Screenshot of a playingcards.io table with a playtest of Aaron Lim's Infinite Seas Under The Same Stars, showing some Star cards assigned to various characters and story threads.
Happy Friday, assorted accomplices and adversaries!
My last post was concerned with looking back on the recent past, so this time I'll focus on looking ahead instead. Here's a list of the in-progress projects I am currently actively working on:
Cover art for Spectres of Brocken by Amita Sevellaraja.
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Spectres of Brocken - A (sort of) No Dice No Masters/belonging outside belonging GN-less game where you play as trainee mech pilots getting to know each other at an academy and then you skip forward in time to when you are all ace pilots on differing sides of a pivotal conflict. Instead of "tokens", you'll be gaining and spending "Words" which act as prompts and reminders of past actions. I just revealed the new cover art for it by the incredibly talented Amita Sevellaraja, and I'm working with another artist to get some interior art as well. I need to continue working on converting the preview rules document into a proper "rulebook". I also need to find an editor and layout artist soon as I hope to crowdfund a nice digital edition later this year. I've been doing a playtest of this with my regular Beam Saber group, which has been fun, and I hope to do more playtests to really tighten up the moves.
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Aaron Lim's Infinite Seas Under The Same Stars - Another (kinda) No Dice No Masters/belonging outside belonging-adjacent GM-less game. You play as one of 7 Constellation characters whose fates are inextricably linked over multiple lifetimes and realities. You take turns assigning Star cards from a common pool to various characters to trigger their traits or to different types of Story Threads which let you introduce new developments or complications to the story of the current world. Once you finish a session or world, you pick up the same set of characters and cards and reimagine them in a different world for the next session. I just had a fun playtest of this during Playtest Zero, which is a fortnightly short-form playtesting event that happens at the Session Zero Discord server every other Tuesday. I've got some revisions to how the cards are drafted and refreshed each round, and I need to do some thinking about how to make scenes flow smoothly and explain how I envision the Story Threads working. I've got some ideas about how I want to release this later, hence the weird title. I'll get into that a bit more in a future post.
Screenshot of the Saboteur playbook from a playtest version of BLADEbreaker.
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BLADEbreaker - This is a Forged In The Dark project about resistance fighters taking on an occupying force that far outclasses them using massive battle mechs called BLADEs (Bipedal Land Assault Destroyer Engine), inspired by XCOM 2. I had a playtest of the new playbooks at Playtest Zero several weeks ago, and I need to take the feedback from that playtest to update all the playbooks to match the new design style and also finally start working on the strategy layer. I've also been doing monthly check-ins with Thomas Manuel as he is also working on a (very, very cool) Forged In The Dark project, and we help each other troubleshoot issues, brainstorm ideas, and keep ourselves motivated to continue working.
Screenshot of a map from an early playtest of Grave Lines.
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Grave Lines - A GM-less storygame that I'm working on with Sen-Foong Lim. It's still in a bit of a protean state, though I did manage to playtest a very early sketch of the game at (surprise, surprise) Playtest Zero earlier. The idea is to create train lines on an island nation and explore the history and culture of the place through interacting with various ghosts that haunt the train lines and stations. The current idea uses playing cards to generate train lines and stations, which seems to work alright but I need to think more about how the players converse with each other throughout the game.
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Ithaca in the Cards: Lonesome Winds - I've been working on updating and expanding the prompts in this game about doomed travellers on a perilous journey home, and I'm planning to take the opportunity to try and design a solo mode for it. I still really like Ithaca's main engine and I love playing it since it's so quick and impactful. I've made a start on the prompts, but I need to find some time to play the game again and work on the solo mode.
Those are the main things that I'm currently working on  (or should be! feel free to yell at me if you see me get distracted by some other shiny new idea), but I've also got others on the backburner.
Most of them are early versions of games that I made as part of Game-A-Month 2020. I've done some playtesting of the following games as part of my 50/50 playtests project back in 2021, and I've got notes and ideas on how to develop them further but I'm prioritizing the other big projects above. Here's the list:
And that's it! All the stuff I'm currently working on and the backburner projects I idly ruminate on while I work on the big projects. I plan to give sporadic updates through this blog/mailing list, probably after playtests or revisions.
If you're interested in playing/playtesting any of the projects I'm working on, please feel free to message me for an invite to join Playtest Zero sessions where I do a lot of playtesting. You could also join this Discord server I have set up that I use for organizing playtests. It's not very active usually but I'll be ramping up playtesting for Spectres of Brocken at least as I work on the text.
