Perdition's Mouth - Revised Edition

Paco Garcia Jaen
over 6 years ago – Fri, Jan 19, 2018 at 08:24:51 PM

The main development this week was getting the first batch of material sent to our manufacturer, as detailed in last weeks update. This was sent on Monday and they have now started checking the artwork. Meanwhile, we’re getting on with final playtesting and translation of the new scenarios, which will be in the next batch of files to be sent to our manufacturers, at the end of the month.

As you know, we have several guest designers adding some variety to the Perdition’s Mouth experience in the revised edition and we thought it might be interesting for you to hear from them. One of our guest designers is Paco Garcia Jaen, the editor of GMS Magazine.

‘You know, there is nothing like designing a scenario for a game like Perdition’s Mouth to make you realise how much work goes on behind the game. While I’m at it, there’s also nothing quite like working with a team of enthusiastic professionals who have more expertise than you knew was possible and an eye for detail you would wish for any surgeon.

‘When Timo asked me to design a scenario, I just went with something I thought would be cool and different. I wanted to add an element of tension based on a time constraint and alter a lot of the basic rules of the game.

‘I never thought it would be so difficult!

‘And yet... The team has been with me all along and have seen where my inexperience led to errors and oversights, offering suggestions for how to correct them and pointing out the intricacies that I had overlooked. Little things that a player never thinks about until they’re left scrabbling around in the rulebook for a precise situation that’s arisen in the game that they haven’t encountered before, or ambiguities which may be exploited by the player or else just leave them confused. The results have improved my initial design a lot.

‘I think this is an experience any good game aficionado should go for if they have the opportunity. Seriously, I have had tremendous fun with this and have loved every second of working with the Dragon Dawn Productions team.’

We’ve enjoyed working with all of our guest designers and think they’ve done a great job innovating within the Perdition’s Mouth: Abyssal Rift ruleset. Their scenarios are all on schedule.

The other part of production, of course, is knowing exactly how many copies we have to send to backers and how many should be available for retail. To this end, we will be closing Backerkit on Saturday 10th March. At the moment there are still 143 backers who have not completed their surveys. If this is you, please don’t forget to do it - you’d be amazed how quickly 7 weeks can go by.

Finally, a reminder that our Kickstarter campaign for Darwinning! goes live at 5pm UTC on Saturday 20th January (not Friday, like I said last week!). Please do come and have a look and let us know what you think.

Lee, Paco and the DDP team.

Back to work
over 6 years ago – Thu, Jan 11, 2018 at 12:55:55 AM

Remember how we said things were getting back to normal? Well, it’s fair to say that we’re back to work, in earnest, now - and we’re busy. The first patch of print-ready files (including translations) is due to be sent to our manufacturer on Monday 15th January for pre-processing. This batch features most of the cards, including the two treasure cards that you chose in the BGG poll.

Meanwhile, we’ve received prototypes of the miniatures from our manufacturer. This is important - those of you who own or have seen the first edition will understand why we have been praised for our miniatures and, since we’re changing manufacturer for this print run, we want to make sure that the figures are of the same quality. By and large we’re quite happy with what we’ve seen but we’ve made one or two suggestions for improvement.

The next batch of files we have to deliver includes the scenarios, which are obviously a bigger translation job so we’ve had to make sure that these are mostly ready now. The stretch-goal linked scenarios by guest designers were, naturally, delivered to us some time after the campaign ended - hence all that playtesting by our team over the winter break. It’s been a pleasure to work with all of our guest designers, who we think have all brought something new and different to their scenarios. They’ve done us proud and we’re excited to see what you think of them.

If you know someone else that might appreciate them then please do point them in the direction of our pre-order site. I know we’ve mentioned this in the last two updates but we’re getting emails asking about it on a daily basis. As a collaborative team we appreciate all the help we can get - whether that’s simply spreading the word or something more substantial. On that note we’re currently looking for someone with AD skills to help with web design. If you think you’d like to join the team - which works without remuneration - then please do drop us an email.

It’s nice when we see that our efforts have been appreciated and to that end we are honoured to have been selected by Tomasza as one of the top 5 games of 2017 in the For 2 Players website, in Poland.

Finally, a couple of quick bits of news about our other games in case you’ve missed them - Perdition’s Mouth: Traitor Guard has been nominated for most anticipated horror game of 2018 on BGG. We’d really appreciate it if you could spare a minute to follow this link and vote for us. Meanwhile, we’re also currently preparing for our first Kickstarter campaign of the new year - Darwinning! - will launch at 5pm UTC on Friday, 20th January.

Lee and the DDP team

Happy New Year
over 6 years ago – Thu, Jan 04, 2018 at 12:01:01 AM

 So, how was your first day back? Things were, perhaps, a little slower at DDP over the winter break but there was very definitely still a lot going on - in fact some team members managed to take advantage of time off work to put in even more hours. So a lot of scenario-testing and translation work was accomplished while the rest of the world was making merry. Nevertheless, things have started to get back to normal here in the last day or two.

The most significant development in the last week or so has been the opening of our pre-order store. Anybody that missed our Kickstarter campaign can pre-order the game at the MSRP of $129 now through Backerkit but our own pre-order system will remain open for some time after we close Backerkit. This means if you’ve got any friends who want to get a copy of the game you’ve got somewhere to point them towards right up until we begin shipping. If they want to know why they have to pay more than you did then point them towards the update in which we explained the reasons for the increase in MSRP - principally due to the increase in component costs.

We’re delivering material to the printers in waves and our first deadline is just a couple of weeks away. Right now, we’re comfortable with that - everything remains on track for both the new components and for the translated components.

We’d like to take this opportunity to wish you a very Happy New Year and to thank you again for your support in 2017. 2018 marks the next step in Dragon Dawn Productions’s commitment to producing games for you. Timo and Tiinallisa are taking to the road and will attend many conventions throughout Europe over the course of the year, being joined by other team members as and when they can. We’ll also, of course, be bringing a new game to Kickstarter in just a few short weeks and we’ll finally be bringing the long-awaited Soul Spire expansion to Perdition’s Mouth: Abyssal Rift to Kickstarter in October.

It’s going to be an exciting year, we hope you’ll join us here and come and say ‘hello’ at the conventions.

Lee and the DDP team

Winterval
over 6 years ago – Mon, Dec 25, 2017 at 11:21:42 PM

It’s very likely that this will be the last update of the year, as the DDP team, like much of the rest of the world, spend a little time with our families to close out 2017. Coming so soon after the last update there’s not a lot of news but we don’t want to leave too long a gap between the last update of this year and the first of next year.

We thought that you could appreciate our alternative "Shuffle the deck" response card, but our artist forgat to put the "Shuffle the deck" text in it. It'll be there before this is printed.

Everything is running perfectly to schedule at the moment, including translating all the text in the game for the fully localised versions. As you might imagine, this is quite an undertaking and by far the most labour-intensive task for the revised edition - so it’s good that we’re blessed with such enthusiastic team members who can help with this task and keep us on track.

Don’t forget that if you’re an owner of the first edition and you’d like to convert it to a translated version of the revised edition in German, Spanish or Italian then you should answer the poll on BGG. This may very well be the only time we consider offering this service - especially if it’s not popular - so do make your voice heard before 24th December, when the poll closes. We’re also still open to offers of help for translation if you think you’d like to join the team, particularly for Italian.

As you know, Backerkit is now open for you to complete your survey and manage your pledge. Over five hundred people have already done this - if that includes you then thank you! If you haven’t yet then there’s no need to panic, it will remain open for a while yet - probably until the end of February (we’ll let you know the exact date when we set it). Thank you, too, if you’ve helped us identify a bug in Backerkit. We spent a lot of time trying to make sure everything was running smoothly before launching it - running through the exercise with every team member - but there were still some problems that you’ve helped us identify and fix. If you come across anything else that doesn’t seem right then do let us know.

Speaking of managing your pledge, we wanted to let you know that Gloom of Kilforth, which was designed by one of our guest designers - Tristan Hall - and was on Kickstarter around the same time as us, now has its own pledge manager on Backerkit up and running and is accepting late pledges from anyone who missed the campaign at the time.

Finally - thank you for making the end of our year so busy and for making the campaign so spectacular. We hope you have a fine holiday season - whatever your beliefs - and a great 2018, in which we’ll continue to provide you with lots of updates on our progress.

Lee, Timo and the DDP team.

Open for Business
over 6 years ago – Sun, Dec 17, 2017 at 11:53:15 PM

We’re very pleased to announce that Backerkit is now (finally!) open. We have sent invitations to some backers and others will follow in the next 24 hours or so. We have to send these in batches but if you haven’t received an invitation by the end of the week let us know. We’re sorry for the delay in getting this up, as explained previously it was principally caused by difficulties in obtaining US postage quotes.

During the campaign we also promised to look into the possibility of producing language ‘conversion’ packs, including all text components of the game for owners of the first edition who want to play the game in their own language. We have now got the estimates for this and have put a poll up on BGG. Please do go and vote to have your say - we will only produce these if there is sufficient interest, so your vote counts.

 While we’ve been trying to sort this out we’ve also been getting on with other things, like playtesting the new scenarios and agreeing a production schedule with our manufacturer.

In the process of doing the latter, we’ve found that many of our quotes have increased by 50% from those that we received when planning this campaign. This is principally due to the increase in material costs in China. In the long term this is going to affect all of us in the hobby as prices continue to rise, in the short term it makes life very difficult for fledgling companies like ours. It means we’re slightly out of pocket. It does not threaten the production of the game.

Due to the increase in production costs the MSRP of the game will be higher than that for the first edition - so your pledge now looks even more like a bargain. Of course, a lot of new content was added to the game during the last Kickstarter campaign, so we think those picking up the game at the revised MSRP are also getting a good deal. We will accept pledge upgrades for the game for the next few months and you can upgrade to any of the pledge levels for the in-campaign prices (excluding the $29 level, which we stated during the campaign would increase to $35 after the campaign was over). If you’d like to help fill the hole in our pockets you can do so by getting your friends to pre-order over on our website (at the new MSRP but including some freebies not available from retail) or by throwing some extra money in the tips jar in backerkit.The pre-order will also be available through backerkit, for those that did not pledge during the campaign.

Finally, as part of playtesting, we’ve begun to test some of the scenarios from our special guest designers and we can now reveal their names - some of them for the first time. Tristan Hall (designer of Gloom of Kilforth and 1066, Tears to Many Mothers) you’ve known about since some time during the campaign. Those of you that watched the livestream on the final day will also know that Timo suggested that Friedemann Friese (Power Grid, Friday, 504, Fabled Fruit, etc.) would be another of our guest designers and we can now confirm that. As you might expect, Friedemann’s scenario does some interesting things that we haven’t seen in the game before.

Our Spanish guest designer is Paco Garcia Jaen. Spanish backers will be familiar with Paco as the editor of GMS Magazine. Our Italian designer, meanwhile, might be more familiar to international backers - Marco Valtriani (Super Fantasy: Ugly Snouts Assault, Vudù) is a designer that, like Friedemann has designed a number of respected games. All of their scenarios will be included in every edition of the game.

Lee and the DDP team