The World Anvil Publishing

CREATOR

5 months ago

Project Update: Pre-campaign Update #1

Hello everyone,

and thanks for your interest in Dirt City Blues.

If you’re not sure why you’re getting this email, chances are you’ve followed us in the past for one of our other games—Dead Air: Seasons, Valraven, Broken Tales, Bitter Chalice, and so on. In that case, welcome back. Dirt City Blues is our next game, and it’s coming in hot.

I’m Tommaso, Creative Director at The World Anvil Publishing, and this is our first pre-campaign update. In this message, we’ll cover three things:

Actual Plays
The first episode of Raffaele Vota’s Dev Diary
A poll to help us fine-tune the vibes you’re looking for in Dirt City Blues

Let’s go!

Actual Plays

We waited a bit before releasing these to give you a chance to check out the Quickstart Problem on your own.

But if you’ve already played it, or if you’re just curious to see how the game works in action, we’ve got you covered.

Below you’ll find two full games:

One in English, run by yours truly
One in Italian, run by Dirt City Blues lead designer Raffaele Vota

Check them out!

🇬🇧🇺🇸 English

🇮🇹 Italiano

Dev Diary

I'll leave the stage to Raffaele, lead developer of Dirt City Blues.

Let me tell you a story.

Which, really, is my story, stitched together from bad choices, half-baked plans, and all the usual over-the-top antics of someone who never quite learned to shut up (or to put the damn pencil down).

But this story, at least this one, after all these years, finally got itself a grim and well-earned happy ending.

The year was 2005. I was at Lucca Comics & Games, the biggest game convention in Italy, presenting my very first game.

Well, the first one that actually got published.

Even back then, I was already hooked on action movies—but not the trendy stuff of the time, all polished leather and bullet time, still riding the Matrix wave (which itself was just doing its own version of Hong Kong cinema).

No, I was into the other kind. The grimy, low-budget, straight-to-VHS B-movie kind.

The kind you watched not for quality, but for the sheer joy of weird choices, raw energy, and the desperate search for that one flash of genius that could lift a mess into cult territory.

That’s how One Shot One Kill was born.

A glorious mess, full of everything I could shamelessly and irresponsibly throw together at the time.

It was wild. Reckless. Probably lawsuit-worthy. But hey, I got lucky.

One Shot One Kill, or OSOK, as we used to call it, became both my worst enemy and my greatest ally.

As I once wrote on my Instagram (yeah, they made me open one)—it’s impossible to ignore how much that clunky first game shaped my path as a designer. If nothing else, it taught me exactly what not to do.

Back then, making a game didn’t require game design theory.

You just took stuff, copied it (poorly, like every great B-movie), reworked it, and threw it into a layout, hoping your enthusiasm would carry you over the finish line.

And somehow… it worked.

OSOK became a small cult hit—just like the trash-action movies that inspired it.

And I? I became something halfway between famous (with a million air quotes) and infamous.

As I like to say: “notorious… in a friendly way.”

But those were the years when the first translated indie RPGs started landing in Italy, shaking things up.

Games that didn’t just tell stories: they worked.

They had rules with purpose. They were instruction manuals first, style second.

And yeah, some of them had too much style—but they made me think.

So I dove back in. Hard.

I started reading seriously. First in Italian, then poking around English forums (as best I could, back when automatic translation was more guesswork than science).

And eventually, I realized it was time.

Time to leave OSOK behind and start building something deeper.

Something darker. Something tighter.

Something that still echoed those over-the-top roots, but knew how to walk the shady alleys instead of clowning around in the sunshine.

If OSOK was the Ninja Terminator of Italian RPGs… then what else could I write, now that I had the tools?

It was time to stop playing in the daylight and take a walk into the shadows.

Down the back alleys of sin, grit, and bad decisions.

The path wasn’t easy, and it wasn’t fast.

I wrote other stuff. I shelved the idea. I rewrote it. Again and again.

But I’m still here. Tougher than I was, and still burning with the same urge:

To tell stories that leave a mark.

Like a bullet.

[This Dev Diary continues in the next update]

The Poll

Hey, Tommaso here again.

Take a minute to check out the poll attached to this update and cast your vote. We’ll use your feedback to help shape some final details and potential Stretch Goals for Dirt City Blues.

We’ll be back next week with more news.

In the meantime, if you’ve got questions about Dirt City Blues (or anything else, really—I’m a good listener), feel free to drop a comment below.

PS: Missed the trailer for the game? Check it out now!

– Tommaso

What kind of vibe do you prefer?

35 votes • Final results

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