​Don’t worry, we’re still here! We’ve been busy preparing for (and decompressing from) Con of the North over the past few weeks and are happy to say that the convention was a success. We learned from Gen Con that having 12 events was a bit much for an online convention since it’s just the three of us, so we scaled it back a bit and only had 4. For some reason we still decided to have three events on the same day though, so we may never learn.
 
Anyways, we got to meet a number of cool folks that took a leap of faith to play our game and (thankfully) ended up enjoying it. As with Gen Con, we got some great feedback about the game and actually learned even more about TTS from our players. Some of the feedback we received will help clarify certain components of the game, such as having double-sided tokens for certain things and adding an additional player aid, and other feedback will help make our TTS playthroughs easier by preventing certain unfavorable collisions that have been plaguing us for a while.
 
Perhaps our favorite feedback of all was something that one of our playtesters, David, said in our post-game survey:

​These are the kinds of things that mean a lot to us as designers, especially since that hit on our core objective for The Stifling Dark. Our goal of creating a horror board game that brings true tension to the table is essential to the experience of the game. The feedback we received about the game creating the feeling of fear and suspense was extremely reassuring to hear. Thank you to all of our players and for the Con of the North staff for providing another great convention experience!
 
With another convention in the books, we’re looking forward to additional opportunities to get people to play our game this year. We have registered for Shut Up & Sit Down’s AwSHUX online convention that’s taking place from 4/23 to 4/25, and we are actively looking for other conventions to participate in. We’ll definitely be participating in Gen Con again and plan on participating in either the Origins Game Fair or Geekway to the West later in the fall.
 
In the meantime, we’ll be continuing to refine the game mechanics, working on additional adversaries and maps, and partnering with our artists and manufacturer to ensure things are prepped for our Kickstarter. We’re still hoping to Kickstart sometime this fall, but we’ll have to see if the stars align. We’ll make that call at a later date once we know more, so stay tuned!
 
As for the blog, I’ll be doing my best to post at least once a month going forward since I’ve been slacking a bit the past couple of months. It may not be on a super-consistent rhythm, but I’ll make sure I’m keeping you updated as we continue to develop the game. Just know this: even if I’m not posting, you can rest assured that we are continuing to refine the game and are moving ever closer to the final version.
 
Happy trails,
 
Jeremy

Gen Con Online was an incredible experience, and we’re extremely thankful we were able to jump in at the last minute and have our game played by over 30 people. In this post I’ll walk through some of the things we learned last weekend, both about our game and about Tabletop Simulator (TTS).
 
For starters, we were very happy to receive overwhelmingly positive feedback for the game. We know our game is far from finished and nowhere near perfect, but it was reassuring that there weren’t any glaring issues or super negative feedback.
 
Our playtesters generally said the game was unique, fun, and (perhaps most importantly) tense. Remember that phrase I’ve been saying over and over? No? I’ll say it again: The Stifling Dark is a horror board game designed to bring true tension to the table. Don’t just take it from me though! Here are a few of the comments from our playtesters:

Positive feedback is always great, but negative / constructive feedback is even more important. We heard common themes that we should update the names for both the Victims and the Stalker, which we will be doing. There was also some confusion around the Adversary’s abilities and movement, so we will work to make that more transparent.

It also came through loud and clear that there is a fairly steep learning curve to start the game, which we very well may have lost sight to with how many times we’ve played the game. One fantastic suggestion that we will be implementing is creating a “tutorial” version of the game to try on your first playthrough that limits the rules while still introducing you to the core mechanics and preparing you for the full game.

There were a host of other comments and feedback that we will be reviewing over the coming weeks. Some of the feedback were things we had actually already discussed (like weapons to fight back against the Adversary or additional maps / Adversaries), but many of the comments were things we had not thought of before. Either way, all of the feedback was helpful and will be a huge asset going forward.

​The feedback wasn’t just about our game though – we also learned a lot about TTS! We learned about the Search ability within a deck, which means we don’t need to lay all the cards out face-up anymore and try to hide which cards we take from the Adversary. We also learned about the Team Chat, which will give us a way to communicate without the Adversary cheating - I mean listening. PS why is there no strikethrough option on here?
 
Another great TTS nugget we learned was that you can hit U to force an object underneath other objects, which is super handy for flashlight placement. This is quite useful when you have a bunch of players near each other and you have to place a flashlight on top of them. No more flashlight juggling!

​Scripting was also discussed a bit, and we’re honestly still on the fence about that. We fully acknowledge it would make the TTS implementation go much more smoothly, but at the same time it might hide real-world problems. Since we can’t playtest in person at the moment, we want the TTS version to match the real-world version as much as possible. As such, we’re leaning towards leaving scripting out for now but adding it in for the official digital version when that comes out.
 
All that said, we want to thank the team at Gen Con, the folks at Double Exposure, and all the amazing people that tried out our game. While we wish our company’s first Gen Con experience could’ve been in person, this was the next best thing that could’ve happened and we are thankful for that. We will definitely be back next year, online or not!

Signing off,

​Jeremy

Gen Con was something that we had hoped to go to some day, but when we saw the news that it was cancelled due to COVID-19 we filed that idea away for next year. To be honest, we hadn’t even talked much about going to Gen Con this year since we had just started working on The Stifling Dark so it wasn’t too much of a disappointment.
 
What we didn’t realize was that only the in-person portion of the event was cancelled and that Gen Con Online was taking its place. That was a bit of a miss on our part. And by that, I specifically mean Ethan. It was all Ethan’s fault.
 
Thankfully, I received an email from a coworker that Gen Con Online was happening. Unfortunately, that email came on July 10th. For those who aren’t familiar with Gen Con timelines, that was 3 days before event registration opened. Cue emergency company meeting.