Eye spotted this, somewhat older, article in which Matthew Hopkins talks about That Which Sleeps, its continuing delays, how he got a refund of what he spent on the Kickstarter campaign and even hints that this might not be realized at all.

Way back in 2014 I spent $50 on a Kickstarter for a promising looking Indie Game called ‘That Which Sleeps’. Per my previous coverage, (1) the (delayed) game is supposedly an ‘evil-returning-god’ simulator where the player manipulates a living world to prepare for their return. The game had a great Kickstarter but since then developers have consistently failed to keep their promises. The game promised to beta in December 2014 yet a year on, 31st December 2015, no beta has been released. (2) On protesting and suggesting contact with the Federal Trade Commission (the US equivalent of Trading Standards in the UK) in October 2015, your author and others received refunds and were removed from the game forums.

I do not intend to fully recap the developers’ discourtesy, lack of professionalism or broken promises here. Readers are advised to refer to my previous articles. The high points are that during the Kickstarter the developers claimed that the project was low risk because much of the game was already written. Kickstarter materials stated, “We have a working game” and also that a scenario viewer was complete and ready to release directly after the campaign, which ended in October 2014.

Beta was promised for December 2014, then March 2015 and it is now the 31st December 2015, New Year’s Eve. The supposedly working game is now in its second chronological year of post Kickstarter development. The scenario viewer has never been released although a partially functional map editor has been. After increasingly acrimonious forum posts from backers in October 2015, on 12/10/2015 developer Josh Perry promised some gameplay videos. There were to be three released at one week intervals showing the early, mid and late games. So far only one has been released.

The Kickstarter page for That Wich Sleeps has been updated last month with more information about the state of the game and a FAQ.

The North Burns

The North Burns has undergone some significant changes over the last year, and you may have seen some of that in the video. I was hesitant to discuss the scenario at length during the video as I have done that prior but I wanted to discuss some of the changes here.

The Barrens suffered a severe reduction in overall POIs and had a lot of their adventure and ruin focused POIs moved elsewhere. We did this to not only make late game marches more immediately threatening but also to prevent a common strategy where players would have 3-4 agents all in the barrens searching for artifacts and ancient ruins. While a few were moved to distant areas most of the unique elements were moved to the large island in the north of the map, which now also holds the Sentinel. In addition to this requiring more investment on the player's part to get to and make use of these POIs it also lures heroes into dangerous expeditions that aren't necessarily at your doorstep.

The Golden Republic of Toln has had its entire off-map kingdom brought onto the map, a militant/pirate neighbor added to the south, and pathways up to more badlands and tundra to the north. We did this to create much more potential for both chaos and order in that area, and we also moved the Mercenary modifier from Tolnspire to a new city off the coast. With the new surrounding territories Tolnspire as well as the massive presence of slaves the city already has enough powderkegs without treacherous mercenary insurrection. We moved The Court of Bone from the west up north, centering The Cult of Mirth's city-based itinerary around the sea and making its appearances in critical moments more frequent. This also serves to make the Court's military threat more unique instead of pinning it in an area already brimming with potential allies.

Minotaurs were added in the western wilds, just one of the four tribes but we also added the ability for a second tribe to migrate in from one of the off-map connections. The Elves were moved slightly to support more aggressive movements by the barbarian tribes and also to make threatening them with corrupted barbarians or the Iron Mountain easier.

Dwarf Holds have been added to Arden and also to the volcano near Hereldus bringing the total of Abandoned Holds up to four. While the North Burns still starts with no established dwarf kingdoms (just some Clay Dwarf modifiers) you can expect this doubling of Holds to almost guarantee at least dwarf attempt to reclaim one of the holds.

Omm now straddles the mountains that once served as its southern border, we did this to create alternate paths for Omm to move against either the Shadowmere rising to the east or the possible undead hordes that can come from the Offmap plains to the west.

The Serpentlands of the Brood were brought closer to the coast, cutting down on the extra POIs needed to get there. This was done mostly because the Brood rarely managed any meaningful contribution to the campaign and by at least allowing them a short transit to the coast they will be a stronger lure both for adventurers and for agents.

Thanks Eye.

First look at the gameplay of the promising strategy RPG That Which Sleeps:

King Dinosaur Games made a video about the strategy game That Which Sleeps showing the current development progress:

That Which Sleeps is a turn based strategy game that lets you take the role of an ancient evil that that must deceive the world about its imminent return. If you're interested in the video please follow us as we will be releasing several gameplay videos in the weeks to come.

King Dinosaur Games next post-funding update for That Which Sleeps has information on the games events, opportunities, political screen,and talks about the mod tools.

We are continuing to work on finalizing the user interface elements, as well as the very time-consuming act of bug squashing - but we have a few more elements to show off today as we get ever closer to the release of our mod tools and, following that, the beta release.

King Dinosaur Games released the next post-funding update for That Which Sleeps with information on the games factions, challenges, and talks about the updated FAQ. 

Kickstarter Update #24

Hello to our Backers!We've been regularly making weekly updates over on our forums - but I wanted to highlight some of the key points since our last official update.

Updated FAQ

We finally got around to pointing the FAQ to the proper link - you can find it HERE - this FAQ is almost entirely community generated and a huge thank you to Sean for helping to update and maintain this.

Final Thoughts (for now)

Things are going much slower than we had initially hoped, but the game looks better and better with each passing week - our excitement is at an all time high and our focus remains on releasing the Mod Tools and Beta as soon as humanly possible.  We will give more concrete details on Beta and release as we draw closer.

King Dinosaur Games posted the next update for That Which Sleeps with more information about various parts or the game, and shares a new video about modding tools.

Dev Log 6 - Modding Tutorial

We've had a lot of fun putting together informational videos and we think future modders could really benefit from a walk-through of some of the features and elements of the in game modding tools.

Warning - we throw a ton of information at you here and showcase how some of the modding tools work.  Not for the faint of heart!  We plan on continuing to release additional tutorials that cover all the rest of the scenario creation and game functions, including Cultures, Nations, Heroes, and much more - stay tuned for that.

King Dinosaur Games sent me a link for the next Developer Log video for That Which Sleeps that shows how the new Map editor will work on the games release.

Well here is the latest post-funding update from King Dinosaur Games for That Which Sleeps has new information about Rewards, the Finalized Map, Old Ones, and Heroes.

Development Progress

As of last week the map is complete on the technical level with in-house alpha assets being shipped out to artists for improvement.

The Map Builder is complete and will be in the hands of Beta Backers this weekend, and most important - every asset type is now in various stages of creation.  

Yes, we wanted to be here almost a month ago but the fact that we are now done with the high-risk unknowns puts us in a good place to adhere to our schedule going forward.  We are trending towards the end of March for the beta at this time but that is only allowing for all of the allotted unexpected risk time has been used up already, it is entirely possible that we may push into early April.

King Dinosaur Games latest update for That Which Sleeps has news that a new artist called Richard Luong has joined the development team to help illustrate the game.

We are really excited to be able to announce that Richard Luong will be working with us to illustrate and create the look and feel for the Old Ones in That Which Sleeps.

Richard is an incredibly talented artist responsible for some seriously ghoulish creations and is perhaps best known for creating the art for the hit board game Cthulu Wars.  Check out some of his creations below.

King Dinosaur Games latest post-funding update for That Which Sleeps is about the games development progress, assets, lore, and your community votes.

Development Progress

Map, Map, Map - the map has remained the priority since our last update.  After nailing down the technical specs we began a back and forth with our artists to generate the kind of cartographic aesthetic that the game demands - after some miscommunications we decided that having an integrated Map Editor tool was definitely a necessity to ensure that the map stayed on track and came out looking the way we wanted it to.  While working with the artists we also made a lot of progress on the necessary overhauls for the eventual integration of the stretch goals, allowing us to begin the laborious process of updating the many data types that got modified. 

The Good - A Map Editor soon to be released which has a robust set of features for sharing your creations with fellow map makers.  We continue to increase the flexibility of the engine when it comes to dynamic terrain generation and the additional functionality promises new fiendish ways to bring about your return.  We've integrated several of the stretch goal features that are related to dynamic generation and are three weeks ahead of schedule with our coding timeline. Event Assets and GUI Assets are starting to come in on schedule.

The Bad - Map Assets are four weeks behind schedule, resulting in a significant delay to the Map Editor.  The decision to tie the scenario viewer to the new map engine lead to a resulting delay as well, meaning we still don't have beta usersreviewing assets though we are at critical decision points.  Unit Assets have yet to start coming in which are the highest priority after the map.

All in all things are looking good - the quality of what we're receiving is very high and though the delays to the map have been stressful the results have been increasingly rewarding.  The map is taking a large percentage of our time but it is where you spend 95% of your time in the game, making sure we capture the feel and functionality properly is worth the extra effort.  The March Beta timeline is on track.

Another update that was missed while I was gone is for That Which Sleeps with information from developer King Dinosaur Games about the gamed development.

Development Timeline and Impact of Stretch Goals

With the technical specifications locked in for the new map structure and sufficient analysis done on the code to support our stretch goals we are now confident in setting a timeline for release to backers.  The overall delay will be three months for Beta, and an additional month for the full release to all backers.

December - Scenario VIewer release, New map complete, overhaul existing scenarios with new settings, map editor complete

March - Final testing, release Beta and Mod Tools to Beta Backers

May-June - Gods and Religions beta release and testing

June-July - Release  to all Backers

On seeing the success of the Kickstarter I had hoped we could keep the delays to only two months, but it turns out that would give us very little wiggle room in case of unexpected issues.  We came up with this timeline by ensuring all risks are understood and generating development hours based on prior experience.  After a final calculation I add +30% to the total time to account for potential overage.  We have confidence in the timeline presented and I do not believe their will be any additional delays.

The latest update for That Which Sleeps has news the forums are now live.

A new update for the funded kickstarter game That Which Sleeps from King Dinosaur Games shares information on how the Beta Schedule will work for backers of the game.

Beta Testing Schedule

As we close out our Kickstarter campaign we're prepared to rapidly transition back into development and testing.  We have the first four weeks after campaign set out ahead of us as follows:

• Initial Week - Access to Beta Backers forums where discussion will continue at around the same pace we've had here.  We do plan to continue to be very collaborative and we're looking to our Beta testers to give us honest and accurate feedback, as well as for things like bug testing, typos (you know we'll make these), and general QA.  Reference art for potential map assets will begin to be posted, and backers will be encouraged to contribute their own. 

• Week 2 - Deliver Scenario Viewer to Beta testers, we'll also begin the process of curating art assets and map assets for coordination and discussion.  At this point we'd like to begin the voting process (for all backers not just Beta) for inclusion of additional agents, races, etc from Stretch Goals.  We will also be assessing impact on overall timeline from additional Stretch Goals and providing a report to our backers.

• Week 3 - Start the asset pipeline working for us beginning with the incoming Map Assets.  Beta Testers will be able to see how the Assets interact with our existing features and come to a conclusion on which style best supports our intended mechanics and theme. 

• Week 4 - Continue with asset testing, begin to integrate new minions, portraits, and additional icons for review.  We will refine samples based on feedback and return for a final round of review.  Ideally we will wrap up the votes for community selected Agents, Old Ones, and Races.

From this point on we'll really get into the meat of the testing.  We also have several backers we need to interact with for guild, event, or agent creation - so we'll work with you to schedule blocks of time to work with you on an individual basis.

We'll get a little more specific and transparent with testing goals and dates as we get closer and transition over to Beta boards. 

Greg Micek of Cliqist interviewed King Dinosaur Games about their new game That Which Sleeps. As usual here is a small sample of the interview posted below.

Cliqist : On the Kickstarter page you mention King of Dragon Pass as a big influence on you. What about it had an impact?  I’ll shamefully admit that I have a boxed copy of it, but have never played it. Time to crack it open?

KDG : KoDP is one of the first things I installed on my laptop and I have it for my iPad.  Its just an incredibly immersive experience.  The way the events string together to create a story, but also the game play elements sort of allow you to “role-play” out your characters in a number of different ways.

I love games that build narrative and yet still give you room to use your imagination, and KoDP was great at that.  If you couldn’t tell by my gush-fest, yes play it.

Cliqist : You guys have crushed your original $12k funding goal, and are now over $50k.  Are you suprised?

KDG : Yes and no.  We know we have something really fun and unique based on the feedback we’ve gotten from fans and other developers.  Our biggest concern was would backers be able to look past our graphics and assets to see what really cool stuff we had at the core of the game.  Mostly they have and we get to use these funds to improve those visual elements.

We’ve also had some great media coverage that helped to get the word out to more people.  We’ve been very active in some well known discussion forums as well, and the folks there can attest to how active & responsive we’re been during this whole process

Cliqist : There’s a lot of Kickstarter scams and unfulfilled promises out there. What kind of assurances can you offer backers that you guys can deliver?

KDG : It comes down to personal integrity and professional experience.  We love our game, we love our backers, and no matter what we were dedicated to releasing something awesome.   Now we just have an additional 3,000 or so folks that have preordered and around 300 of them that are going to be working with us directly during the Beta releases.

A new update for the funded kickstarter game That Which Sleeps announces another stretch goal has been reached, and talks about the games new races.

Thank You to our Backers!

At the time of this writing we've surpassed some major milestones for our campaign and have over 3,000 backers! Not only has the Procedural Generation stretch goal been reached, but we are well onto our way to unlocking our first content based stretch goal - an additional playable agent chosen by the community.  Thanks to your support we'll be able to add tons of additional features, polish, and depth to That Which Sleeps.  

We still have a little less than a week to go, and since we're moving quickly toward our next stretch goal we felt like it was time to unveil the new major races.  

Much like the previous stretch goal, we'll describe some key elements and flavor around the new races as well as their hero classes and government types.  Finally, upon completion backers will get to vote on which one will be included as a new major race.  These races are highly unique and serve to illustrate how far the engine can be pushed with comprehensive custom government types.

The next update for the funded kickstarter game That Which Sleeps announces more stretch goals for the game after the first few have already been reached.

Stretch Goals Revealed!

At the time of this writing That Which Sleeps is over 400% funded and the procedural generation stretch goal is a mere $4,000 away from coming to fruition.  

That means That Which Sleeps is going to be released with even more polish and gameplay options for a much deeper and more sophisticated experience. With our in depth procedural generation process no two games will ever be the same and That Which Sleeps will have near endless replayability.  In case you missed our last update check out a peak into how we're going to go about procedural generation HERE.

Additional Stretch Goals Revealed

We polled our backers and they were mainly concerned with two things (for more in depth results of the poll go HERE).

• Stretch goals that would add more content or unique game play to That Which Sleeps.
• Stretch goals that would not slow down development or the Beta release.

So we took your feedback very seriously and laid out what we think are some really cool additions.

The next update for the funded kickstarter game That Which Sleeps has more information on Procedural Generation, minions, and talks about Steam Greenlight.

Procedural Generation Stretch Goal

That magic number is coming ever closer, and as part of our consideration in adding Procedural Generation we had created a Proof of Concept to ensure that not only was it possible to add in a reasonable time frame but also that it would have unique elements that other, similar approaches do not have.  After completing the prototype, we were sure we had an amazing way to implement some simple and yet compelling genealogical generation.

Let's Talk Minions

The under-appreciated but critically important Minions never get the focus they deserve, so we wanted to describe a few of our favorite minions, explain how you recruit them, and what other uses they might have.  

Orc Grunts - The low Orc on the totem poll, you can pretty much find these guys anywhere.  They take very little time to rally and have a minimal Command Cost so any Agent can make use of them, but they offer only very slight protection.  Best recruited when you are either desperate for some fodder and cheap labor, or if you have a synergy with orcs that gives them that extra punch they desperately need.

Deep Ones - Servants that lurk beneath the ocean, the Deep Ones are a unique minion that changes in mechanics the longer you have it under your command.  Beginning as skilled infiltrators who excel at targeted kidnappings, they slowly turn to their more bestial stature as shuffling monstrosities that reek of the sea.  In this form you'll find them more potent at combat and of even more use if you find yourself on the ocean.  However, to recruit these oddities you'll need to first strike a deal with their masters.

Courtesans - Not all minions are found outside city walls, and a Courtesans deft political maneuverings can lead to far more deaths than an Orc's Axe.  Any Capital City will find plenty of these cunning creatures available for recruitment, though if time is of the essence you'll need to pay in gold.  Make sure you know where your schemes will take you, a Courtesan's bonus to your Infiltration will only help in Cities.

Giants - Don't recruit a Giant if you want to stay unknown, they have the highest Profile in the game.  Of course, when you have a Giant at your side who is really going to come and stop you?  Difficult to recruit, even tougher to kill - you won't find Giants simply wandering along the road.  It may take powerful magic to bind one to your service, or the proper understanding of their ancient culture.

Shoggoths - Can you ever really command a Shoggoth?  Simply bringing one into being is feat enough, but in the moments of clarity where you can impose your will on one of these Eldritch Abominations you can drive your enemy to madness.  It would take an aberrant mind to summon one, in a place where odd intersections make proper arrangements.

If you'd like to see the actual stats for these minions, or if you'd like to get another sampling, please let us know!

That Which Has Been Greenlit

After only 3 weeks on Steam we have been Greenlit!  Thanks to all of you for voting - and you can expect to see us on Early Access in the first part of next year.  

Please note that the "preorder" tier here coincides with our Steam Early Access release, and the "Beta Backers" will be getting a copy of the game much sooner.  We'll post a more in-depth release schedule for Early Access and Beta Backers in a coming update.

Once we finish Kickstarter we'll continue to post regular updates for backers, and interact with backers on the Beta forums, but we'll also look to post regular updates and content on our Steam page - so consider adding us to your favorites list on Steam.

The latest update for the funded kickstarter game That Which Sleeps has more information on the games Lore, the new survey results, and new stretch goals.

Survey Results

In what was probably the most poorly designed survey in the history of surveys, we asked our backers how they felt about us approaching stretch goals and add-ons.  We had over 600+ responses (which is amazing) and I'll give a glimpse of the data below.  

Please note that we read every single write in comment as well and they gave us some great ideas.

So we had a few major take-aways from this survey:

• Our backers want more content - and there was a fair split of what type of content they wanted, but they were most interested in additional Agent types and an additional playable Old One.
• Scenarios, minions / heroes, and the race pack were less desirable, though more than half of respondents were still interested in additional races.
• Very few respondents were interested in a mobile release, the comments suggested they were more interested in a fully fleshed out experience on the PC.
• Only 3 (!) respondents were not interested in stretch goals at all.

So it's pretty safe to assume we'll be adding some content related stretch goals very soon.

Add-Ons

The add-ons survey was much more cut and dry.  Less than 10% of respondents were interested in add-ons and more than 30% said they would not be interested in any of the add-ons we suggested.  We may consider revisiting this over the last couple days of the campaign depending on how well received our stretch goals are.

What's Next?

We'll be going into much further detail about procedural generation over this coming weekend, expect screenshots and an abundance of descriptive text explaining what we will be accomplishing with this stretch goal.  

We will also be releasing the second part of our Modding Dev Log, followed shortly thereafter by an intense video of gameplay in order to hunt down our contest winner's event.  

As for Stretch Goals, we had to do some soul searching to figure out if any of the other features that we had once envisioned as a part of That Which Sleeps should be re-introduced.  We decided that with the amount of features already on our plate it would be best to put as much polish as possible on the fantastic goals we have already achieved.

What does that mean?  It means that we will be setting stretch goals for greater Art and Animation Assets as well as additional content that the community decides on.

Expect to be voting in the near future on some of our Agents and Old Ones that we originally originally omitted when we cut the list to 16 (some of these are really fun).

In addition, each of these new stretch goal thresholds we surpass will bring the world increasingly to life, adding animated caravans and farmers to simulate the prosperous kingdoms going about their business or at the other extreme refugees fleeing the plundered ruins of their homes.  We'll also be revealing some of our Tier 1 Rituals that have powerful and lasting in-game effects, and how these thresholds will take their representation to the next level.

Couchpotato interviews King Dinosaur Games about their exciting upcoming title, That Which Sleeps. So sit back relax and enjoy the new interview on our site.

Couchpotato: Thanks for agreeing to the interview! Your game looks really interesting - I always wanted to play the bad guy in a game. So to get started, can you share a little information about yourself and your game studio, King Dinosaur Games?

King Dinosaur Games: Our pleasure!  We love to interact with the community that has already been built up around the game - it is our firm belief that user involvement at all levels is the key to taking a good game and making it great.  As for King Dinosaur Games, the two of us have known each other for over a decade and during that time we've created over a dozen games for our own personal group's enjoyment.  We are huge fans of niche games like King of Dragon Pass and (Josh: The greatest game ever made) Space Station 13, and a lot of our influences come from the very vibrant board game community as well.  Innovative design is flourishing in that field and we have been routinely amazed at what people are doing with the limitations of board games whether its with cards, dice, or more traditional chits.  It has been our goal to try and bring the lessons learned from that community and apply them to video game design, while also taking advantage of the capabilities that a digital platform gives you instead of creating a direct board game adaptation.

King Dinosaur Games eight update for That Which Sleeps has a new video with information on how modding will work, and mentions a new survey for backers.

Dev Log 4 Part 1/3 - Introduction to Modding

We have a very large development log stemming from the Official Community Create-an-Event contest which we will be slowly revealing over the next week. We ended up having 25 submissions and the voting was very close, but ultimately the winning event was Second Chances by backer Chris S.   His submission was also, in the opinion of the developer, the most complicated to add in as it touched on several components of the game.

Thanks to Chris and to everyone for participating.  Hopefully this video will show you how easy it is to take the game in your own hands.  As usual, if you have any questions or have a particular feature you would like us to showcase just let us know! 

Procedural Generation

The Holy Grail of strategy games now looms before us and we believe our implementation is a compelling one.  We will be preparing a video for you showcasing the developments we've made on that front and hopefully it will get you excited to see it fully realized inside That Which Sleeps.  Stay tuned for more updates!

King Dinosaur Games seventh update for That Which Sleeps mentions the campaign is half done, and already 300% funded. They also talk about the games Endless Mode.

Halfway Point!

We are a little bit past the halfway point with this Kickstarter campaign and the response so far continues to be better than we could have dreamed of.  At the time of this writing we have already surpassed the Rival Old Ones stretch goal and we're rumbling towards Endless.  That means That Which Sleeps will notch up another level in its sophistication, and games and scenarios will be able to run well ... Endlessly.  We'll go into further detail into the Endless Simulation stretch goal as we approach it, so stay tuned for that.

Endless Mode Stretch Goal Details

We received a great question on RPGCodex asking us to go into depth on what exactly will be done to the engine if we reach Endless Simulation.  I've editted our response from that thread to give you some highlights of our intention.

Dev Video #4 Parts 1 and 2 - The Event Contest

As text heavy as this update was be prepared for video content - we got a lot of questions about modding capabilities and ended up running well over our expected 20 minutes, so we're cutting up the video into a Part 1 (modding and adding the contest event) and Part 2 (finding the added event and going over challenges, events, and gameplay).  Part 1 will be posted tomorrow, Part 2 will be posted a few days after that.  I expect everyone to have a lot of questions after we hit all of these critical points.

The RPG Codex sister site dedicated to strategy games posted a new interview with King Dinosaur Games to ask few questions about their game That Which Sleeps.

Thank you for taking the time to answer our questions. For our readers who aren't familiar with That Which Sleeps, could you please tell us a little about it?

That Which Sleeps is a turn based strategy game where the player takes on the role of an immensely powerful evil figure from the world's past who has been sealed away for so long that your name has been forgotten. You begin the game in a weakened state, vulnerable to the heroes and nations of the world who would crush you if they suspected your return. This leads you to recruiting a variety of unique Agents who you send throughout the world, gathering unwitting allies while also sowing chaos to prepare the way for your return. As this shadow war unfolds you will also find yourself making use of conventional warfare with a robust military system that may see you waging bloody wars of attrition or leveraging elite units to cut enemy armies out of supply.

The most interesting part of the game is the living world itself. The nations, leaders, and heroes of the world pursue their own particular agendas, often to your benefit. Expect kingdoms to feud with their neighbors, orc tribes to raid fertile lands, and foreign powers to launch devastating wars of conquest - all without your interference. Of course, many of the heroes of the world will seek to end the threat of hostile creatures and bring peace to warring nations. Distracting, defeating, or corrupting them will make your job much easier. Don't take too strong a stance however, each challenge you undertake will leave clues that heroes can investigate to lead them to the truth of your return.

How has your experience with Kickstarter been?

Kickstarter in general has been super positive for us, though its been pretty much a full time job since we launched our campaign. We were a bit too optimistic entering into the KS campaign, thinking we could still handle development tasks while also marketing and responding to the community. This has absolutely not been the case - Kickstarter is your life for the month it is running.

I think crowdsourcing in general is great for indie developers but I think it comes with a large amount of responsibility too.

We made sure we had some very clearly defined goals and intention for the money we were trying to raise. We asked for a relatively modest amount, and we've been as transparent and responsive as possible to our backers and potential backers.

King Dinosaur Games posted the sixth update for That Which Sleeps with news about rival old ones, new agents,,and mentions the contest deadline & Beta schedule.

Introducing Rival Old Ones, 2 New Agents, Contest Deadline & Beta Schedule

At the time of this writing we are more than 250% funded!  We send our heart-felt gratitude to our over 1,800 backers, and with 19 days to go we think that realizing some or all of our stretch goals is a distinct possibility.  With that being said we'd like to introduce the concept of competing or Rival Old Ones, as well as introduce 2 New Agents to you!

Make sure you get to the Reddit forums and vote on your favorite event, we'll be tallying it up tomorrow night!

Beta Tester Schedule

We are setting the expectation that Beta Testers will be fully integrated into the testing process and have access to builds Two Months after the Kickstarter ends.  However, we also want the Beta Testers to have access to builds earlier than that so we will be giving informal access to the Beta Testers after the Kickstarter to the Scenario Viewer build.

The Scenario Viewer enables a user load up a scenario, check all of the POIs, Champions, Nations, Guilds, Leaders, and Gods as well as make use of unlimited Ancient Powers.  We use this build to test sound effects, special effects, and check for consistency in descriptions and we think it's a good way for Testers to ensure that the build runs on their machine and they can get their hands a little dirty if they'd like to do some early testing.  We won't have the tester program fully setup at that point so we will have to decide how to handle feedback at this stage.

We will also be getting Beta Testers involved with map style selection, more info on this to follow.

King Dinosaur Games posted the fifth update for That Which Sleeps with news about a contest, art images. and mentions you can now back the game with Paypal.

A Really Cool Contest, More Preview Art, Paypal, & More

Hello to our friends, fans, and backers!  Today we are proud to announce that we have over 1,600 people backing our project.  Thank you all for the support, kind words, and feedback. 

In honor of the incredible amount of interaction we've had with our community, we decided to run a contest that features That Which Sleep's dynamic events system in action.

Community Design-an-Event Contest

We are asking our community to come up with some really cool situations that a hero, agent, Old One, or association in the game world might deal with.  We then will choose one that we really like and create a video where we use our Mod tools to implement the event in game.  Voila, your event is immortalized in That Which Sleeps.

How to Participate

Come over to our reddit forums and read our submission guidelines post.  We'll pick the event or event chain that gets the most support from the community

Preview Art

We are continuing to work on overhauling agent portraits, heroes, minions & more.

Paypal Backers

Due to an alarming number of requests from potential backers, we now can accept Paypal funding directly from our site.  We will be counting any money we collect from Paypal as part of our stretch goals, so we'll give periodic updates any funding we get here as we near the close of our campaign.

Currently we only offer the first 5 tiers (Preorder through Royal) if a generous benefactor should want to donate for a higher tier please contact us directly.

In the mean time please feel free to click the link below or head over directly to our home page to donate directly

That Which Sleeps is now fully funded this week after launching, and has reached it's second stretch goal for Gods & Religion. The project has twenty three days left.

Thank You to Our 1,300+ Backers!

The feedback & support we are receiving from backers and fans continues to be amazing.  We are so happy to announce that we have reached and surpassed our second stretch goal within our first week on Kickstarter!  

What does all that mean?  It means we will all be enjoying a much more complicated game. 

Check out our video below for a little tease on what the Gods and Religion system will offer in That Which Sleeps.

New Content Updates Monday!

On Monday we're going to launch our first deeper reveal of how game systems work, and we're really excited about it.  We're going to take a closer look at:

• Ways to recruit and interact with agents.
• A closer look at the Challenge system
• Diplomacy & Political Manipulation

A Responsive Dev is a Happy Dev!

I feel confident saying that we have answered every single question posed to us - either here in the comments section or across a number of different forums that we're active on.  As the number of backers increase and we get closer to alpha / beta builds it's going to be increasingly difficult to maintain such a strong presence across several sites.

That Which Sleeps is now fully funded in three days after launching, and is now getting close to it's first stretch goal. Congratulations King Dinosaur Games.

Funded! A Huge Thank You. Goodbye Poorly Drawn Heroes & Hello Minions!

Thank You! We are incredibly humbled and honored to receive so much support & encouragement from over 700 backers and countless other friends and fans.

We read and respond to every single comment and message we get here and on our other active forums so please feel free to reach out and be a part of the discussion!

Upcoming Content

We have more agent reveals, more info about the Old Ones you can play as, a look into how Diplomacy works in That Which Sleeps and lots more to present to you over the coming weeks. 

If you like what you've seen so far please continue to share our project.  Thank you from the (humbled) folks over at King Dinosaur Games!

King Dinosaur Games posted the first kickstarter update for That Which Sleeps that has news about the game being 40% funded in one day ,and posted a new FAQ. 

Thank you all for your incredibly generous support! Within our first 24 hours That Which Sleeps has reached 40% of our funding goal.  We still have a long way to go but we are really encouraged with the feedback we've received so far.

We took the time to answer some of your questions in an updated FAQ section.  We also had some folks inquiring to learn more about the folks behind King Dinosaur Games, so we've added an About Us section to the main page.  

We have a whole host of additional content we will be releasing over the coming weeks, so stay tuned.  In the mean time I wanted to address a couple of things:

• We will be updating our site this week with additional funding options for folks who can not or choose not to use Kickstarter.  
• Some people offered support but did not have the ability to fund us. To these people I say please remember to share our project!
• Tweet about us or our project.
• Share it with your friends on Facebook!  
• We really love any social shares we can get and it won't cost you a dime.

King Dinosaur Games has notified me their new game That Which Sleeps has launched on Kickstarter, and they are asking for $12,000 with 29 days left.

That Which Sleeps is a turn-based strategy game where the player assumes the role of an ancient being who was sealed away in ages past but has now returned to reclaim dominion over the world.  However, when you waken you are weak and must lurk in the shadows to avoid a return to your demonic slumber.

This is where That Which Sleeps deviates from the typical turn based strategy formula.  Rather than directly affecting the world by building or training troops, you use your power to indirectly influence the world utilizing uniquely designed Agents who can infiltrate the nations of the world, terrorize outlying farms, and perform esoteric rituals to create the perfect situation for your return.

The player must balance an aggressive approach utilizing his considerable power and eager hordes with the need to remain unknown to the Champions and Heroes of the world.  This allows for multiple play styles and various meaningful decision paths - all made more unique and re-playable due to the large cast of available agents and awakened demons aka "Ancient Evils".  In addition, the world is customized at the beginning of the game as you explicitly lay out how you were sealed away, and what methods you used to manipulate the world in your slumber.

The game could also use your help getting votes on Steam.

The  third development log video for That Which Sleeps talks about the games combat.

Lots to digest in this devlog, please feel free to leave a comment for me and we'll be happy to break it down for you.  Combat, while important, is much less so than the Challenges and Events you encounter on your way to deceiving the world, and we'll be going over those in the upcoming DevLog #4.

In their second development log video for That Which Sleeps, the devs talk about the game's user interface and scenario map using some actual in-game footage.

King Dinosaur Games notifed me of a new Development Log video for That Which Sleeps.

King Dinosaur Games latest development update for That Which Sleeps has information about some new GUI overhauls, and in-game portraits.

The seemingly endless string of GUI overhauls continues as we finish up the peripheral screens, as well as the actual Main Screen itself.  I also continue to get sidetracked by localization and modding support - every object and class now has a serialization helper class that makes breaking the object down into XML or bringing it back into the game incredibly easy.  I also put in some extra effort to add full sprite and sprite sheet support to the mod elements so people can really go crazy with theme.

All this work was something we had told ourselves we wouldn't do until after Kickstarter, but it just seemed to make sense.  I still have some cleanup work to do on the Serialization, and a few of the GUI screens just aren't quite looking right yet, but right after that gets done this week we will be back on schedule remaking the videos with our new art and releasing them one after the other. 

It's always hard to decide when to stop, loop back, and try and improve on what you have versus moving forward as planned.  I think we made the right call here, the level of increased interest we've seen raises the prospect of a good Kickstarter, and that raises the prospect of this game getting the treatment it deserves.

King Dinosaur Games has a new update for That Which Sleeps about Terrifying Logos, Localization, and Polish, Here is a sample of the update fom ModDB.

It has been a rollercoaster week since we got our mention in Rock Paper Shotgun, with tons of new subscribers, followers, and people saying they can't wait to get their hands on the demo.  More importantly, we also mustered up some financial support and have some more assets coming in to put a truly evil spin on a game that should be oozing theme.  Also, we discovered that a lot of international gamers are huge fans of the genre, so as to not let them down we've added localization support to the entire project (which took some painful time) so our release will come with at least 3 languages fully supported and open to fan contributions.

I did a news post about  the turn-based game That Which Sleeps yesterday, and failed to mention the developer has a bunch of new updates on IndieDB.

So go on and read them all for more infomation about the game.

That Which Sleeps is a new game from King Dinosaur Games. Now is it an RPG? Well short answer is no as its a turn based strategy game with a few RPG elements.

 Here is a brief description from the games website.

What is That Which Sleeps and how do I play it?

That Which Sleeps is a unique turn based strategy game where you play an evil banished long ago who has recently awoken to find himself greatly weakened but filled with a desire for vengeance. You will recruit Agents to perform Challenges in different Points of Interest which can be villages, cities, farmland, and ruins. These challenges will be contested by meddling heroes and champions which may cause your agents to flee or battle, sometimes resulting in their deaths. Succeed in the challenges and you can cause famines, produce slave revolts, and even assassinate kings. Even success breeds danger because your agents leave behind clues that savvy heroes will research, getting closer and closer to the truth that you are rising to destroy the world.

When will it be released?

We are hoping to launch a kickstarter to gain more art assets in the upcoming months, and should have a release shortly thereafter. We estimate Q4 2014 at this time.