A roguelike developer's diary.
A while ago on a private discord I spent some time articulating one of the central concepts of intuitive game design: that you enter into a dialog with the game you are creating, and this conversation guides and shapes the design. While I believed at the time, that the dialog was essential with a mental construct of the game that you held in your mind and therefore just an example of self-talk, it…
I'm extremely happy to announce update 5 is out for Sixty Years in Space, along with a new solo/coop standalone sequel A Lot of Zeroes about mapping a journey through the Milky Way with your immortal and unusual crew. It's inspired by the High Frontier Interstellar board game I helped develop but goes much, much further: to the galactic core and beyond! You may already own A Lot of Zeroes, which…
Beau Kalden reached out a few months ago asking if they could do a reading from Sixty Years in Space, and I was more than happy to give them permission. The episode is now available at https://www.plutocrat.biz/episodes/10-60-years-in-space-pt-1-types-of-governments --- This post is from Ascii Dreams .
(I had planned on writing another post for part two, but this is an interlude triggered by another Discord discussion, so here we are. You may or may not find part one useful). It is always useful to tease out the assumptions of a thing you're designing -- as an exercise if nothing else. Michael Brough for a while made an art of taking an assumption about roguelikes and turning that assumption…
(Or how I posted in a discord and got told by the mods to write a blogpost instead). In response to me looking to get some TTRPG people onto Roguelike Radio, a fellow discorder Markus posted a link to his blogpost on Bringing Roguelikes to the Tabletop - a considered and well written piece on how to leverage some of the design tropes from modern roguelikes into table top role-playing games. It…
I've been thinking a lot about the season 1 finale of Sens8 recently. It's a great piece of writing, bringing together a gestalt of characters with different abilities to achieve a goal much in the same way a table top role-playing game might. The finale is (mostly) set in an isolated facility in Iceland, and to get to the facility, the protagonist drives up in a expensive sports car with streams…
One of the wild design decisions I made with Sixty Years in Space is that it's rules compatible with the board game it is based on. Not only in the sense that it uses the same terms and units (in both senses) as High Frontier, but in that it could get to your turn in the board game and you say "hold up", assemble a group of players to form your crew, sit down and play the roleplaying game from the…
Update 4 for Sixty Years in Space is now out. This update is focused on completing the colony administration rules in (A)-Base (D)-Landing and expanding the counter and dice "vocabulary" used across the game. The (A)-Base (D)-Landing supplement is now also priced at the same pre-release price as all the other supplements and core rules; but if you contributed $60 or more to buying the core game…
The power of adventuring through New Plan or seeing the map of the Forgotten Realms for the first time is in the gaps in the maps. The sense of possibility that these give -- not every rumour is true on the rumour table but it could be. And as a player in this space or referee running it or video game designer trying to make it or author trying to write about it, you try where possible to try to…
Update 3 required a huge investment of time to put together - but it solved a number of problems with Sixty Years in Space . I really should take some time off to celebrate but I'm already thinking about starting writing further updates to the game. I don't think I'll be making many changes to the Crewed Rules: and I anticipate those rules, along with All Errors are My Own, are unlikely to change…
Update 3 is out for Sixty Years in Space is out. And I'm incredibly proud of it. There's enough changes here that in many ways, this feels like an 1.5th edition. But the key improvement is I've found the shape of the game in a way that was unfortunately lacking in earlier versions. I've slimmed down the core (now called the Crewed) rules and put the focus firmly on space travel in the core game.…
I’ve spent a lot of time listening to a lot of smart people talking about table top role-playing games and the great news is that I think the best podcasts out there are better than anything equivalent in the video or board game space. But I want to challenge that run counter to a common assumption that games should be fun and game designers should be working towards maximising fun - or at the…
For more details see https://half-apress.itch.io/60-years-in-space/devlog/714676/update-2-is-out --- This post is from Ascii Dreams .
One of the great joys of maturing as a game designer is that I've got very good at making complex systems as simple as possible. But it turns out when you decide to make a realistic TTRPG in space, all the rules you need to play end up being far more complicated than you'd otherwise think. For instance, if your crew is spending years travelling between planets, and you want them to care about what…
Sixty Years In Space is the officially licensed tabletop roleplaying game of the High Frontier board game, which means it already starts with all the hard rocket science that the board game includes. And the inspiration doesn't stop there: you'll be exploring the solar system, finding water and building factories just like in the board game except zoomed in to the scale of individual crew members…
Per my wont, I have become obsessed with another game: the 3 lane card battler Marvel Snap. I've been largely uninterested in large deck card games since 1995 because the deck building possibility space is too big - I always ran as slim and simple a Magic deck as possible using cards that were just clearly better than others like "true" dual lands and lightning bolt. Even Imbroglio's deck building…
A lot of my concerns about the length and complexity of 60 Years in Space could simply be addressed by looking at the 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons Players Handbook and seeing how many rules players would be willing to put up with just for character generation. But there's two clear differences: there is an incentive to learn about what your character can do, which is cleverly partitioned by…
When I started writing Sixty Years in Space, there weren't as far as I was aware any TTRPG adaptations of board games. Dungeons and Dragons itself was an adaptation of a miniatures game, and that tradition had kept going, and a collectible card game had a an adaptation, but the overwhelming flow of adaptations was in the other direction. Board games, especially in the modern renaissance of board…
Sixty Years In Space is available now at https://half-apress.itch.io/60-years-in-space 60 Years in Space by half-a.press Sixty Years In first came into being as a Google doc, then a collection of Google docs, early 2015. I had been working in my spare time (I didn't need much sleep) on the High Frontier 3rd editon - I am the uncredited developer of the edition of High Frontier Interstellar that…
I'm going to teach you how to win as commander in Hell Let Loose - at least at beginning and intermediate levels. This is for purely selfish reasons: I have a much better experience at Hell Let Loose if the commander doesn't loose the game, and too many of my recent game experiences have been because the commander loses the game. Let's start by inverting the command chain. The fantasy of being in…
Looking back at my older blog series, I guess I've broken the post title convention I used to adopt, which was The Blog Post - Part One (The Partening) or something like that. I guess if you want a subtitle, then I guess part one might be Sadness, but this part two would be Making, which of course makes no sense. A big part of the reason I've played a lot more games this year, is that they've got…
2021 was a year where I reconnected with playing games in a big way. I played a lot more games. I finished games. And I felt a lot more strongly in games. To be clear, I didn't feel a lot more strongly about games. As has probably been obvious from this blog feed and the lack of any Roguelike Radio episodes for more than a year, I have cared less and thought less about games than probably any time…
“Words have lost their power. I could tell you your life was a lie but it’d barely graze the hardened callouses you’ve built to protect yourselves. Whereas for me those words rang true like the call of the bugle my grandfather fell into the trenches fighting for. Thundered like the New Zealand guns that shattered his friends.” “At least we can agree on one thing. Fuck Australia!” They toasted…
Michael Brough has just released an expansion to 868-HACK called PLAN.B and it's available on Steam as DLC and iOS as an in app purchase . Much like his recent Ossuary expansion to Imbroglio, I consider it pretty essential but for different reasons. Ossuary made the early game more interesting by allowing for a much greater variety of deck builds which were not necessarily game winning but were a…
I would like to announce that Unangband 0.6.5c has been released by the new Unangband maintainer DGoldDragon28. DGoldDragon28 had been developing a variant based on Unangband, and now has my blessing to continue with the main Unangband releases as well. You can find the full details at https://dgolddragon28.github.io/Unangband/ which is also the new Unangband homepage. Please redirect your links.…