Nov 15, 2022 7 min read

October 2022 - Progression

Hello, Simons and Garfunkels! I know it's the middle of November when you're getting this, but hey I had a really busy end of October, so cut me some slack, will ya?

The Spectres of Brocken Kickstarter ended successfully on 13 October 2022, which was a big relief, and I'm now properly back in playtesting and development mode as I playtest the three basic playsets (which I'm calling World Tendencies, honestly because I like the sound of the phrase) for the game and look at expanding and polishing the rest of the text for a proper zero draft.

A preview of what a World Tendency spread looks like.

The three World Tendencies that I'm testing are:

Orbital Century - My love letter to Gundam's Universal Century timeline, with the backdrop of a rebellion by space-bound colonies against an entrenched Earthbound government.

Humanity has made their tentative steps beyond Earth's gravity. Giant orbital colonies twinkle serenely around our solar system, on which a new generation of people live and die. They chafe under the thumb of old terrestrial governments, as new identities begin to form and converge. Mechs were designed to aid the construction and maintenance of the orbital colonies, with dreams of using them to help us reach beyond our meagre sun and unlock the riches of the galaxy. However, conflict is brewing between the Earth sphere and the colonies. More and more mechs are being refitted for "peacekeeping" purposes by Earthbound governments, while their use by builders and labourers become ever more regulated. Rumours circulate about nascent rebellions in "problem" colonies. The whispers of war are on the wind.

JET FANG RUMBLE - This one is me working through my disappointment at Pacific Rim not quite delivering what I wanted from its "To fight monsters, we created monsters" tagline, drawing from Neon Genesis Evangelion, Monster #8, Robot Jox and sports anime.

On Emergence Day, building-sized monsters suddenly appeared and attacked our cities. We banded together to fight them, sending wave after wave of tanks and planes and missiles. When those were spent, we ripped the scales and muscle fibres off their carcasses to build enormous mechanical avengers. We reconfigured our infrastructure and society to survive their onslaught. Now, we've won, but we can't put the genie back in the bottle. We have machines of immense destruction at our disposal, and yet we can't dispose of them because there's always the chance the monsters will return. So, we learn to live with the monsters we’ve created. We turned them towards the most human of pursuits: industry and war and entertainment. Giant robots slugging it out in arenas repurposed from training to exhibition, a new paradigm of conflict for a post-disaster age. And yet, old tensions, old desires, old wounds simmer under the glitz and glamour.

The Fire Quartz Crown - I wanted to pay homage to one of the biggest influences on Spectres of Brocken's timeskip conceit, which is Break Blade. hence the "quartz". I also did end up playing and enjoying Fire Emblem: Three Houses and it was a really useful touchstone when communicating this game to others, so I figure I should have a setting that uses magitech and noble houses. It also draws bits from The Vision of Escaflowne, Magic Knight Rayearth, Aura Battler Dunbine, and The Legend of Five Rings.

In the early days of the Empire, four siblings fought a bitter war to determine who would take the throne. Finally, three were forced to concede and pledge their fealty to the Fire Quartz Crown of Empress Crysanth. Forsaking their claims, they went on to form the three Great Houses. Each strived to build up and defend the empire in their own ways, and in turn were blessed with the secrets of fire quartz to power their spells and Titan constructs. As part of this pact, scions of the Great Houses are sent to the Royal Academy from a young age to be instructed in the ways of diplomacy, magecraft and war. The fact that they were effectively hostages was not lost on their parents. This fragile peace would not last forever. Emperor Hibius II’s hold is weak, allowing the Great Houses to delay sending their children to the Academy until their teenage years. The seeds of intrigue and discontent lie in fertile soil.

I've already started on the playtests with The Fire Quartz Crown, which has been incredibly fun and pointed out some areas which I'll be updating. I had set up the prompts for the Factions to be quite open-ended, which I'm realizing still requires a bit of work from the players. I figured that leaving them open-ended would let players adjust them to their liking, but as I'm learning time and time again, it's probably fine to just give the players some more details and then trust that they'll adjust them as needed.

On the other hand, having more of the Factions (and likely the Academy and training mechs) fleshed out would help players breeze through those sections and get to character creation much faster, which is what the World Tendencies are supposed to be doing. If players want to customize things, they still can, and there are the worldbuilding prompts from the basic game that they can use.

Anyways, if you'd like to help with playtesting the World Tendencies or just playtesting Spectres of Brocken, feel free to hop on the playtesting Discord server (where we are also doing A LOT of Gundamposting for The Witch From Mercury).

In addition to progress on playtesting Spectres of Brocken, I also made a trip to San Francisco for Big Bad Con 2022 at the end of October, thanks to their POC Scholarship programme. I had a really great time there meeting a whole bunch of cool people, including people who I've played games with online and fellow game designers from all over the world, playing some games, and also kinda last-minute filling in on a panel about the politics of violence (which I'll probably talk about in the next newsletter). I played in a really great playtest of Shao Han's Da Xia, a Forged in the Dark game about unheroic heroics during the Japanese occupation of Singapore, and also got to play a cool game of Meanwhile in the subway... where we helped a train give birth!

I do wish I had been able to play some more games and maybe run some playtests (I almost managed to run a playtest of Spectres of Brocken, but unfortunately had to cancel), but hey that's always the problem with conventions, too many cool things to do and not enough time!

One of the truisms of the games industries, be it board games, card games, videogames or role playing games, is that access to "the right networks" can really help a designer/artist/creator's chances at "progressing" in the industry. Traditionally, one of the biggest concentrations of these networks are during major games conventions, which means that being able to attend one or more of these conventions confers a greater chance of accessing these networks. Social media has changed a lot of those dynamics, not only by providing other avenues to access and maintain those networks, but also by highlighting just how malnourished those networks have been because they ended up excluding a whole spectrum of people who for reasons of distance, resources, prejudice and geopolitics were not able to make their way to these loci of connections.

Big Bad Con's POC Scholarship aims to address this lack by providing resources and opportunity to those who have not previously been able to access these networks. And it aims to make up for all that lost time by taking direct steps to connect these disparate networks together through programmes like the POC Meet and Greet, where diverse creators and those looking to work with them are encouraged to connect. It's a truly commendable effort, and has already borne various fruit. I am really, really thankful that the POC Programming team have this vision and drive, and have expended so much effort and care to make this work, as I and many others benefit from it.

One of the questions that came up for me multiple times in the lead up to and during the convention, was what does "progress" look like for me? In preparation for the POC Meet and Greet, we were asked about what types of opportunities we were looking for; during the POC Dinner, the programming team talked about their hopes for the future of the industry; chatting with other POC Scholars, we sometimes talked about what we were hoping to do or make after the convention. I saw so many different visions of "progress".

I used the scare quotes around "the right networks" and "progressing" in the industry a few paragraphs up, because I know that looks very different to different people. That's one of the outcomes of diversifying your networks, you'll get a diversity of aims and approaches. I know some people want to work on their dream properties, or get their work published with an established publisher, or build their own self-publishing outfit, or make something that would finally get out something they've wanted to express for a long time. All with their different goals and views on progress. What, then, is mine?

Sure, in the short term I am very happy to look for help in getting Spectres of Brocken finished and out to people, but what more do I want to do? What's my "five-year plan"? I hadn't really thought about it, to be honest. I've always just done the next thing that I wanted to do. In fact, I started writing this newsletter with no fucking idea how to end it.

While I've been thinking about this, Twitter looked to be imploding, so I decided to look back on some of the things I had written about game design and try and salvage them in case the site disappeared (you'll see me re-heat some old leftovers for the newsletter haha). It was pretty interesting to see how some of my thoughts have changed over time, and what seemed to stay the same throughout. I figured, then, if I can't articulate a clear plan for my future in game design, maybe I could at least figure out my principles and work from there.

Well, what do you know? Turns out I had already done this, kinda. I started this whole newsletter off with a manifesto, and the final two statements there could be neatly re-purposed into a vision of progress:

I want to be as honest as I can for as long as I can with as many people as I can
I want to help others make games the way they want to make them, if they would have my help, the same way others have helped me

Is it that pat, that easy? Maybe. I'll take it, since I'm still writing this at almost 4 a.m. Thanks, past me, I guess.

But wait a minute, how do you turn those vague statements up there into actionable steps? How do you turn vision into direction? Boy, I sometimes really am annoyed that I have a background in project planning because I can't just rattle off points from some "manifesto" and call it a day. So here, for me, for now, this is how I am measuring my progress in game design:

Make tangible steps to be able to make games where I am happy with the creative direction - this means working on self-publishing games sure, but also building up and maintaining resources such that I can choose what projects I commit to (having a steady source of income to keep up with creative work, having alternate sources of income that still allows enough time for game design, building up trust with collaborators so I can be open about any issues I might have, finding collaborators that I can trust)
Make tangible steps to help build a strong cohort of designers with my peers - this means maintaining and improving on stuff like Playtest Zero, helping out with resources when I'm able, passing on any opportunities or advantages that might come my way. This isn't just some altruistic rah-rah "we're all in this together" feel-good statement. It's selfish in a way, because I truly believe that having a strong peer group will make me a better designer as well. I want to get good feedback in playtests, I want to have a deep pool of potential collaborators, I want design colleagues who will challenge me and encourage me, and I think the best way to have that is to build that together (so there's sunk-cost fallacy haha).

OK, NOW I think I'm done and can hit send. Sorry for the long newsletter, I'm still figuring it out as I go. I hope you're able to figure things out for yourself too.

Cursing-I-fucked-up-my-sleep-cycle-again regards,

Aaron