First and foremost, a huge and heartfelt thank you to all of you for supporting this campaign. It means the world to us and, even better, it means we get to keep making independent art.
Apologies for a slightly delayed update, because we're UK based the campaign ended late Friday evening and we needed the weekend to rest.
What's Next?
Our goal is to have all digital rewards - including Solo Mode and the album - ready to share by the end of May.
Physical rewards will take a bit more time - for both printing and shipping, but at the moment we're planning to have delivered all physical rewards - including cassette tapes - by the end of August.
The game itself has been playtested and the text is 90% locked. Now that we know we can pay him, Luka, our layout designer, wil be getting started on formatting the text so that it looks beautiful in the full zine. Georgia has done the vast majority of our illustrations, but she's going to be available for any additional pieces - as well as illustrating the cassette tape covers.
Meanwhile, now that Ella's happy with the base game, she's going to be reaching out to our cross-collaborator Matthew Ayers to fine tune the solo mode - thank you all for making this happen!
Overall, I'd put our progress to delivery currently at about 60-65%, and I'm very confident we'll hit our targets on time. I really can't wait to share the finished game with you all.
For now, thank you again, and if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
Thank you all so much! We've hit our stretch goal, which means we'll be releasing 20 more cassette tapes which you can get as an add-on to your pledge for £9 at 9am EST / 2pm GMT today (27th Feb 2026).
Thank you so so much for supporting this campaign, we're all really excited to create and deliver The Deepest Dark to all of you, and we can't wait for you to play the game too!
These cassette tapes sold out in the first 24hrs of the campaign, and only 50 will ever be printed, so they are absolutely limited edition. They'll contain an A Side and a B Side of the soundtrack album Amber Devereux is composing for our cave, and they'll have beautiful custom covers illustrated by Georgia Cook.
As a bonus, hitting £6,000 will also allow us to give the whole team a payrise, including our incredible actual-play cast.
We're just £300 from this goal, and entering the last 24hrs of the campaign. Let's do this!
We're in the final week now! Happily we're funded, and we're less than £500 away from our only stretch goal of £6k for releasing more tapes. We're really hoping to hit that before the campaign is over.
We've got two streams planned to close the campaign out, one today - which will be the second half of our actual play of the game.
You can watch the first half below! This game is being live-scored by our composer Amber Devereux, which is extraordinarily cool.
We'll wrap up the story tonight with our fantastic cast of players, including Nathan Blades, MasqueWren, Poorna M., Ella and Georgia.
Then on *Wednesday, Ella and Amber will be doing a finale stream, taking questions and chatting about the creative process of making the game and its soundtrack. Tune in for cave facts!
Behind the scenes, Ella is going to be reaching out to our cross-collaborator Matthew Ayers over at Blightfall to start work on solo mode, and Amber is most of the way through composing the soundtrack album, which they've also been sharing on the Tin Can Audio Twitch channel.
We've also had a handful more playtests and a lot of fantastic feedback. We're feeling really confident about the game, and we're really excited to share it with you.
That's all for now, see you tonight!
*Ella confused Fridays and Wednesdays. She has a complicated relationship with time. Apologies for the confusion.
Hey everyone, a slightly late acknowledgement of the fact that The Deepest Dark has funded! It's going to be real!!!! Ella had a migraine and it was Georgia's 30th birthday, so she was taking her boyfriend to see Operation Mincemeat. But what a birthday present!
Thank you, all of you, so so much for helping us make this happen!
What Now?
Now, Ella is going to go back into developing Solo Mode with our cross-collaborator Matthew Ayers (currently funding Blightfall), which everyone who's backed us above the 'Thank You' tier will be receiving a copy of.
What Next?
If we make it to our stretch goal of £6k, we'll be able to order more cassette tapes for backers who missed them. Based on your votes, these cassette tapes will be available as a £9 add-on to your pledge, if you want a physical copy of the album (with, of course, a case illustrated by the excellent Georgia).
We've still got over a week left on the campaign, so there's still a lot to play for - but for now, it's a huge relief to let you know that you will be receiving a copy of the game.
