I’m already running out of piratisms for blog titles, but the Pirate RPG prototype got its first playtest this weekend. There’s 5 battles (1-2 hours), all kinds of ways to grows and equip the characters, and plenty of ideas for developing it into a full game. Players had fun, and I think it’d be a great single player/local co-op follow up to Hex Gambit: Respawned.
It’s a very ambitious game, though. Lots of art needs no matter how I slice it. Working alone, it’d take a few years. So I’m gonna explore some other ideas, give myself some options before I commit to a project.
I tackled HGR because I needed something ASAP, it was already halfway done (before I upped the scope a few times), and it felt like a mistake that I wanted to ‘correct’. The next project doesn’t come with any of that baggage.
I do have some interesting limitations going forward. Unless I can find a partner (like I have with HGR), online multiplayer is not a thing I want to do alone, and Steam is my only certain platform (there are other possibilities, but not certain ones).
I’ve also got a back catalog full of games that I’m trying not to touch. I have a million ideas for resurrecting Tilt to Live, Outwitters, and Space Food Truck, and plenty of good reasons not to go there. Least of which being that two of those were mobile games, which I don’t know the first thing about launching in 2022. Going backwards feels like a crutch right now.
My next prototype exploration will be a tabletop/card game, maybe a digital hybrid like Space Food Truck was. We’ll see where that takes me.