This episode of Dice Exploder can be found here.
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.
Further Reading
Space Fam on itch
The Disc 2 jam.
A commentary podcast episode for Space Fam is available here.
I wrote about the design of Space Fam's "scenes menu" here.
I wrote about the design of the Space Fam character sheet here.
Our Traveling Home by Ash Kreider
Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern by Takuma Okada
Space Post by Jason Morningstar
Night Witches by Jason Morningstar
Socials
The Dice Exploder blog is at diceexploder.com
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Transcript
Dice Exploder: Space Fam Design Commentary
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Sam: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Dice Exploder. Each week, we take a tabletop RPG mechanic and fly with it to the moon. My name is Sam Dunnewold and this week is a bonus episode where we will not be doing that. This is a designer commentary from my recently released game Space Fam.
I see a lot of designers get stuck early on with a forever project, something that might eventually turn out amazing but that also takes fucking years to finish . I often hear designers coming out the other side of these projects wishing they'd spent less time killing themselves over these big opuses it just hit publish at some point. And that's finally what I'm doing with Space Fam.
This is my hack of Our Traveling Home, Ash Kreider's game of queer romance, found family and finding healing through belonging. I took the Howl's Moving Castle inspiration of that game and replaced it with Cowboy Bebop and Firefly. And on the one hand, I'm really proud of this game. I set out to make something a little heftier than my usual to fully embrace a design philosophy of just tell players what you want them to do straight up and to capture an emotional arc of dealing with regret and anxiety that I see play out in a lot of games I play for some serious reason. And I think I accomplished all those goals.
But there's also an important subsystem in the game, action sequences, that I just never figured out how to do, and I can feel scope creep sneaking in. A recent draft out at a map making element of the game that I'm not sure connects to everything else, and I can feel myself wanting to warp the whole game around that cool map instead of just making a whole new game about space found family map-making stuff.
I don't know, I started Space Fam back in 2020, I played at least two full campaigns with a dozen one shots of it. And I'm just sick of working on it. It's time to let it go. It's your problem now.
But as I pass it off to your capable hands , here is a 40 minute podcast episode where I sat down with two of my close friends who playtested the game, and we talked through the highs and lows of all things Space Fam. Thank you very much to Claire and caveat for indulging me on this little romp.
Broadly speaking, you can probably listen to this podcast episode and get something out of it even if you haven't read the game. But if you do want to read along, I put a bunch of copies up for free on my itch page, and you can go over there and grab one if you're also going to come back and listen to this. If you go on to play the game, maybe toss me a couple bucks.
Okay with that. Here is my designer commentary for Space Fam.
Claire and Caveat. Thanks for being here today. Who are the two of you? Claire, uh, you want to start with you?
Claire: Yeah I'm Claire. I use she, her, hers pronouns. And I've known you for, gosh, I don't know, a good handful of years now through my partner John.
Sam: Yeah. What was your experience with Space Fam like? How did I rope you into coming to play Space Fam?
Claire: Well it wasn't hard. I feel like all the games that I've been in with you have been fantastic. Yeah, I think before this, we, I had already been part of the Our Traveling Home playtest
Sam: yeah.
Claire: So it wasn't even my first time playtesting a game with you. yeah, it was not a hard sell.
Sam: Thank you, you're very kind. And, Caveat who are you? How did you come to SpaceFam?
Caveat: I'm Caveat, my pronouns are he/ they, and I have been playing games with Sam for a very long time. I think if I list the actual amount of years that might straight up dox both of us.
And if I remember correctly we actually were discussing Fam was just, like, some mechanics you were interested in. And kinda, like, touched base occasionally throughout the construction process, but because of time constraints, I was not really able to play until very long into the construction process, and so I only played a fairly finished version of the game. But we talked about, like, troubleshooting, oh, I'm gonna take this mechanic out, oh, I think I'm gonna go with this instead extensively, is my memory.
Sam: Yeah, cause the idea for this came back at the beginning of lockdown. I started a new RPG group with a couple of friends, including Ash Kreider and Caveat here, and I introduced SpacePost and Stewpot to that group. And then Ash really loved those games, and got inspired to make their own version of a game sort of along those lines and made Our Traveling Home, and then we playtested that.
And while we were playtesting that I was like this rips and I want to do my version of this and I want to do it in space with a cozy little Space Family and I guess it's called Space Fam now and I think it was it was like really early on in that process where I was spitballing ideas late at night with you after we were playing Cav. And then eventually I actually got a playtest going with Claire and some other people, and I recall the way it would go is we'd do a playtest, and then I would come back to Caveat, and be like, this is how it went. Please debrief with me, and then I'd make changes, I'd go back, and the game would work completely differently by the time we got back to, to playing with Claire.
Claire: That does sound like what I remember.
Sam: Yeah, so that is actually what I want to ask you about. Like, Claire, especially because you played an earlier version of the game, what do you remember from the game?
Claire: Yeah, the things that stick out in my memory are kind of like random little bits too of like, oh, this was an interesting event or like, this is how these characters interacted. And I remembered you know, I was playing the ship AI, I remembered that I picked some neo pronouns for the ship that I wasn't super familiar with. And then thought like, that was a fun thing for me to explore and practice with. But I could not for the life of me remember what my character was named. I could remember that there was an event later that essentially a different version of that character existed and I could remember that name, but I couldn't remember my original character name.
But now seeing it's like, oh, how could I have forgotten that? It was Wishbone, which is very cute.
Sam: just want to also add it's funny to me that I don't think I've ever played a game of Space Fam where someone wasn't the ship AI. People really love being the ship AI on that list of roles.
Claire: It's so flavorful. And I feel like, and again, a lot of my thoughts on this are going to be pretty direct comparisons to the Our Traveling Home game,
but
Sam: I mean this is a direct
Claire: is a direct descendant,
that's true,
Sam: I've taken entire minigames from Our Traveling Home and reprinted them with very little modification with Ash's Blessing, so.
Claire: Yeah, and just that, you know, I played that one and then this was, I think, basically the next RPG that I played, too. It makes sense that people want to play the ship AI because with the, Our Traveling Home it's certainly interesting to be like, the demon or whatever uh, is powering the house, but I feel like that also is just, I don't know, an unfamiliar concept? It's harder to work out what that relationship looks like. Whereas a ship AI, everybody knows what that is and how that might work. So it's like, it's an interesting concept in the more approachable form.
Sam: Yeah, I think there's a very common type of role player who's really interested in playing with the kind of identity issues that come with playing an artificial intelligence and a character that doesn't necessarily have a traditional human body. And I think that's one of the reasons that it's such a popular choice also.
Caveat, what do you remember from playing Space
Caveat: I remember basically moments and character arcs in a way that feels like a series of vignettes, which I think is very much kinda what the structure of the game is. is. It's a little bit less hard to phrase this correctly, because like, the scenes very much breathe, and there is linear development, but it feels chopped up into discreet pieces in a way that feels different from other games, but I'm having a little bit of trouble putting my finger on why, if that makes any sense.
And thinking about this meeting, of the things that I considered is like, oh, so this game really makes you feel a profound sense of community in that like, a big part of the game is being like, No, I, I can't do this anymore, I'm gonna do something, you know, like, leave, or do something terrible or self destructive, and then having your friends be like, no, we, we, we still love you, like, come on, hey, we're in this together.
But then also,
so, in the game that we played, The Company is, like, very outlined as the Bad. Basically, it's an omnipresent, you know, like, late capitalism colonialist endeavor that controls, the known solar system, is expanding to everything, and controlling every element of life, not in an absurd totalitarian way, but in the, like, desperate way that capitalist systems like, bend you to their will.
And so it's it's unpleasant and a pretty effective big bad, if you ask me, because so many of the, like, worst things in our day to day life are writ large in the form of The Company in that version of the game.
Sam: yeah, and and the intent I had for the design of the game was that it would be about finding community and camaraderie outside of this exhausting system that you were all living inside. And then eventually as you gained more beliefs than fears on your character sheet, you would decide that you couldn't keep running away from that, you had to take your little community and go try to fight back against The Company.
Caveat: Yeah, that's How do I put this? do that wonderful RPG thing where you get to have a lot of agency and you get to really affect the world. But also part of that is making the decision of like, oh no, this is just 100 percent what I'm doing. I cannot let this stand anymore. I'm going for it.
And in my experience, real life doesn't work that way in a very dissatisfying way. It's a long grind of just being a person and trying to like help where you can. And there's some discomfort when you see the very clear cut version of that in a game, and then you go back to your life and you're like, oh, that was nice, but also, wish I could do that in a broader sense.
Sam: yeah, so, for much the same reason that you are describing, one of the reasons that I have dragged my heels for years putting out this game is because I just wasn't satisfied by that. I wasn't interested in that.
So what I kicked around for quite a while was a version that is more explicitly based on The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, where the structure is you are a ship crew that is going from point A to point B. And when you get to point B, the story's over. Instead of the story being about we are finding community away from The Company, and now we are gonna go fight back against The Company, it is just, we kind of live in a society, and we are going to try our best to like, find connection in our little corner of it.
And I made it so that one of the players specifically has to be a passenger on the ship, and then at the end you drop that passenger off and say goodbye to them. And so the, the arc of the game is much more about getting to know that person, incorporating them into your crew, and then saying goodbye at the other end.
And I think that works a lot better for a lot of what the themes of the game are, but it does It does, I, yeah, I, I never was able to crack that company thing in a way that felt satisfying and not just like wish fulfillment to me. Not that there's anything even wrong with the wish fulfillment, it just like, it wasn't the thing that was exciting me by the time I was finished with the game.
Claire: Yeah,
Caveat: That makes a lot of sense, and it's also fascinating because then the narrative arc of the game that you're going to put out is radically different than the one I played, and I think probably also the one Claire played. So now I feel like I'm commenting on a version of the game that no one is ever going to see, which is really interesting.
Sam: I do think that my intent with the version that came out is that it basically takes all that energy and it just brings it down into the personal rather than the climactic. Like a thing that I added since I believe both of y'all played the game was giving every character a regret that they have. And then y'all would have playtested guilt limit breaks, which is a term I'm still very proud of and the way that every character can become very guilty and then do the thing of like I'm gonna like run away because actually don't deserve you people and you're better off without me and then everyone has to go run after that person and say, no we do love you, please come back, and like that kind of thing.
And, I added a equivalent for I call it make things right, where you go and like make up your own end of your personal character arc that you can only do once you've got more beliefs than fears. So at the same point where you would go confront The Company in the version that y'all playtested, you now go and confront your past or like whatever flaw you have discovered at the heart of your character and what a mistake that you've made and you try to put it right.
Claire: Yeah, that makes sense, and I'm, I'm trying to remember the exact climax of my group, because I feel like it had drifted a little bit away from that of like, yeah, the full scope of like, you're going to take the company down and the company just doesn't exist anymore, but it ended up being more about like finding the kind of middle ground of like how much you can live with and like what you can't and making a, a small but meaningful difference.
And like, that was really fundamental to my character and how my character worked. Cause I, you know, I was playing the ship AI. And I ended up doing something where I was essentially like bluffing as a current up to date company ship with the proper company software and whatever and I didn't come out of it unscathed and, and essentially became like a child of my previous character who was left behind. But in the process was able to like, disseminate some form of software that essentially gave other ship AIs, like, more free will, like, I was like, kind of slowly starting, like, a grassroots movement,
Sam: yeah, and I, I do like that the way that I did frame the version where you are going after the company is not that you, like, end the game by going and taking down the company, but that you end the game by going and doing
Claire: one thing,
Sam: Yeah, you take one step in that direction and then like, I don't know if you want to keep telling that story, you can switch to playing Scum and Villainy or whatever.
And I do think that that was better than the like, and at the end we save the galaxy kind of thing that it sort of felt like when I was feeling my least generous towards the game. Um, Yeah, I don't know.
Claire: Yeah, it was just funny. I really did like the system of fears and beliefs and how that like so quickly and easily outlined a character by the most important thing you need in an RPG, which is their motivations.
And I feel like in a weird way to at least for me, it felt like it sat pretty much where I wanted it, although maybe just a little bit to the side of wish fulfillment of I feel like I set out with, these fears and things and it was easier kind of both mentally and in, I don't know, situationally, in character for my character to like come to terms with these things than I would have expected.
And like, I don't know, some of that was, again, yeah, kind of a weird wish fulfillment of stuff of like, well this is stuff like, that I kind of believe about myself, and I want to believe about myself so I'm going to project it onto this character and everyone's gonna be super supportive about it, but, I think that was maybe also just like, I don't know, the length of the game just means that some of that stuff is, going to happen kind of fast,
Sam: Yeah,
Claire: but I did really like it overall.
Sam: I definitely fine tuned the timing on it, even by the time Caveat was playtesting it. I will say, I also really like the fears and beliefs system. I feel like this this game was sort of me at my maximum, just say the thing that you want people to do. Just like, put the words down that actually matter.
Like, I think there's a lot of systems that try to create a particular kind of conflict or relationship between characters through like, currencies or moving the right pieces around, and this was me being like, nah, I'm gonna do the Our Traveling Home thing. In this, like you have fears, write down some things you're afraid of,
Like, we're not fucking around here, we're just doing the thing that I want you to think about. And I do think that was pretty effective.
Claire: Yeah,
Caveat: I remember correctly, that was the first mechanic in the game, was this like, fear versus belief trade off, and then everything else came afterwards.
Sam: Yeah.
Claire: just remember it being really interesting and kind of fun to with some of these to like, end up tweaking them or updating them. And looking at the character sheets that was maybe a thing that I did more than some other people, but there were you know, here's, here's the idea of some fears. And then as the game progressed a little bit, I was able to redefine that in a way that made more sense for the situation and the character. And like, figuring that out was, was really fun and interesting.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. I'll also say the Fears and Beliefs system had another component at one point that was just superfluous. I don't even remember what it was called. I think maybe beliefs and convictions were different, even though those are the same word.
I also kinda lifted that whole system from specific Thirsty Stored Lesbians playbook that Caveat and I were in a game playing with at the time.
Caveat: Oh, right! Yeah, that's that specific playbook. I can't remember the name of it now.
Sam: I was
kinda like, this is good enough that everyone should just be doing this one playbook.
Caveat: Yeah, cuz that's what gave rise to everything, because like, that was such a propulsive force in the Thirsty Sword Lesbians game that we were playing that like, it, in a lot of ways, shaped the entire campaign and not just that one character. And it was like, wait a minute, this is so good.
This is just its entire, like, game in its own right, if we, if we do it right.
Sam: Yeah. And it fits so well, especially the Sunday group, which was not the group playing Thirsty Sword Lesbians, but another group that you and I were both in... every story that that group tells is the story of someone trying to martyr themselves for the rest of the group, and the rest of the group being like, no, you're not allowed to die, we love you too much. And like, people like, competing to be the martyr.
And I found that funny, but also like, that was a story that clearly worked across a lot of different games and a lot of different genres, and don't even know that I was consciously doing this, but I feel like this game was my attempt to codify that particular group's playstyle into a system.
And I think a lot of game design is doing that, of like taking what your group is already doing and trying to write it down in a particular context.
Claire: Yeah, that does make sense.
Caveat: If I remember correctly, also one of the things that made it really hard to playtest is that when you're doing the design method of like, we're just gonna write down what our group does organically, then all of a sudden you're like, okay, we need somebody who is not at all connected to this playstyle to see if it even runs with a different group of people who just don't have this template in mind.
Sam: Yeah, there was some amount of trickiness to that, and, I mean, frankly, I never did that playtesting, so I don't know if it functions for those people. I'm really curious if anyone listens to this and tries it out and has results.
But yeah, so, in addition to the Thirsty Sword Lesbians playbook that was inspiration at the start of this, and wanting to make a space hack of Our Traveling Home, the third mechanical ingredient of the beginning of this game was we were playing a campaign of Agon, and I discovered that Agon has this system where you do contests, and everyone rolls dice once, and then you cover an entire scene, and you get a ton done all at once, you maybe do two or three of those on one island that you show up to, to try to solve the island's problems, and then you do like a three contest climax to the island to really put things right at the end.
And, I discovered that if you just did the three contest climax at the end, that was by itself a really satisfying, short narrative experience. And I had this idea that that would be a really fun way to do, like The Watch or Night Witches style missions, or like Blades in the Dark scores, but like, make them all small and focused. That you'd go out into the world, you'd do this big action sequence, and then you'd come back battered and bruised from the action, and most of the game would be in downtime and like, dealing with the consequences of that. And, I loved that little system as like, here's a little trio of dice rolls that you do to sort of generate some consequences and then come back home.
And, what I found playtesting was that in Space Fam, that initial Agon thing didn't port in very well. There was something about doing it GM less that felt kind of bad, or maybe I never wrote it down in a way that clearly communicated it. But, yeah, then I ended up making, I don't know, 20 different systems to try to accomplish this same thing of like, go out into the world, do a little action sequence, cause all these Space Family style TV shows have you going and doing that, and then come home and have feelings about whatever went wrong on the action sequence.
And all of them were bad, I never found one I was happy with. And the one that I'm publishing is basically, I don't know, make it up yourselves, nerds.
Uh, And, Claire, that, that, I really appreciate you especially went through so many different versions of this going out and doing a job, or finding trouble,
Claire: There was, there was a lot of that. Yeah.
Sam: There's so many different ones. Like, I tried this Agon hack, I tried an other kind dice system, I tried one where there was like, six different clocks going, and every turn you would decide which clock you wanted to work on, and it was just too complicated
and didn't make any fucking sense.
Claire: Oh, I think, I feel like I vaguely remember that one. That was, yeah, that was a lot.
Sam: Before I decided to just sort of like, release this game and call it done, and like, I don't want to work on it anymore, the one I was circling around was one where I wrote a like, Powered by the Apocalypse style move, that it was called, instead of like an Apocalypse World, it would be like Seduce Someone, this move was called, Your Ship is Attacked by the Dread Pirate Christobal Shrike. And it was like a two page long move that described how this pirate boards your ship and like gave you a bunch of options to jump in and try to, like, interact with him and do stuff. It was basically a small choose your own adventure booklet. And I do still think it would be fun to just have, like, six of those, and when you get into an action sequence, you get into, like, a very particular on rails sort of sequence that you go through, but there's still places for you to push off against.
But it was just gonna be too much writing to deal with. It was medium effective, but I, I don't know, I'm done with it, I got other projects I want to work on now, and, yeah, I just never was really able to crack this trouble jobs thing.
Claire: And that makes sense because I feel like it, in a very like loose narrative sense generally worked out of just like yeah here's a bunch of random things that you could go do or that happen that you know had very different flavor from like you're being aggressively boarded to do you respond to that like ship's distress call to just like you're on a planet and like they're kind of having some trouble with the agriculture. , but mechanically how we were supposed to interact with that was, oh, never quite got sorted.
Sam: Yeah.
Claire: And like, what the, what the exact mechanical consequences for doing things works. You can always come up with ideas of, okay, well, like, I want to do this. Can I do that? Does that work? But then being able to like, I don't know, fairly say yes or no and then like, but at this cost without the GM. Yeah, it didn't quite function.
Sam: It's tough. You really do need a very particular style of play to, like, enjoy receiving consequences to do that thing GM less. And that style of play is so antithetical to what the rest of the game was asking you to do, of settle down and just, like, have your nice cozy time with your friends and, like, open up to each other. And I think I'm pretty comfortable switching back and forth between those two modes. Those are like my two modes of play.
Claire: Yeah.
Sam: But I think a lot of people weren't in the same way and Yeah, I don't know. I still don't know how to solve this problem. Caveat, what was your experience with it like?
Caveat: I mean, I think that's very on point, because that feels like the Sunday RPG group writ large in the dynamic of it, both in terms of like, yeah, okay, so you're gonna have a really nice cozy moment. And then the awfulness will set in and you'll have some horrible choices.
Sam: Yeah, yeah exactly
Caveat: and then back to coziness. So you can, so you can really, you know, like unpack emotionally what had to happen there in those, in those terrible moments. And so that's something that like feels very natural, but also I think the game doesn't really hold your hand or facilitate particularly strongly. And so it feels more like a basic template for what you want to do. But I think that people might have really radically different experiences playing it, at least the version that I experienced, and it sounds like that's true as well
Sam: Yeah, and I, ultimately decided that Like, one of the things I decided to do with getting rid of the company was like, if people just want to play this game entirely in cozy, like, feeling safe mode, like, who am I to stop them? Like, that's fine. Go do that. And, if you are like me, if you're my people, and you want to go in there and like really fuck each other up emotionally in the spots where the game is asking you to do that, then great, like, it, it fits.
But yeah, I, I don't know, this is actually the first time, like, live I'm realizing that that was the problem in all of these systems, that the game did not do a good job of holding your hand through switching modes like that.
Claire: Yeah, you have to be able to set your own spiciness tolerance.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah.
Caveat: So what you're saying is you need to do another redesign and this entire recording and release is scrapped And
Sam: that is what I'm saying. I mean, that's, this is why this game, I've been working on this game for like three, four years now, and this is why it's every single time I would come up with one of these job systems, I'd be like, I think this is it, and then once this is done, the game really is done. Like, it's just this problem. And I got to the point of, the only thing left is these action sequences. I got there really quickly, but, yeah, I just still haven't been able to crack it.
Caveat: I,
do remember you saying, oh I think I've cracked it, a large number of times.
Sam: yeah, and the one I really want to try now is... I remember vividly Caveat a playtest with you that did not go well where we used Otherkind Dice. Which is where you're doing the Psi*run thing, you like put out a bunch of Individual cards that have a result level from like one to six on them and different bad thing like six is good, one is bad, different badness levels are in the middle. And you roll a bunch of dice and then assign one die to each card and then it's like you accomplished your goal but the ship got damaged is the second card and also you did collateral damage to some civilian is the third card and okay, cool.
Like I think that that process was really clunky in the way that we did it in that particular playtest, but I wonder if there's a way to use that kind of system in a more freeform way to just like tell people, okay, it's now time for action sequence. Just go into the action sequence and play it out however you want to until you get to a moment where it feels like it's time to roll dice, and then make up your fucking cards that are tailored to the situation as opposed to using the like very generic boring ones that I had come up with and then roll some dice and and deal with it from there.
But even as I'm saying it out loud now, that's that's still just sort of like fill in the rest of the owl Logic like it. I I don't know. I don't know how to make this system work. Someone please hack my game and make this system work in the way that I need it to
Caveat: I'd totally forgotten that playtest until you mentioned it, and then now I'm realizing that I look back on that very fondly.
Sam: hmm
Caveat: But I think you're right that it was mechanically clunky, but even more than that, It wasn't Space Fam. It was like some sort of Scum and Villainy offshoot where the game cycle was downtime action sequence, downtime action sequence, and you could probably just play that forever.
And like, that's not the game that you were trying to make. And that's a really fun game that sounds very fun to play, but also isn't like any of the emotional mechanics that you are very clearly like carrying through from variation to variation. And so, I mean, like, I think you just have another game on your hands if you want to finish the rest of the owl, to borrow your turn of phrase.
Sam: think, part of the issue is that I wanted Space Fam to be both of those games at the same time. Like what I, I, what I still want it to be is a game where you play this unpack your emotions simulator that I have created and I think works really well. And then you go off and you get fucked up because you have to pay rent. And then like, you come back having been fucked up, and then you need to process your emotions again. And yeah, it does just feel like mechanically, those two phases of play never interlock properly. And as a player, it is tough for a lot of people to switch between those two modes, and the game didn't do a good job of helping you.
And so I still don't know. Yeah. I still don't know what to do about it.
Claire: Yeah, I feel like what the tension in the jobs also often boiled down to in my play group was like exactly how much consequence is there supposed to be, and are we, like, spreading it around correctly? Like like we don't want one person to take all of the emotional damage or whatever, but sometimes that kind of mechanically seem to make more sense of like, well, this really is their wheelhouse, and then if there's going to be failures, it's going to be on them. And then, how do we evaluate that and stuff?
But I'm, I'm really curious to see, too how this game has become more like the Becky Chambers books, because I, I specifically started reading those after we had played these.
Sam: Me
Claire: And I was looking back in the notes too I just had a comment there of like, wow, I know you said this game was inspired by these, but then I read it, it was like, oh yeah, that's exactly what we did.
Sam: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder, actually, if an interesting way to do the jobs slash, trouble scenes would be to specifically, like, play until it is clear who fucks up, and then put all the consequences on that character. And then, the next downtime could almost be about them unpacking those emotions, and everyone else unpacking their emotions around that character. And then you could, like, rotate that spotlight around, so that when it's your time to get fucked up, like, you're the protagonist for the episode, you know what I mean? Maybe there's something interesting to that.
Claire: Yeah, that feels like vaguely what we did, or like we did that, but it would be like two people on half the intensity but it definitely varied, yeah.
Sam: Two other things I am proud of that I've added to this game since y'all played it.
The first is I rewrote the game text so that the voice, like the narrator who is communicating the game to you, is the hull of the ship that you are on. And I found that really cute and effective and I'm very proud of it.
And the second is I added a bit to character creation where you sit down and you draw a physical map of the ship
Claire: Oh, that's good.
Sam: you all like pick your room on the ship and you also like add details to the rooms about what you like about them and what you don't like about them and you end up with this really weird little crude drawing of a spaceship that is fun. And that's really effective too.
And if if I was gonna take another two years and make Space Fam like my priority as a game obviously the focus would be on trouble and jobs and sorting out what the hell is going on there but another thing I would do is find places in all of the scenes, all of the mini games to allow you to spend camaraderie like in the scenes to like change how the scene goes down a little bit because like that's something else I like the mechanic of camaraderie in that you get it when you learn new things about your crewmates that was always super effective but I never found a good thing to spend it on.
Claire: Yeah,
Sam: The the other thing I would do is find stuff in the scene slash minigames where you, modify the map of the ship.
Like, in the scene where the Dread Pirate Christobal Shrike shows up and boards your ship, you have to, like, draw on your ship where his ship clamps onto yours and breaches through the wall, and then you just permanently have a patch there. And I think that kind of thing would be really fun to kind of play out as the campaign went on, too.
Claire: Yeah. That does sound really cool because again, I'm maybe a little biased playing the ship, and I thought a lot about how that physically interacted with the human people on the ship. But I feel like the, at least there were a couple of different locations on the ship that ended up being really pivotal of just like to the whole vibes of it, and then also sort of to some of the characters of like, this is where this person retreats to, or like this is where they're comfortable.
Sam: Yeah, so I'll wrap this up by just saying I'm really proud of all of the feelings side of this game. I obviously have problems with it and those problems have led to me dragging my heels and actually putting it out and maybe I will actually fix those problems one day, you know, if you're a publisher and you like the look of this thing, at me.
If you playtest this game or you think you have good solutions for the problems I've laid out and you want to come on as a co designer, DM me.
But I, I am overall really happy with a lot of the pieces of this game and I hope that they are of interest to someone. I want to just conclude with like, what Claire is like your favorite part of this game?
Claire: It came down to, yeah, really the fears and fears and beliefs and relationship system and how those evolved over time. And like, the journey that my character went on and how that was influenced by the journeys that the other characters were going on.
Sam: Yeah. I love an emotional advancement system as opposed to a power level advancement system.
Claire: Yeah, and like the way that our climax played out too, it was very much a, a system of like how much, effect do you want, versus like, how much are you going to pay for it personally, to be the change you want to see in the world.
Sam: Caveat, what do you, what was your favorite part of Space Fam?
Caveat: I mean, I have to echo the emotional arcs, but the specific thing I want to point out is the guilt limit breaks, because I just love. Any really style of play, not even mechanic, but style of play that is like, okay, here's the fundamental tension in this character, and that's going to build and be affected by the world until something fundamental changes.
And how does that change the way that this character sees and interacts with the world, and what happens after that. And I think that it really places a direct mechanical focus on that happening, and that's one of my favorite parts of RPGs. And I love the fact that the game says very clearly, Oh, no, this is what it's about, okay? This is where we're heading, like, keep this in mind, and, not necessarily, like, call your shot in advance, but, like, here's, here's what you have to work with. Here's your ingredients. What's gonna happen? And then it does the classic play to find out thing, and, and I think that's just wonderful.
Claire: I like the tension that it ended up building with the idea that when problem happen, or like when your, your character is stressed out of course they're not going to handle it perfectly and like they're gonna have, you know, their flaws or whatever and they're gonna cope with it in their particular way. And that like there is a reason that they do that. That's effective for a while, but eventually that's going to have consequences and they're going to have to either really get hurt by that or examine those beliefs and feelings and do something about it, which was really cool.
Sam: Yeah, I think maybe the thing I'm proudest of in this game is guilt limit breaks for a different reason. Which is for everything that you both described about building to that point, a thing I really wanted to do was make a game that taught people how to frame a scene of the kind that is presented in this game.
This like, list of leading questions about what's going on. Like, we know we are going down planetside, and there's a bunch of stuff that could happen there. But like, the game asks you like, six questions or whatever, and you answer them. And like, maybe you embellish on them, you like, move out, you add your own questions, but like, the game is sort of walking you through going through a scene like this.
And by the time you got to a Guilt Limit Break happening, the game stopped giving you directions. It explicitly says like, do whatever you want. Make your Guilt Limit Break playing Yahtzee. Like, I don't give a shit, do what feels right to you. And invariably, people got to the point in the game where it was time for their guilt limit break and it was clear what the scene should be and they understood it and they were able to frame it themselves without any hand holding from the game.
It was like the moment where you take off the training wheels and like let the player sort of fly and do the thing that they want to do and paralleled the moment when the character does that and I found that really really satisfying.
Claire: It's really sweet. I can see it though. Yeah, I definitely would have thought of it that way, but that makes a lot of sense.
Sam: Yeah. Well, thanks to both of you for coming and chatting with me about my silly little game. I hope one day it is perfect, but art never will get there. So, this is the version that we have and everyone can live with. Please make my game better.
Claire: Yeah. If you're mad about it, you fix it.
Please. Please fix it.
Caveat: perhaps you even designed a game that is about things not being perfect, but getting to a place where you can live with them and move forward.
Perhaps that's even a parallel for the feelings that you're having now.
Sam: Thanks again to Claire and Caveat for joining me, you could pick up a copy of space fam. Now on my itch page S Dunnewold dot. ish.io/space. Hyphen fam. As always you can find me on socials at S Donald Walt or on the dice Exploder discord. Our logo was designed by sporgory, and our theme song is Sunset Bridge by Purely Grey
and thanks as always to you for listening. See you next time.