Stepping Back Into A Stream(s)

Happy Friday, friends and enemies and miscellaneous!

It's been a year (plus a week) since I released the full version of An Altogether Different River digitally, fulfilling part of the Kickstarter obligations. To mark the occasion, I organized a couple of streams on Twitch last week to play the game and also chat with the designers who contributed to An Altogether Different River's Branching Streams supplement.

I'm not really a "streaming guy". I very very rarely watch any streaming content (I prefer to listen to Actual Plays as podcasts or watch videogame clips on YouTube) and just as rarely appear on streams (I've made like 5? appearances on Plus One Exp streams last year and I did a stream for the end of the Kickstarter and 1 impromptu design stream for BLADEbreaker and I think that's it).

I'm not well-versed in the scene, but I thought it would be a fun way to celebrate the anniversary and also use it as a good excuse to hang out with friends and colleagues. This was basically my modus operandi for the 4 or so years when we were doing the podcast (oh yeah did you know I ran a podcast or two for a while?), just using it as an excuse to hang out with friends and trick people smarter than me into letting me interview them.

It was pretty cool! It's nice to get back to playing a game you've made after a long time away, and go "huh maybe I made a good one". I think the last time I had played An Altogether Different River was during a Melbourne International Games Week tabletop event back in October 2021 (I think I said I hadn't played it since playtesting on the stream which was a mistake, I completely forgot about the other promo events I did last year). I had forgotten how enjoyable An Altogether Different River was, which is a nice reminder to have.

It was also really nice to finally get some of the Branching Streams content out there. I absolutely love Thomas' game seed (A Good Town to Leave) and Logan's alternate rules for ending the game which we managed to highlight in our streamed game together. They both really hit on the tone and themes on the original game, and added great layers to it.

I didn't do any stretch goals or involve any guest writers in An Altogether Different River since I wanted to keep that project simple, but it did well enough that I had some funds left over and I wanted to see what other designers might make of the game  and also do a bit more with game seeds which I felt a bit hampered by in the original form of An Altogether Different River to meet the page counts, which is why I ended up making Branching Streams. I'm really happy with how it turned out (especially Venessa knocking the cover image out of the park again), but I think it's suffered a little bit for being a surprise supplement that came out at an awkward time. I do hope more people get to check it out, which was one of my hopes for the anniversary event, since I think it's a great little supplement that really enhances the base game.

It wasn't just stepping back into playing a game after a while, but it had also been a while since I did any "public performance" (last I had done something similar was probably this Metatopia panel in November 2021) and it was kinda nice? To be honest, I do enjoy "performing" or talking publicly (see Exhibit Podcasts above). I'm often conflicted about "public performance", as a part of it I do not like is the tendency to look to public people as somehow "better"/"smarter"/"insightful"/'experienced"/"more relevant" or whatever bullshit we use to justify why these voices deserve to be elevated above others at this time. I'm too well aware of my own foibles and the deep bench of hardworking people doing incredible work without any notoriety to be comfortable with any possibility of that perception being put on me, even though I simultaneously crave the validation of being seen and having my work recognized. The dilemma of creative work, right?

Anyways, this is performance of humility is just ironic preamble to tell you that I think the stream of An Altogether Different River with Rick and Valis that we did as part of the anniversary is one of my favourite sessions of An Altogether Different River I've played in a while (my all-time favourite is actually from the post-Kickstarter playtests). I don't think it's the "best" representation of the game, but we made a weird little place (a watery ghost moon) and even though we started with some really abstract and strange characters (shapeshifting ghosts/astral beings), I think we ended up telling a very human story about grief, anger, avoidance, reconciliation and healing in a little over 2 hours.

I think that's it for this edition. Not really an update on new things I'm working on (which I'll try and get to next time), but hopefully this was still interesting.

Retroceding regards,

Aaron