Alone™: 2nd Print Run with New Contents and Localizations

A quick shipment update!
about 4 years ago – Sat, Feb 15, 2020 at 12:29:45 AM

Dear backers,

the wait is almost over, we're receiving the first news or ships reaching their destination, with the final part of the shipping process poised to start soon for most countries!

AUSTRALIA / NEW ZEALAND: The games have already been unloaded from the ship and gone through customs. They will soon be received by VR DISTRIBUTION, who will soon start to send out the parcels to your homes. Expect to receive a tracking number in the next couple of weeks.

EUROPE / SOUTH AMERICA / ISRAEL / KUWAIT / SAUDI ARABIA / TURKEY / AFRICA: The ship has arrived in Hamburg, and the containers are being inspected by the German authorities for routine controls. As soon as the checks will be done (it seems it may take a while, from what we've been told), the games will then be sent to FULFILLMENT EUROPE to start the final bit of their journey. We will keep you posted.

CANADA, USA, PUERTO RICO: The games are still traveling on board of the vessel ZIM ANTWERP en route to Jacksonville, where it is expected to arrive (a bit later than expected) on February 24. We will let you know when QUARTERMASTER LOGISTICS will receive the games and be able to start the final shipping stage.

We can't wait for you to receive Alone... and we're almost there! XD

Until next time!

Sincerely,

the Horrible team

Shipment update! All aboard the fulfillment train (actually, ships and trucks).
over 4 years ago – Sat, Jan 18, 2020 at 12:23:29 AM

Dear backers,

let's start with the best news... your games are officially on their way to your home! We are working with 4 different fulfillment companies to deliver Alone all over the world. Most of the games are traveling by ship, while some are traveling by land. Read below to know all of the details!

AUSTRALIA / NEW ZEALAND: These games are being handled by VR DISTRIBUTION. They are traveling on board of the vessel OOCL ITALY en route to Adelaide, where it is expected to arrive on February 2.

CANADA, USA, PUERTO RICO: These games are being handled by QUARTERMASTER LOGISTICS. They are traveling on board of the vessel ZIM ANTWERP en route to Jacksonville, where it is expected to arrive on February 17.

EUROPE / SOUTH AMERICA / ISRAEL / KUWAIT / SAUDI ARABIA / TURKEY: These games are being handled by FULFILLMENT EUROPE (which, despite its name, actually serves many parts of the world, not just Europe). They are traveling on board of the vessel COSCO HARMONY en route to Hamburg, where it is expected to arrive on February 11.

After these ships will reach their destinatio harbour and after the games have gone through duty inspection, they will be received by our fulfillment hubs, from where they will be rerouted to their final destinations.

ASIA: These games are being handled by VFI ASIA, but they are not traveling by ship; they are traveling by land from the factory to their hub, to then be rerouted to CHINA, HONG KONG, INDIA, INDONESIA, JAPAN, KOREA, MALAYSIA, NEW CALEDONIA, PHILIPPINES, SINGAPORE, TAIWAN, and THAILAND.

Even if loading everything on all those ships (or trucks) took slightly longer than expected, we still expect you to receive the games between the end of February and the first half of March. Before we wrap up this campaign update, we would also like to share a few pictures from the latest batch of production samples that we received, to show a few things that we've never been able to show to you before. Take a look!

That's all folks! We're sure you'll be following the route of the ships just like us, and be prepared to receive a tracking code once your game leaves the hub of our fulfillment companies for the final portion of their long journey. We can't wait for you to finally receive Alone! ;)

Until next time!

Sincerely,

the Horrible team

Final production update... we're almost there!
over 4 years ago – Wed, Dec 18, 2019 at 11:30:58 PM

Dear backers,

first of all, sorry for the lack of updates during the last few weeks. We believe in fewer but significant updates, but writing significant updates takes quite a bit of time, and we've been very hard at work to deliver you Alone as soon as possible. We should have made at least one more update during november, but work just got in the way, sorry about that. Rest assured, though, that you were not forgotten!

Let's go straight to the juicy news: and we are mostly on track with the schedule we shared with you during our previous update. The whole production was supposed to be ready to ship on december 20, but according to the latest updates we're receiving from the factory, it seems the final assembling stages will take slightly longer than they originally expected: we now expect the games to be ready for shipment on december 27, give or take, a week later than the date previously communicated by our factory. All in all, not that bad. This should not affect the delivery time too much, if we manage to have our forwarders load the games onto their respective boats without too many issues: you should all still receive your games by late february / early march. We'll keep you posted, and we'll also share with you the names of the ships that will carry your games across the oceans as soon as they are available to us!

Some of you may have also noticed an email coming from our Backerkit profile, asking you to verify your shipping address: with the time of shipping now approaching fast, we need you all to make a final check on the shipping address you submitted on Backerkit (and make changes, if needed) as soon as possible. Your shipping addresses will be automatically locked in 2 days, so make sure you have the correct address submitted before then!

Another service communication before moving to more interesting stuff: there are 22 backers who still need to fill their survey (that means they still have to confirm their order, pay for shipping costs, and submit their shipping address). We've been repeatedly sending these backers reminders about it, but they never replied so far. Additionally, there are 2 more backers who did answer their survey, but have payment processing issues they need to solve. These backers have also been sent numerous reminders over the past few months. If you belong to either of these groups of backers, you need to confirm your survey really fast at this point, or we won't be able to ship you your rewards!

Now, back to game-related stuff. We would like to share with you a collection of pictures of the final production stages that happened between our previous update and now, to give you a sneak peek at the work that's been going on behind the scenes during the past few weeks!

The following pictures are from around mid november, after the printing materials were all printed, but before they were put through the cutting machines:

And these are from a few weeks later, when the first fully produced components started to come out of the factory chain: these pictures show parts from one of the first French copies.

Next, a couple of older production photos: a while ago, a few of you commented about the lack of feet of the Big Droid / A.I. Avatar miniature. We worked on that too, and here is the final result (these pictures are actually from a few months back, but we just realized we never shared them with you):

Finally, we are very happy to share some production pictures of the many stretch goals / add-ons that were available during the campaign! We're quite satisfied with how they all ended up looking!

The end of our long journey is drawing near! The next time you'll hear from us it will be time to celebrate the start of shipping, and it will be soon! In the meantime, everyone here at the Horrible Guild headquarters qould like to wish you all a merry holiday season!

Until next time!

Sincerely,

the Horrible team

New production schedule (with shipping date!) & a big company change!
over 4 years ago – Mon, Oct 21, 2019 at 02:38:06 AM

Dear backers,

as we mentioned in some of our previous update, we are a bit late on the originally planned release date of October 2019. There are several reasons for this delay.

• The development of the new rules for the Avatar and Deep expansions that where unlocked during the campaign took a bit more than expected, but it was eventually completed (and we even shared preview rulebooks so that you could check them out in advance) and, by itself, it wouldn't have caused much of a delay.
• The production of the resin copies of the new miniatures (one of the many steps needed in preparation of the actual production of the miniatures) was delayed by our resin caster by one full month (we mentioned this already in a previous update). We did our best to minimize the impact of this delay on the final shipping date, but some of the final delay we're having has been definitely caused by this accident.
• After we showed you the first samples of the 3D plastic tokens, a problem in the process used to mass produce them emerged, that would have caused a few minor (but quite unaesthetic) circular marks to appear in the background of the front side of the tokens (around the symbol of the token, basically). This problem was not visible on the pre-production samples we received, and we could not accept a suboptimal look for the plastic tokens, which are meant to be a cosmetic upgrade over the base cardboard components. We investigated a few options to minimize these marks in the final mass-produced tokens, but it proved to be impossible with the existing tool. Luckily, our factory eventually came up with a brilliant solution that effectively erases the unaesthetic marks completely... but the side effect was that we had to remake the tool (losing time), and the new tool would also be quite a bit more expensive than the more classic tool we were using before. We bit the bullet and gladly payed the extra money to deliver you the best product possible, but some additional time was lost because of this.
• The final main factor that caused some further delay is the Alone project in its entirety contains a lot of text: 4 rulebooks (with one of them being a very text-heavy scenario book), lots of cards, and a huge screen full of player references... and this is just the "first print" content, without counting the additional content unlocked during the second campaign! A lot of text means a lot of time for translations: we knew that, of course, and we started working on the files with our business partners (HeidelBÄR Games for Germany, Ghenos Games for Italy, and Edge Entertainment for Spain and France) well in advance. However, the translation of a project as big as Alone was a huge task that proved to me more complex and time consuming for us and our partners than we all expected. Both us and our partners felt that taking a bit more time to polish the translation work, at the cost of some delay, would be more beneficial than a rushed project.

We are now happy to announce that the work on all files is done: they have been sent to the factory for printing, and the last step of this journey has finally begun! We are sorry we didn't manage to meet our original (and admittedly very ambitious) shipping date plans, but we hope you will appreciate our efforts to deliver you the best product possible. We think that quality is more important than meeting a deadline at all costs, and we're sure many of you will agree with this sentiment.

Without further ado, as we promised in our previous update, here is the new production schedule, with sea shipping and final fulfillment dates!

The production and assembling of all parts of the core game and the four (four!) expansions that you will receive will be over slightly before the holiday season, just in time to be loaded on the ships that will bring them overseas to our various international fulfillment hubs during the holidays and beyond. We will notify you when the ships will depart, and tell you the name of the ships so that you can track them during their travel. 4 to 6 weeks later, the ships will reach their destination harbours and go through customs (we will take care of any import duties that may be needed during this stage). 1 to 2 weeks later, your games should reach our fulfillment hubs by truck, ready to be shipped towards their final destination: your home! We expect the whole process to last for 2 to 4 weeks, depending on your country and exact position of your home (bigger cities usually receive shipments earlier than smaller / more remote towns, but there is nothing we can do about it unfortunately).

So there you have it! Let us repeat once again that we are sorry this will take longer than we originally planned, but we are sure it is for the best and we hope you will understand :)

Finally, some news about us as a company. We've grown a great deal since Lorenzo Silva established the company in 2014. Over the years, from a team of just two people (including Lorenzo) we expanded to a big family of seven, we moved to a bigger office, and we increased the amount of games we release each year. Now we have a big catalog with several worldwide hits, and a lot of new projects in our pipeline.

We decided we needed a new name, one that could be faithful to our story while also better describing who we are today, compared to who we were when we started, back in 2014, and with a new name, a new logo is also needed. Without further ado, please allow us to introduce you to our new selves... we were known as "Horrible Games", but now we are the Horrible Guild!

Our new logo still features our beloved tentacle (with an updated look and a new nice "shield" background), our characteristic shade of green, as well as our initials "HG"... it's new, but you can also still clearly identify us.

Regarding the new name, we think that the word "guild" better describes us as we are now, a bigger group of people sharing the same goal: designing, developing and producing cool and innovative games capable of bringing fun to everyone.

The additional benefit of the change is that, finally, you won't have to tell your friends that we don't actually make "horrible games" when you introduce one of our games to them: we are simply a bunch of silly people with a horrible name doing great games! 😜

Our new branding will officially debut next week at the SPIEL'19 fair in Essen, Germany. You can come pay us a visit in Hall 4, booth 4-A108. We are also building a brand new website at our new web address www.horribleguild.com (Look, Mom, no hyphen!) and we will also update all our social media profiles to reflect the change (but if you already follow us, there shouldn't be anything you need to do).

You will also see our company name and logo change here, on Kickstarter: you don't have to worry, it's still us, and we're working harder than ever to deliver you Alone!

Until next time!

Play HORRIBLE, join the GUILD!

Sincerely,
the Horrible Guild

September production update! A new adventure starting! More!
over 4 years ago – Thu, Sep 26, 2019 at 02:23:11 AM

Dear backers,

the last few weeks have been incredibly busy at the Horrible headquarters, and we have some new juicy production updates to show you!

The factory mande the first injection test, and we received the first samples of the plastic injection-molded miniatures for the new Avatar and Deep expansions that were unlocked during this campaign! The factory we are using is the same we used for the first print run of Alone, so we knew what kind of quality we could expect from them, but seeing the real thing always blows away your expectations. Take a look at these pics!

We also received the first pre-production samples of the plastic tokens add-on! A bit of work is still being done on this from a production process point of view, but the early results are quite encouraging. Keep in mind that these are still pre-production samples: you see white/opaque tokens in these pictures, but the final product will be colored/translucent as we announced during the campaign, of course!

Regarding a shipping date: while we can't give you a precise answer just yet, we're in a late enough production stage to start fully understanding how late we are with the miniatures because of the delayed delivery of the resin copies we mentioned in a previous update, plus the status of the rest of the production. We're working on a new, fully updated production schedule that we will be able to share with you soon, in the very next campaign update. This schedule will include all missing steps from now to the day the game will be at your door, including sea shipping and hub fulfillment, with the expected time frames for each step, all wrapped in a nicely colored infographic to make it as clear and easy to understand as we can make it. Stay tuned!

One final note: as we announced in the previous update, we just recently launched another kickstarter campaign for a new game of ours, Unicorn Fever. The project has been already funded before the end of the first day of the campaign, and some of you already joined us in this new adventure. We hope you will take a look at this new project, but again we want to reassure you that the Unicorn Fever campaign will have no impact on the delivery of the second print run of Alone! The two projects do not overlap in any way (with the exception of this humble scribe of yours, who deals with writing the updates and replying to the comments for both campaigns, but that does not affect production anyway :P).

You'll hear more from us about Alone soon!

Sincerely,

the Horrible team