don't turn my ST off!" as we started the scan rotations at the end of the night, hoping they'd be done before we got in the next day. They usually were, luckily, as we only had two STs, one of which (the 1040STFM) sometimes needed dropping from a height of six inches to seat the CPU before it would boot, as we needed one of them for Anne Glass to type all the text we wrote into Calligrapher, a word processor I'd won a few years previously in an Atari magazine competition.

For layout, we tried Calamus in the early days, one of the many applications to come out of the German Atari ST DTP market, where all the good apps came from - including Retouche Pro, the Photoshop-alike we used - but we eventually settled on Didot, another piece of translated German software, because it was much more powerful, if a lot harder to learn.

We were tied into a deeply budget-driven workflow as Nightfall was funded by three people's unemployment cheques, which is why the Ataris made sense for us. We used floppy disks of pirated software from Glasgow's "Barras" market to evaluate the software until we could buy it, with the slightly dodgy philosophy of "we will buy it if we use it to make the book" that stems from poverty and a need to find the best tools, which is how we were able to test Calamus and Didot (and other forgotten options) on a shoestring. Saving up for legal software on ten or twenty quid a fortnight was not easy, but you pay for tools that you use to make money.

Anyway, the German ST DTP scene served us well, as it allowed us to stick with Atari, instead of switching to the more expensive Apple options, something we would eventually do when Wizards of the Coast paid for our first Power Mac 6100 to finish Karma in 1994. The only problem that the Atari ST workflow ever gave us was when I turned up to the printers with my STE (my first investment to Nightfall as the last partner to join was my brace of Ataris), a box of floppies, a floptical drive and six 20MB drives, looking for a postscript RIP that would accept a connection from an ST. The printers in Newcastle couldn't get the files we spent so long preparing to work on their high-end raster image processor. Without being able to output film, we couldn't print SLA. We needed another solution.

If you were a reader of ST Format or ST User in the late 1980s or early 1990s, you may have heard of a church in Nottingham that had a 1270dpi film printer for the Calamus RIP, just to produce their newsletters, but the DTP revolution was giving them all sorts of enthusiastic small press clients. We called them and they agreed to try to let us plug in our ST directly to their film printer and try to get Didot's software RIP to get our films printed. Victoria Braithwaite turned the Astra Estate around and drove us to Nottingham, the city I'd left for Scotland. We installed the lithfilm drivers on the STE and …

As SLA Industries was released in August 1993, you know the story ends on a high note with everything coming together just before the deadline. Like a duck on a pond, like a quickstep on Strictly, a graceful release was powered by furious paddling below the surface.

All this was brought flooding back as I recently moved house and found the art below as my previous place wasn't large enough for all of my collected art. I remembered scanning it in sections, matching and aligning the suit buttons on an old ST monitor so an A3 picture could be scanned in halves for full-page reproduction, even though I knew I'd be cropping it.

Here is Dave Allsop's 1992 pencil portrait of Cherry "Cerise" Hinton in full. In my opinion, it's the epitome of SLA Industries art. It's both media and corporate in Dave's sharp and clear pencil style.

18/12/2016

Entry 7 - Learning miniatures and RPG Update

Dave here; yes, yes, I'm sorry it's been awhile since my last update. Working on Cannibal Sector 1, and other related SLA material has been eating all my available time.

Learning Miniatures
Instead of just posting up more concept art from CS One (which you've no doubt already seen via the Daruma pages) I thought I'd talk briefly about the miniature range we've been producing.
Daruma has been operating for about 16 months, and I have to say it's been a real eye opener. I've been experiencing a very sharp learning curve with regards the production of the models, and there's still an awful lot still to learn.
My background is primarily in rpgs, and whilst I've collected miniatures voraciously as a teen, I didn't fully realise what goes into taking a design from concept art to final model.
When I started out I would get the art together and send it off to the sculptors for rendering. When the model returned I put them through their paces, trying to get them as close as possible to original design.
All the sculptors I've worked with strived to nail the design, and followed all my (numerous) revisions. What I found, especially with the first models, was that what looks just fine as an exact 3D render loses something when it finishes production as a model, especially if it's too close to reality. A lot the fine detail that appeared on the art (especially the weaponry, like pistols) just lost so much in the molds. It just doesn’t read when reduced down.
When I would look at the miniatures on the gaming table, and in photographs, I could see that from even a slight distance that too much of the character models just 'greyed out'; you could see what was going on.
As a result I've had to re-examine how the art translates to the miniature. You may have noticed that the most recent releases as are little chunkier, this is intentional. Everything from Joe Fade onwards has been created with these considerations in mind.
I'm looking forward to seeing an actual print copy of the Capt Feany model to see if he translates better on the game table.
Fingers crossed.

RPG Update
In amongst the Cannibal Sector One work I've been gradually plugging away at the rpg material. As I'm pretty sure I've already stated, there's two major releases to put out before we move onto the much-anticipated '2nd Edition SLA Industries'. That's the Shi'An Sourcebook, and Whistling Bridge.
Right now, the focus is on getting the first part of Shi’An – Neophyte together, so I’ve dividing the time available (about 2 hours a day) between the art and writing. I’m hoping to at least get the first draft of this release into editing with Jared in February.
Here’s one of the new interior illustrations I’ve finished for the book. Hope you like it.

Until next time,
Dave

10/11/2016

Hi everyone, Jared here,

Dave has been working on the concepts for the Cannibal Sector One game and future SLA RPG stuff while I have been going in the other direction, resurrecting the original rule book to get SLA back in shops. Scanning all the art from the old book was a chore, but we just got the printers' proof of the cover back and I was blown away by how the scanning/retouching job Dave and I did on the Glenn Fabry cover art and Clint Langley's rear cover turned out.

So, here's the proof; the book should be in shops later this month.

08/11/2016

Entry 5 – Dark Night Inc.

Hello again, Dave here.

Now that the Cannibal faction visuals are completed I’m moving onto the next one – Dark Night Inc. In the original book there really wasn’t a whole lot to go on. Actually, going back to the original source I saw how little information there was on SLA main rival; I remembered there being a lot more. I found that also to be true of the art; there were only a handful images of characters shrouded in darkness and even then it was just a face or at most, the head and shoulders of a DN agent.

The illustrations on Dark Night was some of the last art to go into the book before it headed off to the printers and none of us felt like they’d gotten the attention they deserved but we’d try and explore them further in a DN sourcebook (which, of course, never arrived). The art, while nicely rendered, don’t give away much about their organisation. If you scratched away the logo the characters could quite easily be standard SLA operatives.

That can work in-game, in that Dark Night agents could effectively be anybody, but in truth, that wasn’t really what Nightfall was going for, even at the time. We wanted them to have their own distinctive look, just like Thresher.

So, now that CS1 Skirmish has rolled around, it was finally time to nail down what Dark Night looked like. At base, Dark Night are meant to be a terrorist organisation, and we wanted to convey that in the art. Just like today, terrorism has many different appearances (and beliefs), so we wanted to incorporate a mixture of different styles for the DN agents. Aspects that would be familiar to the reader, but not an exact copy of any real world organisation. One of the main cues was the helmet, which I wanted to closely resemble the balaclavas worn by soldiers, but rendered in armour plates.

I had to similar thing in mind regarding the DN weapons, which would have certain nods to pre existing weapons in our world.

Something I want to briefly touch upon that these DN agents in the Cannibal Sectors are the true extremists, what SLA calls the ‘Hardliners’. Groups of individuals with very strict beliefs systems that often don’t adhere to what the main organisation of Dark Night believe. We’ll be covering a selection of these beliefs in the upcoming book.