Keep your friends close and your flashlight closer in this one-vs-many hidden movement horror game.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
June Post-Campaign Update
11 months ago
– Sat, Jun 03, 2023 at 06:33:07 PM
To some people’s chagrin and other people’s delight, this update will be slightly shorter than normal! We took a much-needed break after the mad rush to get the files sent off to our manufacturer and are getting back into the swing of things while we (im)patiently wait for the prototypes to arrive.
We’ll go through a quick development update, talk about our big upcoming conventions (Origins and Gen Con), share some exciting news about the future of Sophisticated Cerberus Games, and end with our usual PSA and timeline sections.
For starters, we still have close to 100 base and deluxe backers who have not filled out their surveys. Please do this as soon as you’re able to because we need to know where you live in order to get your game sent to you! If you don’t fill out your survey you won’t end up getting a game, and if you fill it out late it may incur additional shipping charges if we end up having to ship it from a different country.
Moving on, we’re pleased to report that we got the prototypes ordered and files sent to our Spanish friends on schedule, so things are still looking good from a timing perspective. We expect to have revised prototypes in-hand prior to Origins, and we should receive the translated Spanish files right after we get back from Origins.
Once we have both of those things, we will place our final order with our manufacturer and mass production will officially begin! While it will mostly be a waiting game at that point, we still have a couple to-do’s (such as finalizing the soundtrack, creating how-to-play videos, and putting the finishing touches on a little thing known as the map editor) so we’ll still be hard at work ensuring everything is going smoothly and ready for launch.
We are also in the process of updating our Tabletop Simulator (TTS) and Tabletop Playground (TTPG) versions of the game to include all the new content, and we’ll be looking for playtesters once those are all updated. Keep an eye out on social media (@sophcerb) or our Discord if you’re interested in giving it a shot once things are updated!
We are now less than a month away from Origins and only 2 months away from Gen Con, which is crazy to think about. It seems like we were just there a few months ago, and we can’t wait to dive headfirst back into the craziness!
As we mentioned in last month’s update, all of our Origins events sold out pretty quickly and remain full. For those of you who weren’t able to get in, keep an eye on tabletop.events since people drop from time to time and you might be able to sneak in. Tabletop.events has a handy “Notify Me” feature you can click on to get an alert if a spot opens up, so make sure you hit that button if you’re wanting to get in to a specific session!
You can always stop by at the start of a game to see if we have no-shows (which we frequently do) since you might be able to get into a game that way. Feel free to stop by our booth as well to see if we are planning any one-off events! We can’t promise anything since we’ll only have two or three helpers, but if we have the capacity we’ll try to fit in an extra game or two. Speaking of our booth, we’ll basically be right in the middle of the exhibit hall in booth 925! See below for a map of where we’re at:
Gen Con is a similar story - our events sold out very quickly and we’ve heard from a number of people that they weren’t able to get into a game. As with Origins, keep checking back on Gen Con’s site to see if people have dropped, and feel free to stop by at the beginning of events or check in at our booth to see if we have anything extra planned.
We’ll be in booth 2945 at Gen Con, eerily close to where we were last year. Gen Con apparently likes sticking us in the back right corner of the exhibit hall :) See below for the map so you can come find us!
Our only other planned convention for this year is 2D Con, for our local friends in and around Minneapolis. It takes place from 8/25 through 8/27, and we’re excited to return for our second year!
Now that we’ve wrapped up the design and development portion of The Stifling Dark, it’s time to shift our eyes to the future of our fledgling company. We’ve had many debates about what our next step should be - do we continue designing our own games, do we start publishing games from other designers, or do we do a combination of those things?
We love designing games and have a blast doing it, but the reality is that it’s a long and tedious process. Our ideal long-term goal would be to turn this company into full-time jobs for the three of us, but that’s not going to be possible if we only release a game every three years.
That led us to discuss publishing other designers’ games as a natural next step now that we’ve established ourselves. We’ve met a ton of local designers with fantastic games, so there’s no shortage of publish-worthy designs out there.
With that, we are pleased to announce that we’ve decided that publishing someone else’s design will be our next step as a company! We haven’t signed anything so nothing is official and we can’t share any details yet, but if all goes well we plan on announcing the game while we’re at Origins later this month. We even plan on having a demo available for people to check out at our booth!
We do still plan on continuing to design our own games since we have a wealth of ideas for future designs, but publishing will provide us with a much quicker turnaround for our next game compared to designing it from scratch. Don’t worry - expansions and new content for The Stifling Dark are included in that massive list of ideas and are on our roadmap!
We want to end this note with a very important callout: while this is all super exciting, we still have a commitment to deliver The Stifling Dark. The Stifling Dark will remain our number one priority, not only because it’s the right thing to do but also because future games mean nothing if we can’t deliver on our first one.
We also want to acknowledge that many backers have been burned by companies moving too quickly to their next game before their first one has been shipped, especially recently. Hopefully it has been evident through our communication and planning, but we have done (and will continue doing) our due diligence when it comes to budgeting and roadmapping.
We are in a financial position where we have enough money reserved for manufacturing, shipping, and all the other remaining expenses for The Stifling Dark (including a sizable reserve fund) that we have set aside and will only be used for The Stifling Dark.
Not budgeting properly or (more commonly) taking money that was already marked for a previous campaign is where many other companies have gotten into trouble, and we have taken the necessary steps to prevent that from happening. We are extremely grateful for the trust you have placed in us and we take our responsibility to deliver on our promises very seriously.
Keep an eye out for more info on our next game in the coming months!
PSA time, and it’s different again this month! As mentioned last month, our Kickstarter pricing for late pledges ended on June 1. Our preorder store has also been updated to simplify the number of offerings and lock prices in at MSRP pricing that we've begun the manufacturing process. A link to our late pledge store is below:
Lastly, if you are a retail backer and have not filled out the intake form yet please do so once you get a chance. If you received an email from us on April 1st, it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke - it means we have not gotten a response from you yet. If not (or if you already responded), it means you submitted the form and you’re good to go!
Now that the pre-production samples have been ordered, the production process has officially begun and we can move the factory step to in-progress! Don’t get too excited though - it’s going to stay in this stage for a while since this is a long and multi-faceted step. We are still on track to deliver by our promise date of February 2024, and will hopefully be delivering sooner than that if all goes well!
We’ll be in touch next month, but as always please feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns in the meantime. As a reminder, you can expect our campaign updates to come out around the 3rd of each month.
Thank you once again for your support in helping us make The Stifling Dark a reality!
This is Matt, Jeremy, and Ethan, churning those gears…
May Post-Campaign Update
about 1 year ago
– Wed, May 03, 2023 at 03:13:18 PM
Spring is officially in the air! After raining for about 4 days straight (and then snowing in some areas this weekend) temperatures are supposed to be in the 60s and 70s for the foreseeable future. We probably just jinxed ourselves by saying that, but oh well. We’re not here to talk about the weather though, so onto the game we go!
In this update we’ll talk about the locking of the pledge manager, give a comprehensive component count update, go over a development update (including sneak peeks at some of our revised components, like the double-sided player screen), share some raving new reviews, provide some info about Origins Game Fair (including our booth number), and wrap things up with a timeline update.
As everyone should hopefully be aware of, we locked orders and charged credit cards on Monday. The charge should appear on your statements as SOPH CERB GAMES for the amount that you owed for shipping, taxes (if applicable), and any incremental add-ons you may have selected. If your payment went through, your job here is done! Now you can sit back, relax, and (if you’re like us) be surprised when the game shows up on your doorstep because you back way too many games and lose track of them.
If, on the other hand, your credit card was declined, fear not! It's typically just your bank being overly cautious. In most cases you just have to call your bank to let them know it's legitimate and they'll remove the hold so it will go through the next time the charge is made (which we have to process manually on our end).
Per BackerKit's suggestion to reduce the number of manual one-offs we have to reprocess, we will be re-trying all failed cards once a week for the next four weeks to give people time to call their banks and remove the holds. Note that if your payment failed because you need to switch to a different card, you can do that by clicking on the "update your payment information" link in the email and it will automatically re-try the charge.
If you have any questions or concerns about the payment or anything about the pledge manager, please feel free to leave a comment, send us a message on Kickstarter, or email us at [email protected]. The below article from BackerKit also provides some additional information about the various payment issues that may occur:
For anyone who fills out their survey from this point onward: your order will lock and your card will be charged immediately. Make sure you triple-check everything on your order before submitting, because once the order locks you won’t be able to change the items on your order or modify your pledge.
All backers will be able to update their addresses up until we start shipping the game out, so you don’t have to worry if you plan on moving between now and then - just make sure you keep your address up to date! As we did with the order lock, we will be sure to communicate well in advance of that deadline to remind everyone to double-check their addresses.
As a continuation of our component update in our April update, we wanted to provide a full list showing you how the components changed over the course of the Kickstarter. The left column shows the component count as of when we launched on Kickstarter, the middle column shows the component count as of the end of the campaign, and the right column shows the current (and mostly finalized) component count.
The "Current" column is conditionally formatted to highlight where components have increased (green), decreased (red), or stayed the same (gray). The vast majority of the reductions are on the mini cards and tokens, although we also have the evidence cards and mini-sleeves that we mentioned in our previous update. Also, we apologize that this is just a screenshot of a spreadsheet. We planned on making something fancy-looking but realized our time was probably better spent doing more proofreading.
We discussed the biggest changes in previous updates, so most of the other changes you’ll see here are pretty small. There may still be a couple minor component count changes between now and the final production copy (such as the addition or removal of a couple cards or tokens), but all the big stuff is officially out of the way.
We are mere days away from officially beginning the manufacturing process by ordering our pre-production samples, right on track with our initial estimate of beginning production in the middle of May. We’ve spent the past month doing tons of playtests, proofreading, and overall graphic work to bring all the components up to their final versions (and then we did even more proofreading).
As most of the past month was spent playtesting and proofreading, we don’t have a whole lot of crazy new development things to share, but we do have something we think all the adversary players will like - the newly-designed back of the player screen! The screen will be tri-fold, with each adversary taking up a full panel:
In case you forgot, this was one of the stretch goals we unlocked that all the “ones” in one-vs-many games were super excited about. Not only was the player screen upgraded from cardstock to cardboard, we also made it double-sided and are including player guides for each adversary on the back to help reduce how often you need to reference the rulebook.
Speaking of the rulebook, the back cover of each rulebook will contain quick-reference guides for the investigators and adversaries, respectively. Rather than use the last page for credits and all that fun stuff, we stuck that inside the back cover and used the prime real estate on the back cover for helpful information.
We also got the final versions of both the Nightfall box and the mini-expansion foil pack, which you can feast your eyes upon below:
In terms of next steps, once we receive the pre-production sample and approve all of the components (and get the Spanish version back from Maldito), we will begin production and await the receipt of the mass production sample. The pre-production sample is manufactured differently than the final product will be, so even though it’s close it won’t be exactly the same as the mass production version of the game.
That’s where the mass production sample comes in! This sample will be the same as the final production copy of the game, so that’s our final checkpoint to see how everything will look when manufacturing is completed. Once that is approved, mass production begins and we have to (im)patiently wait for it to complete.
Once manufacturing is done, we will ship the games to each of our fulfillment partners, who will then ship the game to each of you!
It sounds so easy when we write it like that, but as we’ve all seen, there are bound to be little things that pop up here and there. We added extra time for both manufacturing and shipping into our timelines to account for things like that, but we will keep everyone posted if anything pops up along the way.
We have not one, but two new written (p)reviews to share this month! The first is a review from Josh at PopHorror, a website we only recently discovered (but wish we had discovered sooner). It’s a site dedicated to, you guessed it, all things horror! We were thrilled when Josh reached out expressing interest to do a review, and the review is now officially live at the below link:
We wanted to include a small quote from this review, but we couldn’t just pull a single line or two. Instead, we just went ahead and included the entire end of the review below since this is a perfect summation of what we wanted this game to be, and we are beyond ecstatic that reviewers are seeing that come to life:
Admittedly, in a time where at least the videogame market is seeing some fatigue in asymmetrical horror games, with almost every one of them being accused of being a clone of another (rightfully or not), The Stifling Dark may sound like a less accessible clone of those games. Not everyone wants to bother setting up a board game, especially if there’s any complexity to it when they can just boot up a videogame right?
Here’s the thing. We had more fun with The Stifling Dark than any of those video games. Where the videogames lose the horror and tension after a few playthroughs, The Stifling Dark didn’t. You can’t see a huge chunk of the board no matter how you arrange your flashlights, with nothing more than maybe some noise tokens as the killer crunches in the dark brings far more tension than its videogame contemporaries. There is no increased heartbeat volume to let you know you’re in danger, there is no, keeping an eye out over the whole map for each other as one of you works at an action. There are no updates or patches that throw the balance out of wack. The Stifling Dark is a game that always feels how the other games only feel the first few times you play them.
The Stifling Dark is one of the most immersive horror board games I’ve played, between the lighting and sound mechanics, the mystery and hidden movement, and the strategy. It’s a little bit on the complex side and may take some time to fully understand, but it’s worth the effort. I strongly suggest that you don’t write this off as another clone.
Our other new preview comes to us from Bert! We found him in a Facebook group for board game reviewers and were excited to work with him to get some more written content. It just so happens we had two written pieces launch in the same month! See below for Bert’s preview:
We won’t post half of the article in here again, but this small section also does an excellent job of illustrating the feeling we want the game to evoke:
The flashlight made the players feel as if they were right there in a horror film, especially when you turn it on to find the adversary standing right in front of you. It’s the closest to a jump scare in a board game that I have experienced.
We’re close to wrapping up all the reviewer content we had lined up at the beginning of the Kickstarter, but you can expect new content to start popping up again once the game is released!
Convention season is quickly approaching! Origins is less than 2 months away, and all 12 of our events sold out within about an hour of registration opening, which was pretty crazy to see. We’re always trying to see if we can add more events so more people can play, but since we also have to staff our booth (and take time to eat) we can usually only run one event at any given time.
We also received our Origins booth number, and we’re pretty pleased with where we ended up. We’ll be in booth 925, which is a corner booth almost directly in the middle of the hall. We’re by Elf Creek Games and Restoration Games, and just one aisle over from our good friend Dave with Paverson Games (Distilled, anyone?) We'll share a map of the exhibit hall once that information is public.
As a reminder, here’s what we have planned for the rest of the year:
PSA time, and this time it’s slightly different! We are still matching Kickstarter pricing on late pledges through the end of May. Late Pledge (preorder) pricing will increase to MSRP at the beginning of June, so if you know anyone that’s on the fence tell them to hop over pretty quickly or they’ll miss out on a good deal! A link to our late pledge store is below:
Lastly, if you are a retail backer and have not filled out the intake form yet please do so once you get a chance. If you received an email from us on April 1st, it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke - it means we have not gotten a response from you yet. If not (or if you already responded), it means you submitted the form and you’re good to go!
The last of our Testing and Art placeholders have been filled in, which means we are ready to send files off to the factory to get our pre-production sample going!
We expect to send files over within the next week, at which point we’ll be in about a 45-day waiting period until we receive the sample. We’ll be sitting with the factory at “In Progress” status for a couple months, beginning in next month’s update.
We’ll be in touch next month, but as always please feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns in the meantime. As a reminder, you can expect our campaign updates to come out around the 3rd of each month.
Thank you once again for your support in helping us make The Stifling Dark a reality!
This is Matt, Jeremy, and Ethan, ready to take a sliiiight break once these files are sent…
Charging Credit Cards Soon!
about 1 year ago
– Mon, Apr 24, 2023 at 04:31:59 PM
Only one week until surveys lock and credit cards are charged! One week from today (on May 1st), we will lock surveys (which means you will no longer be able to add or remove items from your order) and charge credit cards (so you will see a charge come through from SOPH CERB GAMES or SOPH CERB).
If you are a Kickstarter backer you will also get an alert from BackerKit 2 days ahead of time (on April 29th). Note for preorder / late pledge backers: your orders will lock on April 29th due to how BackerKit handles late pledges vs. Kickstarter pledges, but you still won’t be charged until May 1st.
As a reminder, last month we announced that we signed a Spanish deal with Maldito Games. If you wanted to switch to the Spanish version, now is the time to do it! Leave a comment, send us a message, or email us at [email protected] to get switched over.
If you have already completed your survey there’s nothing you have to do, this is just an FYI so you know that your cards are about to be charged. If you’re waiting to fill out your survey until after we charge cards, your order will lock and your card will be charged as soon as you submit your survey (as long as you do it after May 1st). You will still be able to edit your order before finalizing your survey if you'd like to.
For anyone who ordered multiple copies of the game and qualified for the free mini-expansion, we will be adding as many free mini-expansions as you have copies of the base game. If you already paid for an extra mini-expansion we’ll take that off your order and replace it with a free one.
Lastly, you will still be able to edit your address even though we locked orders (up until be begin fulfillment). Just make sure you update your address if you move prior to when we start fulfillment, otherwise your game is going to go to your old address!
That’s it for this update! We’ll be back on/around May 3rd for our regularly scheduled monthly update. Talk to you soon!
This is Matt, Jeremy, and Ethan, too busy proofreading the rulebook to think of a clever ending for this update...
April Post-Campaign Update
about 1 year ago
– Mon, Apr 03, 2023 at 06:55:30 PM
We were planning to start this update with something along the lines of “spring is in the air”, but we just got eight inches of snow this weekend so we decided to rescind that statement and save it for the next update. Oh well, we suppose that means more time indoors for board games!
Anyways, onto the good stuff. As usual, we have quite a few important updates to share this month so please read through the update when you get a chance (preferably at least the first three sections). We’ll start off with some exciting localization news, give an update on pledge manager and credit card charge timing, provide some insights into how the components have changed since November, and then round out with the usual sections.
Onto the big news: The Stifling Dark will officially be available in Spanish! For those of you who missed the announcement on social media, we’re partnering with Maldito Games to bring The Stifling Dark to our Spanish-speaking friends.
If you are an existing backer that has already filled out your survey and would like to switch to the Spanish version, please leave a comment on our Kickstarter, send us a message on Kickstarter, or email us at [email protected]. Since we’re already halfway through the pledge manager we’ll have to switch you to the Spanish version manually so we don’t mess up the other 3,000 backers that have already completed their surveys.
If you are an existing backer that has not yet filled out your survey and would like to switch to Spanish, you’ll be able to switch your pledge level to the Spanish version on the welcome screen (the very first page you land on after you click your survey invite).
For anyone that may be reading this and worrying that it will slow down our timelines, fear not - we planned ahead for this! Maldito will need around 40 days to translate the game, but while they are translating the files we will have already started the manufacturing process by ordering pre-production samples (which will also take 30-45 days).
This way we’ll be able to work out any kinks with artwork or components while Maldito is translating the game and then proceed to mass production immediately once the translation and pre-production samples are complete. Gotta love parallel workstreams!
We don’t have any other languages to announce yet, but we are still working diligently with our friends over at M.O.B. Vanguard to find other foreign publishers and will keep everyone posted if/when we find other partners.
Time for everyone’s favorite topic - the pledge manager! We’ve had about 3,000 people fill out the survey so far, so we’re 80% of the way through all the backers. About 400 of the 800 remaining backers are dollar backers, so after accounting for that we’re closer to 90% completed. Things are looking good!
We still plan on locking the pledge manager and charging credit cards on May 1st. We will publish a brief campaign update 7 days ahead of time (on April 24th) to remind everyone, and if you are a Kickstarter backer you will also get an alert from BackerKit 2 days ahead of time (on April 29th). Note for preorder / late pledge backers: your orders will lock on April 29th due to how BackerKit handles late pledges vs. Kickstarter pledges, but you still won’t be charged until May 1st.
As soon as orders lock on May 1st, we’ll proceed to charge credit cards. The charge will show up as either SOPH CERB GAMES or SOPHCERB on your credit cards depending on whether your credit card company uses the long or short form of the statement descriptor:
Don’t be surprised if you see what you believe to be a random charge come through from SOPH CERB on May 1st - that’s us, Sophisticated Cerberus Games! We love our name, but realized a little too late that it might just be a little too long.
As a reminder, you can add/remove items up until we lock the surveys, but once we lock them you will not be able to change the items on your order. You will still be able to update your address until we start fulfillment later this year, so no worries if you plan to move between now and when we fulfill!
Lastly, we will be completing the audit we mentioned in last month’s update within the next couple hours. We’ll be looking to identify backers that may have accidentally added something to their cart when they were already getting it. As an example, we’ll be flagging people who added the Nightfall expansion to a Deluxe pledge or purchased the mini expansion when they already had it for free.
We will send you an email from [email protected] if we notice duplicate items in your cart, and there’s a chance it could go to spam so make sure you check that too. Unless we hear back from you stating otherwise, we will remove the duplicate items for you (which will also reduce the amount you will be charged). We want to make sure you don’t accidentally order too much, not that you could ever have too much Stifling Dark in your life, of course.
Now that we’ve locked in most of our components we wanted to provide an update so everyone is aware of what has changed since the Kickstarter. There are two reductions and a couple additions we wanted to call your attention to.
The first reduction involves the removal of two decks: the evidence deck (full-size cards) and the mitigation deck (mini cards). We received feedback that there was too much going on in the game and too many things to remember, which led us to take a step back and evaluate what was truly necessary and what could be removed to streamline gameplay.
The evidence deck was a prime example: each time you picked up an evidence token you had to draw a card, then reveal an item, then decide if/when you wanted to play your evidence card. Now all you have to do is pick up the token, and you get a reward of your choice once you turn it in. Not only did this eliminate the clunkiness surrounding evidence, it also gave the investigators a strategic choice in selecting a reward that was immediately useful to them instead of relying on random chance.
The same was true for the mitigation deck: every time you gained a face-up wound you had to check if it had a mitigation. If it did, you had to draw a mitigation and then do something to resolve the mitigation to flip the wound face-down. We liked the variability this created, but sometimes the mitigations were impossible to resolve, and other times they immediately resolved so they had no effect.
As such, and in the interest of streamlining the game, we decided to remove them and replace them with medkits. Now all you have to do is go to a medkit space and pick it up if you need to flip a wound face-down. Of course, this means there is a scarcity element to flipping wounds face-down now. Investigators will need to keep that in mind when they decide which wounds need to be flipped down, and which they are willing to “push through the pain” with.
The removal of the mitigation deck, combined with the streamlining of some conditions and wounds, led us to our second reduction. We were left with 57 mini cards in the game, and there are 55 mini card sleeves in a pack. Rather than ship a full pack of 55 sleeves for the 2 leftover cards, we decided to eliminate 2 wounds so we could reduce how many packs of mini sleeves we needed. Note that the wounds we removed often had little or no impact on the game, so we felt it was justified not only from an environmental perspective to eliminate unnecessary plastic, but from the perspective of making the game more fun as well.
To be very clear: the deluxe pledge will now come with 3 packs of full-size sleeves (165 sleeves) and 1 pack of mini sleeves (55 sleeves), as opposed to our final Kickstarter component list of 3 packs of full sleeves and 2 packs of mini sleeves. Note that we added a free pack of full-size sleeves to the deluxe pledge during the campaign (it initially only came with two full-size packs) due to all the additional cards we added, and that will still be included.
Now that we covered the reductions, it’s time to cover the stuff we added! All of these additions will be included in all versions of the game at no extra cost. The one we’re most excited about is a custom-designed insert (complete with a lid) to keep your components organized and spill-free. Here’s a preliminary draft (minus the lid), although we’re still in the process of moving some things around to ensure all the cards and tokens fit:
We initially planned to include a very basic insert without a lid, whereas a custom insert with a lid was a potential stretch goal we had pretty far down the list. Since the campaign did so well we decided to splurge for the custom insert anyway, and we hired an insert designer to create it for us!
Another notable addition comes in the form of custom-designed standee holders to ensure the flashlights are able to rotate smoothly around the investigator standees. We had initially planned on using generic standee holders, but none of them worked well with the flashlights. Since that’s such a central aspect of the game, we decided it’d be best to use custom standee bases.
Lastly, we’ll be upgrading the cards to a linen finish and upgrading to more durable flashlight lines to ensure the lines on the flashlight last virtually forever.
We wanted to make sure we addressed all these changes so everyone knows what to expect when they receive their very own copy of The Stifling Dark. We’ll include a comprehensive breakdown of all the component changes in a future update, but the remainder of the changes are much less impactful than these.
We covered a lot of development updates in the component section, so we’ll keep this section pretty short this time. We finalized our new card layouts and thought it would be a fun idea to showcase the history of the cards in The Stifling Dark, from the very first card we ever made (which is super pixelated for some reason) to the current version. V5 was certainly our longest-lasting iteration, but we have to say V6 is our favorite:
Lastly, as we hinted at last month, we were putting in some major work on our rulebook! We were thrilled to be able to hire Jonathan Bobal, who has been involved with games such as The Dark Quarter, The Witcher: Old World, Euthia: Torment of Resurrection, and (for our hidden movement fans) Sniper Elite, to do our rulebook layout and graphic design.
Jonathan has done a fantastic job of taking our massive unformatted Google Doc and converting it into an actual comprehensible rulebook, which is still weird to see (in a good way). We’re working on updating example images and making a few other changes, but we are very pleased with how the rulebook turned out. Here’s a low-res sneak peek of the investigator turn spread:
Once we’re done with all our updates and order our pre-production samples, we’ll be doing a massive update on TTS and TTPG to bring the virtual versions of the game up to date with our physical version of the game (complete with the revised rulebook).
Back when we were earlier on in development, we were tracking a list of playtesters so we could acknowledge their contributions in the rulebook. Now that we’re getting close to manufacturing, we wanted to do a review of the list and ensure everyone that expected to be listed is indeed listed.
If you playtested our game with us (most likely at a convention) and want to be listed in the credits, make sure you take a minute to check out the list on our website and ensure your name is listed.
The names are listed in alphabetical order based on last name, and anyone who didn’t provide a last name is listed at the end. If you don’t see your name, fill out the form at the bottom of the page with your name (as you’d like it to appear in the credits) and where you playtested with us and we’ll get you added! The deadline to add your name is May 1st. Those of you who have reached out already have all been added, thanks for letting us know!
We have a new playthrough to share this month, thanks to our friend Derrick over at Canje Studios! We met Derrick at Gen Con last year and had to send him a prototype since he was so enthusiastic and friendly, as you’ll see in the playthrough. Before you watch, it’s important to point out that these prototypes are approaching a year old at this point so they do not have any of the new enhancements or changes we’ve been working on since the Kickstarter.
Derrick and Steve brought up some of the exact same things we’ve heard from playtesters and other reviewers since those prototypes were made, and the good news is basically everything they mentioned has already been fixed! With that in mind, we hope you enjoy their playthrough!
One thing we forgot to mention in last month’s Con of the North recap is that we met a local vendor named Big SoftD who makes, well, big soft dice! The dice were super fun to play with, so we decided we had to have her make some big soft sprint dice for us! Here’s one of them making an appearance in our April Fool’s post about a big box version about The Stifling Dark:
Make sure you stop by our booth at one of our upcoming conventions to check the dice out. If you’re lucky, we may even use them in some of our playtests!
Speaking of upcoming conventions, here’s what we have planned for the rest of the year:
PSA time! These are the same as last month, so feel free to skip if they don’t apply to you. We are still matching Kickstarter pricing on late pledges for a limited time (likely until we place our order with our manufacturer in May), at which point those will increase to MSRP. A link to our late pledge store is below:
Also, if you signed up for Kickstarter using an Apple account please check your messages on Kickstarter to see if we tried to contact you. This can sometimes result in a “fake” email being generated that doesn’t play well with BackerKit. We’ve seen this cause issues in multiple campaigns that we’ve backed, so we’re trying to get ahead of it. If you don’t have a message from us (or if you already responded) you’re all set!
Similarly, if you are a retail backer and have not filled out the intake form yet please do so once you get a chance. If you received an email from us on April 1st, it wasn’t an April Fool’s joke - it means we have not gotten a response from you yet. If not (or if you already responded), it means you submitted the form and you’re good to go!
As promised, we have some juicy updates on our timeline. Artwork is wrapped up for everything except the rulebook and the Nightfall expansion, both of which will be completed shortly. We’re in the final stages of testing for the remainder of the components before we get our pre-production samples ordered and begin the Spanish translation:
We’ll be in touch next month, but as always please feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns in the meantime. As a reminder, you can expect our campaign updates to come out around the 3rd of each month.
Thank you once again for your support in helping us make The Stifling Dark a reality!
This is Matt, Jeremy, and Ethan, practicing our Spanish…
March Post-Campaign Update
about 1 year ago
– Tue, Mar 07, 2023 at 08:33:23 PM
We’re back again, this time with our “normal” monthly update! First off, thanks to the 2,500 of you that have filled out your surveys so far. We’re about 2/3 of the way through the pledge manager after a week, and we’re quite happy with how far along we are. That said, 1/3 of you still have to fill out your surveys, so don't forget!
In this month’s update, we’ll provide information on the pledge manager, do a deep-dive on everyone’s favorite Horror, share a recent developer playthrough, recap our most recent convention, and end with a couple PSAs.
As we stated in the intro, the pledge manager has been moving along nicely! One of the things we were interested in seeing was where in the world our backers are from, so we threw together a couple quick graphics for our fellow data nerds. The darker the color, the more backers there are:
Since half of our backers are from the US, we decided to do a breakout within the US to show which states had the most backers (based on those who have filled out the pledge manager so far). This is obviously largely influenced by the population within each state, but it also makes sense that we saw spikes in Minnesota and Wisconsin seeing as we're from there:
We did a quick exercise to compare the population rank of each state against the backer count rank by state to see where we over-indexed and under-indexed (relatively speaking). The three states with the biggest positive variance between their rankings (meaning we over-indexed) were Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Idaho. The two states with the biggest negative variance (meaning we under-indexed) were Mississippi and South Carolina. The more you know!
In total, we had backers across 6 continents and over 50 countries. We had a bit of a moment after seeing these visuals since it's crazy to think our game will be traveling to this many places throughout the world. That said, does anyone know someone that's currently in Antarctica? :)
Anyways, that's enough geeking out for now. Onto the actual details! Overall the pledge manager has been going smoothly and we haven’t encountered any major issues. Thanks to those of you that have reached out with questions or comments throughout the process, since that helps tell us what may have been confusing or not communicated well enough. Don't forget that we have step-by-step instructions on our website for those who aren't familiar with pledge managers.
By far, the main question we’ve gotten was around the free mini-expansion eligibility. In order to be eligible, you had to be subscribed to our mailing list at the end of the campaign and back at least the $50 level. It was not included by default in the Deluxe pledge.
If you met the eligibility requirements, the mini-expansion will already be in your cart for $0 and will be listed along with the rest of your pledge on the right-hand side of the Add-Ons screen:
If you don’t see it listed, that means we didn’t find your email in the mailing list snapshot we took at the end of the campaign. In all but two of the scenarios that we’ve looked into, it was because the email wasn’t subscribed to our list. In one scenario, someone used a different email on our mailing list than on Kickstarter and in the other scenario an email got dropped somehow, but other than that the matching has worked correctly.
All that said, if you thought you joined the mailing list but don’t see the mini-expansion please don’t hesitate to reach out and we’ll be happy to look into it for you! And even if you know you were not eligible to receive it for free, you can still add it to your order for $4.50.
The other issue we’ve seen is related to local pickup for our MN and WI friends. Unfortunately, the way local pickup works within BackerKit is that you have to select it right off the bat on the landing page where it asks for your country. Rather than asking on the shipping screen like you’d expect, you have to change the country from United States to Local Pickup:
We’ve already provided feedback to BackerKit that this process is quite confusing, so hopefully they’ll change that in a future update. If you missed the option and want to go back and change to local pickup, send us a message or leave a comment and we’ll get it taken care of!
The last thing we wanted to mention regarding the pledge manager entries is that we’re seeing some backers double order things (potentially by mistake). For example, if you backed at the Deluxe level you’re already getting the Nightfall expansion, but we’re seeing people purchase the Nightfall expansion add-on (without getting a second copy of the game).
If they’re buying it for someone else that only purchased the base game that makes perfect sense, but if not they’re going to end up with two copies. We’ve reviewed a number of potential scenarios like this (such as ordering the mini-expansion add-on when they were already getting it for free) and will be contacting the backers in question to make sure they don’t accidentally order duplicates of anything. Make sure you keep an eye on your email and/or Kickstarter messages!
As for timing, we still plan on leaving the pledge manager open until May 1st, at which point we will lock orders and charge credit cards. You can add/remove items up until we lock the surveys, but once we lock them you will not be able to add or remove items. We’ll send an update out a week before then to make sure everyone is aware, and BackerKit will also send out an alert around that time as well. You will still be able to update your address until we start fulfillment later this year.
This month’s deep-dive is all about The Insatiable Horror. The Horror’s main objective is to feast upon the investigators to prepare its next brood. It does this by setting up an ambush and then reeling investigators in with its proboscis to attack them, as shown in the lovely illustration below:
The ambush ability requires thoughtful planning and anticipation of the investigators’ next moves - you have to position yourself close enough that you can still reach them on your next activation, but if you stay too close and get revealed your ambush is foiled. The investigators will have a general idea of where you are, so they will have the choice of running away or trying to find you before it’s too late.
If the ambush is successful, The Horror can pull the investigator(s) to it and give them some pretty nasty effects. One of our favorites allows The Horror to spawn a hatchling, which can move around the board and pester the investigators. Not to worry though, the investigators can stomp on it to remove it from the board.
Flashlights also work differently with The Horror since it is tunneling around beneath the map. If The Horror moves through a flashlight on its turn it does not get revealed, but the investigators will see every space it moves through since the ground is rumbling beneath their feet. However, if it ends in a bright space or the investigators reveal it with a flashlight during their activation, then The Horror is revealed and punished accordingly.
The Horror wins once it is able to eliminate two investigators, as that is all the nourishment it needs to lay its next brood. The investigators, being the monsters that they are, can banish The Horror and win the game by destroying its eggs. Not exactly super thoughtful of them, but you gotta do what you gotta do to survive!
This is our last planned deep-dive, but if there is another topic you’d like us to go in-depth on just let us know in the comments!
In other development news, our artist is close to wrapping up artwork on the Amusement Park and we’ve officially signed on a rulebook designer. We’re especially excited with who we were able to hire for our rulebook, and we’ll have a lot more to share on that in our next campaign update.
We don’t have any new announcements yet, but we suggest keeping an eye out since we may have some news to share on this front by the time the next update comes around :)
We partnered with one of our FLGS backers to host a developer playthrough on TTS with a couple of their regulars back on February 25th, and it was a super close game. The recording is below in case you want to check it out:
We want to give a special thank you to Game Kastle College Park over in Maryland for organizing the event - both Boyd and Keegan were great partners, and we appreciate Aaron for joining us to play as well. If you’re near the College Park, MD area make sure you stop by and show them some love!
Back when we were earlier on in development, we were tracking a list of playtesters so we could acknowledge their contributions in the rulebook. Now that we’re getting close to manufacturing, we wanted to do a review of the list and ensure everyone that expected to be listed is indeed listed.
If you playtested our game with us (most likely at a convention) and want to be listed in the credits, make sure you take a minute to check out the list on our website and ensure your name is listed.
The names are listed in alphabetical order based on last name, and anyone who didn’t provide a last name is listed at the end. If you don’t see your name, fill out the form at the bottom of the page with your name (as you’d like it to appear in the credits) and where you playtested with us and we’ll get you added!
It feels like it was just this weekend, but we wrapped up our second in-person and third overall Con of the North a couple weeks ago. This was our first time with a booth, and it was great meeting some of you and running into others who played The Stifling Dark at previous Con of the Norths (whether in-person or online).
Our favorites were some of the people who played online at Con of the North back in 2021, when the game was still quite early on in its development. We reminisced about the way the game used to work, and it was crazy to see how far it had progressed since that point. For those of you who’ve been following along for a while, that was back when the first phase involved interacting with the spark spaces to power up the office.
Anyways, we had six playtests with about 30 players throughout the course of the weekend where we tested both The Cult and The Horror. We got some good feedback on a couple minor things we could tweak to improve gameplay and balance, which we’ve already incorporated and continue to iterate on.
Here’s the updated list of our remaining conventions for the year. Two down, three to go!
PSA time! These are the same as last month, so feel free to skip if they don’t apply to you. We are still matching Kickstarter pricing on late pledges for a limited time (likely until we place our order with our manufacturer in May), at which point those will increase to MSRP. A link to our late pledge store is below:
Also, if you signed up for Kickstarter using an Apple account please check your messages on Kickstarter to see if we tried to contact you. This can sometimes result in a “fake” email being generated that doesn’t play well with BackerKit. We’ve seen this cause issues in multiple campaigns that we’ve backed, so we’re trying to get ahead of it. If you don’t have a message from us (or if you already responded) you’re all set!
Similarly, if you are a retail backer and have not filled out the intake form yet please do so once you get a chance. If you received a message from us on January 28th it means we have not gotten a response from you yet. If not (or if you already responded), it means you submitted the form and you’re good to go!
Time for an updated status chart! We only have one new update to report (as represented by the icon with a white outline), but it’s a big one.
We have now finished development / rough layout of the rulebook, and we have hired a professional rulebook designer to bring it to life. They will begin work on the rulebook shortly, while we finish up final testing on a couple of things. We expect a fairly sizable update to this chart in next month’s update as we wrap up testing and artwork on most of the assets.
We’ll be in touch next month, but as always please feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns in the meantime. As a reminder, you can expect our campaign updates to come out around the 3rd of each month.
With that, we'll leave you with another weather-related question since this is something we’re all dreaming of: what are you most looking forward to this spring? Let us know in the comments!
Thank you once again for your support in helping us make The Stifling Dark a reality!
This is Matt, Jeremy, and Ethan, reading through thousands of surveys…
