Issue #8 (December 2022, 2022 Wrapup)
Hi there! I’ll give a quick rundown of my (too many) projects in progress as usual, then I’ll get into the year in review.
APOCALYPSE FRAME
APOCALYPSE FRAME has an official cover spread, courtesy of Galen Pejeau! (The right half is the front cover while the left half is the back cover.) It was incredible to work with him on this and I hope we can do more in the future!
v1.0 is coming out tentatively January 24th. Everyone who has the original game will get it, and the release comes with a price bump to $20, so get it while the getting’s good! It’s been a long time coming, so thanks to everyone for sticking with it.
Liminal Void and Total//Effect
Liminal Void’s quickstart is out! Liminal Void is my hard(ish) space game inspired by The Expanse, FTL, Alien/s, Cowboy Bebop, System Shock, and other things I’m forgetting. The quickstart has Level 0 rules (basically just on-foot stuff with no advancement and no ship stuff) and it comes with a scenario, Escape from CICP-1! The goal of Level 0 is basically “explain how your group of regular folks becomes an independent ship crew”, and assuming everyone survives, it’ll do that excellently - there are five different ships you can escape on in several different ways. I’m fixing to do a full breakdown of the scenario on cohost sometime soon because I put way too much thought into it, so stay tuned!
(I also made a few changes to how a few things are formatted and added the idea of the inverse of a die - those’ll be ported over to the core SRD at some point.)
A few people have already started iterating on the concept! One from minimalist jam here and one that’s being developed on Cohost! That’s incredibly exciting to me.
ANOINTED and Dungeon23 (ANOINTED23)
ANOINTED is going to be a much bigger focus in the new year (more on that later). But for now, what I’ve done is committed to doing the Dungeon23 “write something every day” challenge with ANOINTED. Specifically, I’m going to make one Region per month, and make a point, a feature, an enemy, a piece of equipment, or a spell every day. You can keep track of my progress here! (I won’t be updating online every day, probably, because it’s going to be a picture of my physical notebook as it slowly fills up, but probably every half-week or week.)
Other
I want to shout out papercult because I like bbcode forums and it’s tiny-tiny but it’s a good crowd so far. Go join and post! I’ve done a bunch of Total//Effect and Liminal Void ruminating there!
Cyclic Dungeon Generation is a very cool technique. I did a little showcase of it here. Give it a shot!
I’m going to be on cohost more than Twitter/etc and I encourage you to do the same.
2022 Wrapup
This year, I was pretty busy! Though, not a lot of stuff that’s just done-done. (Which is fine, of course.)
I started a bunch of stuff and didn’t finish it!
ANOINTED is the one that’s really half-done - it’s (going to be) my big soulslike game. It needs a lot of love to get finished for real. It’s fun already though.
Total//Effect is technically “done”, but I know I’ll be updating it a bunch so it goes here.
Liminal Void! (See above.)
The Binary Atlas! This needs some updates for RUNE’s final release but it’s absolutely playable as-is.
As far as projects I completed:
Ballad of Industrial Gods was this year, somehow! It’s my mission for APOCALYPSE FRAME.
The Infected World was a neat season pass expansion for APOCALYPSE FRAME! Next time I do something like this I’m going to commit to 3 entries instead of 4 but I’m happy with how it all turned out. (At some point I’ll compile it with the new APOCALYPSE FRAME style/layout guide and bring it in line with v1.0, but it’s content-complete.)
Trespasser! This was something I tapped out while in the middle of The Infected World to give my brain a break. I really like how it turned out, and it helped me sort out some thoughts I had about GMless/GM-optional games.
It’s been a year of HUGE growth. I made 10x the amount of money/sales this year as last.
Looking to 2023
Here are my plans for 2023.
Release APOCALYPSE FRAME. Obviously! But more specifically, I want to get it printed and distributed, and get more eyes on it in general. It’s already gotten a fair amount of burn but I want it to get more, it deserves it!
Get ANOINTED to a mostly-finished state. The main thing it really needs-needs is more content and ANOINTED23 will help get it there. (I have some other renovations to the base mechanics in mind too, especially the armor system.) ANOINTED is going to be a really cool game if it’s in a state where people are actually willing to play it but it’s going to take more work to get there given its ambitions.
Collaborate with more people. My goal in making money with this “business” is to reinvest it and I need to do that more often because I’ve loved the result every time (APOCALYPSE FRAME, editing and illustrations) thus far.
Work on other people’s games. All of my third-party stuff has been pretty fun to write! I want to do more of it.
Continue on Total//Effect. Liminal Void needs finishing, but also I want to get started on developing one of those two other games (probably Valiant Horizon because I don’t really have a fantasy game other than 36th Way, but we’ll see). I also have Other Plans for the system but I want to get at least 2/3 of those worked examples out as actual games first.
Thanks for reading! Hope to see you all again next year!