One of the first posts I ever made on this blog, which I wrote largely to try out the Substack post editor, was this one about the “scenes menu” in Space Fam, my recently released Firebrands / Our Traveling Home hack about being the crew of a space ship and processing your trauma together. In it I walked through the design of probably the most important page in the game: the list of scenes you can pick to frame when it’s your turn, which you return to again and again throughout play. Between that post and now, I landed somewhere pretty different from what the post was looking towards, so I figured I’d finish off the story in this update.
For Ken Lowery’s Disc 2 jam, I decided to finally release the game I’ve been working on for nearly four years: Space Fam.
This is a game about, you guessed it, found family in space. In particular, it takes a lot of inspiration from The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet in that you’re the crew of a ship escorting a traveler from point A to point B, and along the way you deal with your feelings of guilt and stress about living under an oppressive government.
It’s a hack of Our Traveling Home by Ash Kreider, and it’s like 90% of the way to really great. But that last 10% is always the hard 10%, and I decided it was time to let this game just be what it is and push it out into the world.
As a part of that, I wanted to look back on the design process. What went well, what didn’t, what would I change if I was going to spend another 30 minutes or 30 years on this thing. To do that, I sat down with two of my friends who playtested the game, and we talked about all things Space Fam.
The first ever Dice Exploder game jam came to a close about a month ago, and today I sit down with the three hooligans from the discord who put it together and go through some of our favorite entries. If Dice Exploder is a show about concrete examples, this episode is as Dice Exploder as it gets.
I have complicated feelings about ranking things. When you start ranking art, you start deciding what makes one art “better” than another, and that often leads to trouble. But also… it’s fun?
The thing about Google Slides that makes it my favorite virtual tabletop is that everyone knows how to use it. No setting up accounts, no learning a new service, you just get right to playing. It’s easy to navigate and remember where things are. And if all you’re doing is dropping in jpgs of character sheets and putting text on top of them, maybe with a few extra slides for session recaps and notes, Slides is fully functional. You’re killing it even.
I’m kind of obsessed with this article over on the excellent Indie Game Reading Club. It’s a guest post by Jason Morningstar in which he describes his process for throwing together a game in an hour. And I don’t mean prepping for a session, I mean soup to nuts all the mechanics and everything, done in 60 minutes.
This post is more or less a love letter to that article. Here’s how my playgroup did that and what we learned.
One of the first posts I ever made on this blog, which I wrote largely to try out the Substack post editor, was this one about the “scenes menu” in Space Fam, my recently released Firebrands / Our Traveling Home hack about being the crew of a space ship and processing your trauma together. In it I walked through the design of probably the most important page in the game: the list of scenes you can pick to frame when it’s your turn, which you return to again and again throughout play. Between that post and now, I landed somewhere pretty different from what the post was looking towards, so I figured I’d finish off the story in this update.