January 2024 - Reset
Hello hello,
While I'd love to just jump back into things and not talk about missing oh... the past 7 months worth of newsletters? I think it's actually quite relevant to what I wanted to bring up this time, so let's get into it.
The last newsletter was at the end of April 2023, almost a year after starting up the newsletter in May 2022. Hey, not bad. Right about that time was when I started really getting into the guts of revisions to Spectres of Brocken. I also ended up getting involved in a major project at work in conjunction with that, and those two combined to take up most of my energy and focus in the back half of 2023.
I mostly wrapped up the work project in October 2023, and then released the digital edition of Spectres of Brocken on 15 November 2023. I then continued to work on getting Spectres of Brocken printed, and they were done in December 2023 and shipped out to fulfillment partners in early January 2024. That's hit a big hiccup recently as I found out DHL had damaged the books during delivery, so that's probably not going to complete until February 2024.
I think this is the longest I've ever worked on a single game project. Spectres was conceived way back in 2019 with the Emotional Mecha Jam, and got most of its development from late 2020 to early 2023. Through all that time, I've worked on other smaller games, but during mid-late 2023, I was pretty much just working on Spectres. Part of it was the fact of being busy with other work, but there's also the obligation to prioritise Spectres since I had committed to complete it for the Kickstarter backers.
I did still work on other games - revisiting A City of Shining Stars, and Ithaca in the Cards, as detailed in my last newsletter. These were done while I was in-between Spectres tasks, mainly while waiting on edits. However, these were also re-visiting old projects.
Towards the end of 2023, I realised I really missed working on new projects. Don't get me wrong, I loved and still love working on Spectres of Brocken (I teased a secret project for it early last year, that's still happening). I love the game immensely, I think it's my perfect game, even if it might not be my best game, if you get what I mean. But I did need a bit of a break to work on other things.
(By the way, there's still a couple of days left to get Spectres of Brocken as part of this showcase bundle of 10 great games from the Playtest Zero community. I'm planning to talk about Showcase Zero in another newsletter, hold me to that.)
I ended up making a couple of new games, more like game sketches, to bring to Playtest Zero sessions in September and October 2023. Playtest Zero is honestly a really important part of my process now. Rather than keep working on them and only release them when they're polished, I looked back to my 2020 self when I released a game a month, regardless of level of polish and I decided I wanted to get back a bit of that feeling. I had also seen Ethan put together an ashcan version of his Drawn from the Wellspring game (available in the Showcase Zero 2023 bundle!) so I figured I'd do the same.
While I was working on the games for an ashcan release, I realised that I had been dragging my feet a bit on BLADEbreaker, which you'll remember I've been working on since at least May 2022 when I mentioned it on the newsletter.
And so, here we are. I've just released Triple Play 2024, which is a trio of new draft and ashcan game releases that I intend to work on for the rest of the year and probably more than that.
The reason for releasing them publicly in this way is threefold:
- Motivate myself to get down the rulesets into a presentable form by giving myself a deadline. I had initially hoped for end of December 2023, but hey this isn't too bad.
- Have the games ready for others to read so I could get back into more longer-form playtesting. The playtesting Discord has been kinda dormant except for Gundam-posting, so I want to get back to that more this year.
- Get some more eyes on the games publicly, as they are a bit different than the games I'm currently probably known for, which are more GM-less storygame affairs. People who know me know I'm a freak for tactical combat games but I haven't really released anything in that genre, so I wanted to make sure I could get a variety of feedback and interest in my games.
Releasing them as a collection on itch is more for my own ease of tracking, as the games aren't really that related otherwise. Anyway, here are the games:
BLADEbreaker
This one should be familiar to past readers of the newsletter. I've been working on this Forged in the Dark hack for a while now, and only now put together something that's a bit more suited for public reading and playtesting.
Honestly, it hasn't progressed that much since the last time I mentioned it in the newsletter. I cleaned up some of the special abilities, adjusted some of the numbers for Position and Conditions, tried something new for Group rolls, and I've added details of the different types of Carriers and some more guidance on how to do the Engagement Roll. This playtest package is still very much focused on the Mission mode of the game, as I still need to flesh out the downtime and campaign sections.
Get In The Dungeon, Losers!
This game actually came about because of class, haha. For one of my classes, I usually teach my students a lightweight fantasy adventure TTRPG (I've used World of Dungeons, and a super cut down version of it, in the past) and run them through a simple scenario. Then I'd get them to design a dungeon for their characters to run through.
However, this last semester, I wanted to try and get them to also design their own class of character. Rather than use World of Dungeons again, I ended up designing my own take on it that they could use as a base. This let me talk through my own design decisions for the classes with students as well.
I thought it worked pretty well, so I ended up taking that simple base and making it more complicated and weird for my own purposes, and hey, here's another game. I came up with a whimsical name for it, because I wanted to keep that whimsical vibe and that ended up being the impetus for creating the terrible wizard bosses that you work for, which was an idea I had been toying with for a while anyway. I think it ended up being a really fun addition, which brought me into some fun design space - what if your boss decides how you level up?
This is my take on a light fantasy adventure game, a spiritual sequel of sorts to my own Dungeon Whatever, that reflects my own tastes in this space. Everyone makes one of these, so I figure I should get another go.
SPEEDMECH
This last game is kind of a return to my roots for me. I didn't start out designing tabletop RPGs, I was more interested in making card and boardgames. I also have a long-running love for tactical combat games or tactics RPGs like XCOM, Midnight Suns, Into the Breach, and Star Renegades. I also started playing RPGs with D&D 4th Edition, and so I've always had a soft spot for that style of combat design.
I designed this game purely off the idea that I wanted the only dice rolls to be initiative rolls. It didn't actually start out as a mech game, but hewed closer to the old fantasy tropes in D&D 4th Edition (there was a warlord!). After some playtesting and wanting to incorporate the idea that the only way to get better in this game is to steal skills from your opponents (which actually was trying to be a nod to Final Fantasy with their Blue Mages and the good ol' Cinquedea in FFTA), my playtesters informed me that I had made another mech game. OH WELL.
It's currently only available as a spreadsheet (.xlsx) because that's how I do most of my design work, but it also works pretty well in a spreadsheet because of how it allows you to manage initiative order via sorting rows, and I genuinely think I could fit a whole campaign of SPEEDMECH into a spreadsheet.
That's it for now! New year, new games! And also some old games becoming new again, but more on that another time.
Triple regards,
Aaron