Our latest crowdfunding campaign ended a few months ago, and we are proud to release The Kodama Institute to the world! In this 2 player roll & write, we continue the story of the Ghost Gate Chronicles, many many years after the first game, as we navigate the world as a Director of the Kodama Institute in a world where the repercussions of the Ghost Gates closing made the dead restless and the people dreamless. Inspired by euro mechanisms, The Kodama Institute runs at about 45-60 minutes and showcases a lot of meaningful decisions with its 6 different actions and variable player powers.
(pictured, prototype of the player board)
In creating this series of games, we wanted to explore our favorite type of game, the roll & write, and hopefully bring innovative mechanisms and ideas to it. Deciding on creating an overarching storyline between all Ghost Gate Chornicles games permits us to keep a similar tone between games and reuse some icons and notions between them and hopefully have the players recognize the patterns both mechaically and thematically.
What links all GGCs from now until we’re done with the series are the black & white dice and how you choose them. In the Kodama Institute, the choice becomes even more important as every black die you use inches you closer to the endgame.
While GGC1 : The Divide was a simpler attempt at a roll&write game, using pickup and deliver mechanics, we aimed at a more ambitious sequel with high variability in gameplay and style.
This has made the design of this game more laborious and we had to make sure the rulebook was tight and well-designed. Since this is a print&play game, we want folk to print the least possible number of pages, and we’re happy to have the full game within 4 pages of rules.
Having spent the last year with a new dayjob, as a board game developer, I’ve had many learning experiences that hopefully helped with this endeavor, while simultaneously reducing a lot of my time to work on these project, having to take some days off to really focus on this project.
Melanie worked on some gorgeous art for the game as well as created the whole user experience and interface from the boxy vector prototype shown above and we are absolutely stoked with how the final game looks!
We’re not yet sure where the Ghost Gate series will go next, I have quite a few prototypes in the works for third installment!
Lastly, the way we kickstarted this project was not to our liking. Be it a question of timing or appenstance, we had very little visibility and we’re thinking about how to change that for future projects. Stay tuned for more!
Last time we talked, we released a free 2-page ttrpg called The Lost Rooms, based on the one of the actions of The Kodama Institute as part of our new monthly free game. Monthly-ish?
This month we are releasing a free supplement called Porten People : Vampires. It is a 20 page digital zine filled with random generators for creating a world and its vampires as well as 4 pre-made characters with randomly generated pasts, ambitions and personalities and 2 encounters that could serve as quests or adventures you can drop into your world! It’s got some light stats to help you with your ingame battles too!
So since October, it’s been pretty hectic! But awesome! I went with my whole board game publishing team to France mid-October for a conference and then went to London for a few days.
Had some world famous french omelettes for the first time, and holy shit were they good! It was an hour wait after an overnight flight but it was worth it.
Met with longtime friend Guillaume, better known as Kaneel and he showed me around London, Deptford and Greenwhich. I fell in love with this city. I would move there in a fucking heartbeat. We listened to glitch music, reminisced about the tracker scene, ate great food and drank quite a bit.
My first sunday pub roast was absolutely delicious. Here in Quebec we sure do have a lot of influences from France but this food reminded me how close we are culturally to the English. We’re both potatoes, pork and apple sauce kinda people. Thanks Cutty Sark!
Got to go to the Tate and see my first live Rothko. I don’t know if it makes me a simp or not, but Rothko’s always been my favorite artist, paving the way for my love of ambient music and minimalism. Seeing it in front of me, his work felt huge and ambitious and world-shattering. Beautiful.
My last morning in London, I felt home. It was damp and raining, but Guillaume was preparing his fruit-bearing trees for the winter, which to me is pretty telling of how different both of our winters were going to be, case-in-point :
Winter hit pretty early in Montreal. It hit pretty hard actually. There hasn’t been this much snow this early in years. Thank you polar vortex!
My next stop in November was Pax Unplugged. I went there to source for board game publishers and met wonderful people. It’s funny how the world have been talking about americans in the past few years, but every single person I’ve met was kind, helpful, sweet and empathetic.
I don’t care much for Lords of the ring, to be honest, but the big smile on my face was from the sheer overwhelming joy of this event. Pax U, while filled to the brim with gamers, was light and calm. People took the time to talk, and I met many an interesting person, either from a passing nod or a long conversation about music or game design or the best place for a philly cheese steak.
The nicer pictures I took of London are on my photography instagram : Empire, Sleep
The last few months have been filled to the brim with amazing experiences, and I’m leaving some out, as I’ve also worked weekends at local conventions demoing games. It made it quite hard to stay on track with my personal projects, but I’m finding ways to balance all this dayjob / nightjob thing. I’m new to the corporate world, working in an office, spending energy there, so it’s been tricky for me to find my footing. But as this newsletter proves, I found a way!
I have taken 3 weeks off of work in the holidays to finish The Vacant King, hopefully by the end of January it will be sent to printing!
I will be back before the end of the year with a recap and some favorites! Spoiler : I will probably thank you for your support in 2025!
Thank you for reading! You can always reply to this email if you want to chat some more. Also, come by the discord channel and say hi.
This substack is free, but if you want to support me you can do so by checking out my games on my website, itch.io, or drivethru.
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