radiant fracture

Hey, I posted my game! You can find it here.

Playtests welcome. It is a solo storytelling/journalling/story creation horror game. It uses a simplified version of solitaire to drive the story.

[ETA] From the writeup:

And yet the sun rises.

Weird. is a horror game about a flawed protagonist confronting their worst nightmares.

I, a troubled character, am alone on the longest night of the year.

You, a storyteller, use prompts and the inevitability of card order to tell a story for me, driven by fear and fate.

I am tormented by unfinished business, which, as you know, is a great way to become the target of supernatural forces.

Enjoy bringing about my nearly inevitable and almost certainly miserable end, but also maybe final moment of grace, redemption, or transformation, in Weird.

* * * * * *

Title-wise, I went with Weird, as an archaic synonym for fate, styled with a period: Weird.

I liked the suggestion of Patience quite a bit, but this isn't really a game about being patient. I'd want waiting, duration, something like that, in the mechanics somewhere. Actually, maybe I'll try to make such a game, since I still seem to have Game Fever. Maybe it's to play in waiting rooms.

As predicted, the game jam I made has not posted to the Itch calendar, so I am the only person who knows about it or has submitted anything. But I tried!

( Thoughts on the possibilities of this mechanic )

* * * * * *

Qua writing tool, I find the game a pretty decent method for creating something between a detailed outline and a rough story draft.

§rf§

Hey my game jam is over! I'm announcing the results a little early.

Folks, that was brilliant. 32 people signed up, and there were 10 entries in the end! (Plus one after the deadline.) I ended up giving awards to four games instead of three because I liked so many.

It is damn difficult to be in charge of judging things, but I do feel like the small prize encouraged people to enter. It's so nice to win a thing.

Here are the four cup-of-coffee winners (couldn't stop at three in the end). I had lots of criteria, but it came down to -- how easy was it to tell a story that I loved through the game? All of these games helped me build a story that I wouldn't have come up with on my own and that surprised, delighted, and moved me.

• Monster in the Wilderness - ursula - a beautiful abstraction of the themes of Beowulf (or that's how I read it) - gorgeous
  
• A Moment too Late - ToriBee - You are a time-travelling tortoise who always arrives too late for the Major Historical Event and has to piece things together from the aftermath - Crept up on me!
  
• A Game of Tower - yhlee - Fantasy, surrealism, and personal growth via confronting your lies about yourself - delicious
  
• Kintsugi - elusis - A supple yet strong spine for stories of damage and repair - poignant
  

There was lots of fun and story to be had in all the games, though, and I recommend reading / playing the others.

{rf}


PS what is a good name for the cup-of-coffee prize and/or winner?

Okay, I'm going to do it!

Fractured Birthday TTRPG Game Jam
Runs Nov 1 - Dec 22
Results released Dec 31

It's my birthday. I would like there to be more small weird TTRPGs (Table-Top Role-Playing Games) in the world. Make my birthday wish come true. Create a TTRPG on the theme of fracture, breakage, and/or repair. Win a cup of coffee!

This jam comes with a tiny prize! Up to 3 (three) of my fave games will receive $10 (Canadian) so that the designer can buy themselves a congratulatory coffee.

More details and the jam submission page here: itch.io/jam/fractured-birthday-game-jam

Some Examples of Games I Like

I like spooky games, horror games, and games about feelings.

Ten Candles (beautiful doom ritual)
1000-Year-Old Vampire (roll & write delight)
This Vineyard Will Be Our Salvation (quirky, smart, critical)
Quietus
Pull Me From the Earth (Q&A excellence)
Star Crossed / Dread
Brindlewood Bay (love the crime-solving mechanic)
The Quiet Year
Debrief

Other Things I Like in Games

Collaborative storytelling
Queer & trans content / vibe
Solo journalling games, other writing games, other solo games
Unusual and / or witty mechanics (esp. physical objects)
Low-prep, improvisational games with a few rules to anchor play
Games about feeeeelings but also about story
Gamification of hard real-life activities or experiences
Games with aspects of ceremony or ritual

My Games

I think my most successful games are these, if you want to see the kinds of things I make:

You Are a Beacon (solo journalling game)
Getting There (2-player Q&A storytelling mini-game)
The Fledgling and the Vale (2-player Q&A story game)

If you'd like a small colourful PDF of my little road trip conversation game / story prompt Getting There, you can download it free here on Itch.io. I've already posted the full text in this journal here, and a delirious run-through with sabotabby here, so the PDF is just for those who might want something more visually appealing to use on class slides or something like that.

I dunno. It's yellow. Might be cheerful. Just trying to get everything in one place.

Game Jam

I joined a game jam for the first time, but then I got buzzy and made a whole game before the jam even started, so now I need a new idea starting at 10 pm tonight.

The jam is to create a solo journalling game -- a game whose form is a series of journal entries you make in the voice of the character.

This format wasn't something I'd particularly thought about creating, but this jam was one of the few jams I identified that was a) for TTRPGs, not video games; b) starting soon; and c) asking for something I thought I could produce.

Now I can't stop making them.

My current idea (the one that's nearly finished, knock wood) is a journal that gets written out of order and then filled in via memory threads that link different entries, or "how I draft everything anyway." I like the way this brings about connections and narrative arcs that the player/writer might not otherwise have come up with. Since it's moving back and forth that is the core mechanic, the effect is going to be kind of ephemeral -- the finished result will be a linked piece of writing, but the most pleasurable part of the experience, I think, will be making the links.

I'm pleased because I had drafted a very complicated mechanic for moving from entry to entry, and then as I was walking to work today I saw how I could vastly simplify it. Now I think I can get the game onto four pages. I can see that economy is a value in game design, especially in these little TTRPGs.

I didn't actually need to go in to work, but I did need the walk, and it was good to be in the office and grab a few things and print a few things and feel At Work, even if what I actually mostly did was revise the new game. No one else was around until the cleaning staff came by -- I got there pretty late in the day, and folks are still minimizing their time in shared interior spaces.

{rf}