Hey there, folks. All of a sudden, out of nowhere, and with blatant disregard for my personal feelings on the matter, it is now November. Here's an update on where things stand.
📋 Surveys Releasing (Right Meow) The guidebook for Gossamer Frontier is almost ready, and the Captain's Log will be shortly to follow. To try to get in front of all of the holiday craziness, I'm going to send out surveys here as soon as possible. Take a moment to update your shipping addresses if you moved recently, and make sure your credit card information is up to date.
🌀 Guidebook (Wrapping Up) I'm currently hammering out some final details here, and then need to get the .pdf ready and fillable. I can say pretty confidently at this point that the game will be so much better in print than in digital, and would encourage the folks sitting on the .pdf version to pick up a physical edition. This is due in part to the guidebook being something you work and write in, and in part due to the pacing of the game, which simply translates better when you're forced to look away from a screen and think about what's going on.
📦 Production/Shipping (Late November/Early December) I've been shopping around a bit, even locally, and it really seems like the most cost-effective and fastest option to print, is through Mixam (which surprises me.) If I can get the files situated here soon, then it'd take a couple of weeks following that for them to land on my doorstep, and I can try to start sending everything out. This does likely put us into the December timeframe for actually getting the game, but you'll have the digital version of the game here pretty freaking soon.
All that said, despite the page number limitations, I'm pretty keen on what Gossamer Frontier has turned into throughout this process, and feel like overhauling it (as mentioned in earlier blogs) was the right call. It should be a fun story to play through, give you room enough to be creative, and legitimize growing closer to your crew. I do still think it warrants more page space, and even think it'd be fun to turn the world into a whole 300 page rulebook for a multi-player experience. Maybe that'll be the next big project?
The guidebook is almost wrapped... and simultaneously may not be totally finished until the end of October. This month is pretty chaotic, as far as real-life scheduling goes, so my confidence isn't super high in getting this out the door much earlier. That said, most of the pieces are in, and I'm fairly confident that it'll stay at the 60-page limit, now that I've thoroughly torn apart and pared down the original design... -_-
(Apologies for the colors being off. Had a rough go of it compressing the gif.)
Over the past few weeks, I made efforts to get a proper playtest put out, but doing it in digital has been a bit of a nightmare to get it formatted. Lots of checkboxes, lots of write-ins, and you lose a lot of the intended flow of the game by virtue of it.
That said, I could pretty readily post a version for people to print... but didn't think it'd get much traction, based on post viewership. However, if you have an interest, please feel free to chime in below!
P.S. On a related note, the last post I published didn't have the video linked to the post image. That's fixed now, and here's a direct link, as well. Here, I walk through how rolling up a non-canon crewmate works: https://youtu.be/ZW0z5FCQxtk
Was trying to get Gossamer into playtesting form this week, but there's still work to be done there. However I did want to share a walkthrough of how a roll-able character, and their story arc/romance arc functions.
You'll always have access to the "iconic" or "canonical" crewmates, but... there's the possibility that they die, or abandon you, or maybe you just want to shake things up or do a new run. That's where the rolled crewmates come into play.
A (not-so-brief) walkthrough of rollable crewmates and their story arcs.
Still some refinement to be done, but it should give you an idea of how the game operates using the updated core mechanics.
Today I’d like to check in with you all on Gossamer Frontier. Where it’s at, what’s still left to do, and what the timeline is. A lot of this is sort of a designer’s blog, so brace yourself.
Where it’s at
Gossamer Frontier, as a whole, has been slow going. I spent literal months beating my head against a wall trying to figure out how to handle some very specific problems that became more evident once the systems demo was released way back in March.
The long and short of it is that I was giving too much control to the player. It felt like playing make-believe at the best of times, and homework at the worst. That, on top of the perpetual issue of a constrained page-count (still a massive problem) kept development at a crawl.
In May, Deeds Drawn kicked off, which was another solo-focused TTRPG (but card-based.) I shifted my focus to that game, thinking it would be quicker to develop, but it turned out to have some similar problems.
The root of these issues was my inexperience developing solo-TTRPGs.
Fast forward to Q3 of this year, and Deeds Drawn is happily at the manufacturing stage now. During its development I was able to put a face to some of the stumbling blocks I was having in Gossamer Frontier.
I’ll let you be the judge once the playtest goes out, but I think having to work through similar problems in Deeds Drawn ultimately helped make Gossamer a better game.
Random spread for Wheeler, but I'm unsure how much of this will stick around.
What’s still left to do
With Deeds Drawn out of the way (currently waiting on a prototype,) my focus has been on Gossamer Frontier for the past few weeks, and it’s been humming right along. I’m at the point where figuring out how to solve a problem is a rare occurrence. Now it’s just about choosing which way I want to deal with it, and writing a bunch of text.
That said, during these past weeks, I totally revamped the game’s core loop, shifting more of the creative and administrative burden off of the player a bit, and onto the book itself.
Some examples: You no longer decide how many successes are needed for a scene, based on your approach. Instead, the scene sets the difficulty, and you try to match up crewmate traits to give yourself an edge. Then you roll dice. If the roll goes poorly, you no longer improvise a resolution, you pick one from a list.
Additionally, the guidebook is now “finite.” A lot of frustration through development had stemmed from trying to fit an infinite game into 60 pages… while still giving the player the freedom to do whatever they want, and somehow jam a high-fidelity story into it at the same time. I wasted a lot of time trying to solve this, but frankly, they were the wrong design goals in the first place.
Example of a Destination in the tutorial. Phrases are harvested from the wordbanks to generate scenes, unable to be used again.
Instead, I pivoted to a system of finite resources. As you move through the book, you’ll pick at it, phrase by phrase, piecing together scenes from whatever remains. The more you play, the more limited your options become, reflecting changes to the world and your circumstances.
Do you defer hardships until later in your story? Or do you suffer them early, so they don’t pile up like a stack of bricks?
It’s been a pretty fun system to build out, and I think you’ll dig it in the end.
What’s the timeline?
At my current pace, it might take me until the end of September to get this finished. The actual turnaround for production will be quick, especially if I print everything in the USA, but it does mean that the release window moves into (possibly late) October regardless.
At the end of next week, I hope to have a new playtest available to send out. You’ll get a glimpse of the new system, and can gut check me on whether it’s as good as I think it is.
Okay, what else?
THERE’S A NEW BOOK. In less than 48 hours, the campaign for Meek, Mighty, and Pious will launch. It’s a romantasy novel that I started working on last year, and will take to fruition in 2027. Unlike all the work I’ve done to this point, I won’t need to fuss with design problems, and can just vomit all the stuff that’s been stirring around in my head for too long.
That’s about it though. Sorry for the delay getting Gossamer into the wild. I wish I had been better about blogging the design (and subsequent problems) that popped up. I’ve seen other designers struggling with their games feeling too much like “homework” or “accounting” as well, and I think (and hope) that I’m on the other side of it now.
But again, I’ll let you be the judge here soon. Thanks, folks!
Hey there, folks. I'm running a bit behind on Gossamer at the moment, and all the juggling I'm doing this year is certainly the culprit. Deeds Drawn is wrapping up, and should enter production here soon, but it, among other things, have sidetracked me a bit.
The physical release date for Gossamer remains unchanged, September being the absolute latest, but I was really hoping to have the digital version in your hands about now-ish. A little overzealous, maybe.
Anywho. Most of the art is done for Gossamer at this point, this last crewmate was the final piece, aside for a few smaller bits I'm going to hand-draw myself. There's definitely more writing left to do, and some learnings from Deeds Drawn that I want to reincorporate into Gossamer, but I have no doubt we'll get there.
Hags play an important role in Gossamer Frontier, and you have more-than-a-sneaking-suspicion that she is one of them. She never gives up her real name, is older than your entire crew combined, and knows the ship like it's her home. Of the crewmates you were asked to enlist... "Bauga" was not one of them.
The art was done by Graey Erb, and you can find the full piece after the jump (just need to log into BackerKit to see it!)
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