August 2022 - Full Hearts

Hello, hawks and doves!

Sorry this is a day late, but it's less than two weeks to the launch of Spectres of Brocken's Kickstarter campaign on 13 September 2022, so I've been focused on getting all the preparations for the campaign sorted.

Spectres of Brocken

One of the things I've been working on was updating the game's PDF Preview and subsequently the online play materials. You can find the latest version of the game in a brand new layout on my itch page here, and you can also see how the new Miro board setup looks like over here.

I'll still get back to updating the Google Sheets version of the play materials, and I've got some ideas on how I could build some more automation and quality of life improvements to it. For now though, I'll be using the Miro version since it's been much quicker to get up and running and looks quite nice since I can re-use assets that I made for the new preview PDF. Honestly, Miro is a pretty great tool for playing roleplaying games online, especially storygames that don't require use of dice or cards.

The key driver for finishing these was to have them ready for the campaign so people could have a look at the current version of the game before deciding whether to back it, but I also wanted to have them handy for the few livestream games I've arranged to occur before the campaign goes live so that people can get a feel for how the game plays. One of those livestreams occurrred just last week over on the Plus One Exp Twitch channel. It was a blast to play with Tony, Adam and Kit, and see how corporations have always been our true enemy. We also managed to chat a bit at the end of the stream about some of the design of the game. You can check out the YouTube archive of our session below:

Finally, a fun little thing I did earlier this month was compile all the pilot and mech names that had been used in the various playtest games of Spectres of Brocken to use some as sample names in the Game Seeds section. There have been some absolutely stellar names made by the playtesters, and I actually did use a couple as prompts for one of the artists. You can click through the Tweet to get to the cool names list so I don't inundate you with them here:

Other Development Progress

Since I've been so focused on preparations for Spectres of Brocken's Kickstarter, I haven't actually been able to do that much design work on other games. I did manage to talk through some of the latest changes I've made to BLADEbreaker (see last month's newsletter for some details) with some other designers at one of the Playtest Zero sessions.

I also managed to playtest an idea I had for switching up the dice pool system in Four Swords in another Playtest Zero session. That playtest went really well, since we identified the flaws in that dice pool system pretty quickly and clearly. One of the key things was that it was quite difficult to actually meaningfully fail, but even with successes it was tricky to direct the outcomes since the Techniques and Reckless Moves are quite prescriptive and the GM always has a chance to introduce some consequences via the Risk Ratings.

I've got to go back to the drawing board with the dice there, but there were some good insights out of that playtest on what players would want out of the Technique/Moves options they are given, and also some nuggets that I'd want to fold into the next iteration such as more interesting triggers on what dice you get to activate.

My Heart Is Full

That's pretty much it from me on the game design front this month. I'll end on a nice, heartwarming note though. I firmly believe that gamemaking is something that you can and should do for yourself, just like how you can draw or sing or dance for your own enjoyment. Yes, you can also make game products for others to use and enjoy, but that's just one weird way to make games, and not the be all end all of gamemaking as a practice.

I'm a pretty self-motivated (self-centred?) sort of person; I make games that I want to make in the way that I want to make them so that I can play them how I want to play them. That's not to say I am not considerate of others. My whole love of playtesting comes because I like connecting with others over play, and as and probably more importantly, over game design. That is also a part of me. When I say I make games for myself, that includes the part of myself that wants to connect with others. As much as I'm satisfied making and releasing games for myself, I also really enjoy seeing and hearing about my games being played by others.

It was a really nice surprise then this month to learn that several Japanese TRPG players have taken to my solo journaling game What Should We Have Tomorrow? and posted some of their journals/play reports online!

It's quite mind-boggling to me that other people are playing a game I made and using it to create new art, and even though I can't read Japanese and have to rely on Twitter's translate function to get an idea of what they're writing, I feel so happy that we could share this game together. I had never made a solo journalling game before, and I really just wanted to make What Should We Have Tomorrow? to reflect on what I was doing every day anyways (planning, shopping for and preparing meals for me and my family). It's just really nice to be reminded once in a while that these games can connect us in this way.

Sentimental regards,

Aaron