Customise Your Heroes In The Forge: Where We’re At
If you’ve only discovered Dragon’s Forge Miniatures in recent months, you may not know that we have big plans that go way beyond simply selling pre-sculpted miniatures in our store, on MyMiniFactory and on Patreon. In fact, our biggest contribution to the world of miniatures is yet to come, in the form of The Forge.
The Forge is our digital miniature kit customisation app. Unlike other online hero creation tools, you don’t customise your model starting from a blank mannequin. Instead, you start off with an exquisitely designed character that looks awesome right out of the gate and customise from there, just like you would if you were picking out a cool character kit with custom parts at your local hobby store – the main difference being that the box would need to be the size of a shed to fit all the options in!
Each customisation option has almost always been sculpted specifically for the character it belongs to, meaning that your custom miniature will look great no matter what. If a part doesn’t suit our design team’s vision for the character, we don’t include it as an option.
We ran a successful Kickstarter campaign in November last year to help fund the app’s development, and since then it’s been a wild ride – sometimes thrilling, often frustrating, but never boring.
Fast-forward to March 2022, when we announced our new partnership with ANVL. Since then both our teams have been working intensively behind the scenes to light the fires of The Forge and finally bring it online as a fully operational service, first for our original Kickstarter backers and then for the wider world.
There’s still a lot of work and fine tuning to do, but The Forge now looks fantastic and has its core functionality fully in place, meaning that you can access miniature kits, customise your character and export it as an STL file ready to print. It’s also working in-browser and remotely, which is kind of important for an online service! We’ve imported three kits so far; the Wyrdweft Sorceress, Wyrdweft Sorcerer and Halfling Questfoot (Male).
Besides the work still to be completed on The Forge itself, we also have 9 further kits to add that were promised as part of the Kickstarter campaign, including a female halfling, dwarf fighters, katmandari monk, dragora-kai warriors and a pair of dandies! The actual customisable parts for these have been sculpted and ready to go for some time, so we can’t wait to finally get them in there and hand them over to you to explore!
Besides the kits featured in the campaign, we’ve designed and sculpted even more in the meantime too, so the weeks and months following the launch of The Forge are going to be a veritable feast of customisable wonders and jaw-dropping new releases.
It’s been a long road, but a tentative launch date is almost in sight. In the coming weeks you can expect to see more frequent progress updates showing off the various exciting kits and features that are on the way – it’s going to be fantastic!