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!
