DEV-TALK 006: Just Jamming I Think
Nothing like a casual one month hiatus here as March summarily kicked my ass. But after some time in New Orleans, another round of COVID, and too much time learning about Meta ads, I have returned to update on the progress here! As luck (and good timing I guess) would have it, a lot of the work I had done for this new Ceallan system aligned with that of some friends/family of mine. Following our usually chaotic game of Lancer, we got to talking and decided that we should try a little game jam of our own and see what comes out. Thankfully my fervent overselling of the One Ring 2e didn’t frighten them off as my main design inspiration, and it was actually interesting seeing out the similarity in our design goals could come from completely different games. We’ve decided to do it in 2 week sprints, with a focus first on the core rolling/resolution system before moving into the actual bits of the travel, combat, and social loops.
The last time I did anything like this was for PocketQuest 2024 when we released Dustbound, which honestly came out a lot better/more fun than I had expected with my poor layout design work and complete lack of knowledge. This however is a significantly larger endeavor, but thankfully I have the same team with me that we had for that, all of whom have cut their teeth for the last year helping me figure out how to get this whole business thing up and running! In addition we’ve got two more folks as mentioned above helping out, and I have to say I’m pretty stoked to see what we come up with by the end of this jam-sprint-series. So far the engine still has some One Ring inspirations (three attributes, similar skill list) but some cool flavors pulled from Darkest Dungeon and CyberpunkRED. I’m hoping to do a bit of testing this weekend on it before we begin working on the combat or travel loops, so I’ll be reporting back soon with those findings I swear. I’m also throwing some of my notes that kicked this off in here, but take them with a grain of salt as a lot has changed and my stuff was VERY much heavy in pulling from the One Ring haha.
P.S. - Oh and I’ll be going back to our Friday Freebies now that we’ve managed to catch up a bit, for a teaser as we close in on the Kickstarter release towards the end of April. Stay tuned, and see you Friday!
