Helllooo Everyone,

We had a fantastic first week and we're happily swimming through our second. As I keep saying, I'm so chuffed you all want The Wanderer's Bookshop in your lives.

We've unlocked our guest writers for the BackerKit Exclusive Ephemera and are well on our way to unlocking a beautiful layout by Nala J Wu. So let's talk more about Nala's work which you can peek at here .

I've worked with Nala on two of my previous games, The Tower and Universe At Your Door: The Traveller. Two completely different styles and both turned out amazingly. With The Tower we were working with 2 colour Risograph printing for the puzzle dungeon and each spread was designed to highlight the puzzle with art and layout.

a sketch of fully grown stalks of corn in black highlighted against pink stalks. Below that text reads " 9 Time and Care 9, as you enter the room, you are greeted by towering corn with browning leaves and autumnal heat."

One of my favourite things about Nala's work is that every spread is different, designed to best highlight what's going on at that point with the text.

They also brought their incredible style to Universe at Your Door: The Traveller. Creating new heads up display styles for every spread to best feature and provide good flow for the game text, which aids the understanding of heirachy and how to move through as you play.

A mock up showing the internal layout of Universe At Your Door: The Traveller, this shows the first spread featuring the Safety information and Your Mission summary. It is layed out as a sci fi HUD on a pink purple gradient, you can see a glimpse of a darker page below it as one corner of the top page is raised to flip

Even though Nala knocked these out of the park with their amazing flexibility of style, they actually specialise in digital collage and I'm finally with The Wanderer's Bookshop giving them a project that yearns for that style.

The Brief: An old weathered journal, interwoven with watercolour, pen and ink wash illustrations, literary quotes, fragments of book pages, maps and more.

Of course we'll only get this kind of levelled up, varied and beautiful layout if we surpass our stretch goal at £9500.

So If you're still thinking about it get backing!

Another Zine Month Project to check out!

I would be completely remiss if I didn't spotlight a Zinetopia game I've already backed, one featuring Nala's work as well. Nala has worked in their signature linocut style to make a cover design that feels rustic and folky at its core. The cover art is so good that they're offering a tier where Nala is doing a linocut print by hand for the covers with additional unique ink drawings.

How I Heard It is campfire storytelling game, GM- less and designed to be playable against the crackle of campfire, as 3 - 6 of you gather round and weave a tale of a folk hero; from their humble origins, to their great deeds and finally their somber end.

An image from the How I heard it BackerKit Page, featuring the linocut art of 4 people of different ages and ability standing and sitting around a large campfire they have lines that indicate noise coming from each of them. Title text reads " How I heard it".

Includes Backer-Exclusive Content

Stretch Goal: Layout Level Up ~ Nala J Wu

At this Goal, Nala will take my carefully storyboarded layout for the game, throw it out the window and make the game look better than I could have ever dreamed of.

Goal: £9,500 reached! — We did it! This project reached this goal!

100%

Stretch Goal: Unlock The Book List Notepad

At £10500 we unlock the book list notepad as a physical add on and a printable for every backer. Included in Keys and Patron Tier

Goal: £10,500 reached! — We did it! This project reached this goal!

100%

Community Goal: 50 social shares!

Share away to unlock a book plate sticker for every backer of a physical tier. As a bonus, share the project on Bluesky and tell us what you're excited about @thirdvaultyarns.com to unlock 2!

Goal: 5 / 50

10%

We need 45 more to reach this goal.

0

Share

Edit