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Legends of Sleepy Hollow

Created by Dice Hate Me Games

Find Ichabod Crane in this scenario-based cooperative game for 1 to 4 players set three days after Washington Irving's classic tale.

Latest Updates from Our Project:

Forging Forward
over 4 years ago – Tue, Dec 03, 2019 at 11:50:54 PM

Hello, Legends! Maggie here with your first December update! We are going to talk about changes to the playtesting schedule, our reasons for the changes, and the impact we hope they will have. 

Playtesting Schedule

In our last update, I had mentioned that we were ready to release Chapter 7-9 on that Friday, but after receiving intense and important feedback from our playtesters we decided we needed to re-release Chapter 1-6. We will be releasing Chapters 1-6 on Friday of this week, Chapters 7-9 next Friday and Chapters 10-12 on Wednesday, December 18th. 

In addition to re-releasing the chapters, we are also going to provide our testers with a survey that ask more pointed questions about gameplay but still allows up-ended responses.

This does put us behind on the playtesting schedule we had crafted originally, but we will not allow it to affect our timelines. Our playtesters are very dedicated and we will be able to start playtesting more aggressively internally after PAX Unplugged this weekend, so we do not foresee the game lacking playtesting because of the delay. We are still planning on wrapping up playtesting at the beginning of January so that we can begin the editing and layout process. 

The Reasons

This game is very complex. Every chapter adds in additional elements and new mechanics in some way, shape, or form. This means any tweaks or edits have large ripple effects, and while Chris Burton, our Lead Game Developer, was keeping up with the tweaks, it became clear that the documents needed cleaned up and edited more holistically to allow our playtesters to continue. 

The Impact

We have already seen the positive effect of this decision internally. We have worked out several rules issues that needed further clarification, caught mechanical errors and gently tweaked things to ramp up the intensity. 

Overall, we are hoping that this will allow our playtesters to provide us with more direct feedback and will allow them to test the tweaked content with a set of completely updated rules, instead of pieced together parts. 

Next update I will let everyone know if our schedule has been successful until then stay warm!

See ya'll soon!

- Maggie

P.S. We will be at PAX Unplugged (Booth #2513) if you want to stop by and say hi! We will not have Legends of Sleepy Hollow available to demo.

A Sumptuous Autumn
over 4 years ago – Tue, Nov 19, 2019 at 09:47:56 PM

Hello Legends! Maggie here with your mid-November update! This update is going to be short and sweet because we are still in the thick of playtesting, collecting feedback, and working that feedback into the game. 

Playtesting

We made the decision after my last update to delay releasing chapters 4-6 by a week. This allowed playtesters more time to play with the starting Legends and give more accurate feedback. Chapter 4 and 5 were released last Friday and chapter 6 was released Monday. We have already started working through the playtester notes and are on track to release chapters 7-9 on this Friday. 

Chapter Names

In the last update I promised you chapter names and you will see a list of them below. We would like to note that some of these are subject to change when we are going through our editing process, but it will give you a hint of what's to come! 

  • Disrupted Learning
  • Visiting the Van Tassels
  • The Final Resting Place
  • Shadows of the Past
  • Facing the Darkness
  • Hiding in the Hay Bales
  • In Search of Knowledge
  • Church Demons
  • Heart of Darkness
  • Battle at the Bridge

Check back next month to learn the expansion chapter names!

See ya'll soon!

-Maggie

Dreary days- perfect playtesting weather!
over 4 years ago – Tue, Nov 05, 2019 at 11:44:41 PM

Hello, Legends! Maggie again with more excellent news about Legends of Sleepy Hollow! This update is going to cover playtester feedback and the status of the remaining chapters. 

Playtester Feedback

Our playtesters received chapters 1-3 last Thursday, a week ahead of schedule, and have already sent in a lot of awesome feedback. Chris is compiling all of it as I type this and we will be meeting later today to discuss tweaks, edits, etc. If we run into any major updates, we will let everyone know but currently, we are expecting a lot of it to gentle balance tweaking. 

Chapters 4-6 will be released on November 7. 

Remaining Chapters

Chris and I will be continuing to work on chapters 6-8 this week and expansion chapters. We had hoped to wrap up 6-8 last week, but we were both sick on Friday and didn't get as far as we'd like. 

I'll have more information for you on November 19, including chapter titles that will tell you a little more about the story and how it has changed! 

See ya'll soon!

-Maggie 

All Hallows Eve Approaches!
over 4 years ago – Wed, Oct 30, 2019 at 01:31:46 AM

Hello folks! Maggie here with a slightly delayed update and an apology! 

I was supposed to post an update on Tuesday, October 15th but in the chaos of wrapping up Legends of Sleepy Hollow chapters and preparing to leave for Essen Spiel, the biggest board gaming convention in Europe, I had to push this update until I was back from Germany. I apologize for not informing everyone sooner and for the delay in general but have no fear Chris Burton got a TON of work done while Alex, Jenn and I were away in Germany.  Let's talk about what is done, what is in progress, and when our playtesters can expect to be getting files. 

What is done

As of this evening, Chapters 1-5, 9-10, Legends builds and monster builds are all completed. Chris Burton and I plan on playing through Chapter 3-5 one more time to make sure any tweaks that happened while three-fourths of us were out of the country are correct. 

Before we left for Germany though, Chris and I had played through so many sessions that we wore one of the poor Gobkin's out! 

Gobkin loses arms due to excessive fighting! NOTE: these are pre-production samples and not a final product

Please note that this Gobkin is a pre-production sample and made from more brittle/less durable plastic. 

What is in Progress

We are in progress on Chapters 6-8 and 11-12 currently. This week we will focus on 6-8 and complete them by October 31st and we hope to complete 11 and 12 the following Thursday. 

Playtesters 

We are still on schedule to send files out to playtesters starting on November 7th. We may push up to October 31st, All Hallows Eve,  to allow testers more time with the content. Our current playtesting schedule is: 

  • November 7th: Chapters 1-3
  • November 14th: Chapters 4-6
  • November 21st: Chapters 7-9
  • November 28th: Chapters 10-12

That's it for now folks! We hope you have a positively spooOootectular All Hallows Eve!  

See ya'll next Tuesday!

-Maggie 

The Path Ahead
over 4 years ago – Sat, Oct 05, 2019 at 02:55:18 AM

Hello, Legends! Maggie here with your Friday timeline update! We apologized for posting this late and I can personally assure you that it was because we were working on Legends of Sleepy Hollow all afternoon, which went amazing! 

New Timeline

In our yesterday we went over the updated story outline, what changes we currently know we will be making, what changes we could make potentially, and what our internal due dates are. Most of these items had already been discussed in some way previously, but we need to organize the chaos further in order to continue moving forward efficiently. Needless to say, it was a long meeting but well worth it.

From that meeting, we settled on the deadlines below.

  • October 10th: Finalized character builds, complete Chapter 10
  • October 17th: Complete Chapters 2,9 and 1
  • October 24th: Complete Chapters 3, 4, and 5
  • October 31st: Complete Chapters 6, 7, and 8 
  • November 7th: Complete Chapters 11 and 12

You might notice that chapters are being completed totally out of order. This is because some chapters function very similar to each other and need to be developed side by side to avoid errors and repetitiveness. You might also notice, we are completing the final chapter of the base game first. It seems weird, but it will allow us to see how the final character builds stack up against the Horseman and all of the monsters. The monsters grow in power over time, just like the Legends, so it's important to make sure the scaling is mirrored. 

I'm personally very happy to report that we are ahead of schedule and this afternoon Chris Burton and I were able to complete the character builds! These builds are similar to what you knew before, and as I mentioned in Tuesday's update their backstories have changed slightly to make them more compelling. Every character now has three different paths they can choose to play in the game that will develop as the story unfolds, and it will lead them to final character build that is uniquely specialized!  

Playtesting 

We will begin sending content to our playtesters at the beginning of November. We will send content out weekly in three chapter chunks. The schedule currently looks like:

  • November 7th: Chapters 1-3
  • November 14th: Chapters 4-6
  • November 21st: Chapters 7-9
  • November 28th: Chapters 10-12

This will allow players time to test through content before we throw more at them and has proven to be a successful method for us in the past. We have already received a few messages from backers asking to join our playtesting forums to assist with Legends of Sleepy Hollow, and that is awesome! 

If you would like to sign-up to be a playtester, please email: [email protected]!

Bonus: Meet the team!

We have talked a lot about Chris Burton, Alex, Jennifer and myself so I figured it is time to introduce ourselves to you! 

Tall person in blue is Chris Burton, crouching person in purple is Alex, leaning person with necklace is Jennifer, and short person that took the selfie is Maggie

See ya'll in soon!

-Maggie