If you want to playtest a small RPG or get early access to a 2D co-op survival game, then read on.

We have never been very good at maintaining a regular series of updates around our projects, thanks to our various neurodivergences, but we have a few projects coming up that would benefit from regular communication with you all. For this post, we will be soft-announcing them both, and asking for your help to make them both truly great.

Firstly, we have a project called the Deck of Voyages, which helps you tell the tale of a crew sailing the seas, stopping at islands for short, dramatic episodes of roleplay. It's a deck of narrative prompts that combine in imaginative ways, either to produce a short, light, narrative RPG experience, or to enhance a campaign in any other system. When you reach a new island, you draw two cards; Each card describes an island, and an event, and you choose the island from one card, and the event from the other. This gives you a rich and vibrant setting, and a dramatic, unexpected event to deal with, following in the footsteps of classic episodic TV like Star Trek.

Currently, we have all 28 Island cards written, and are trying to figure out a way to lay them out in a PDF for print and play. We have also created a little program that will automatically draw two cards from the deck, and allow you to highlight which island and which event you want to choose. Once both of these are sufficiently complete, we'll upload them and start distributing to playtesters for feedback.

If you want to volunteer to playtest the Deck of Voyages, either DM us on Mastodon @Fenreliania@mastodon.gamedev.place or email us at fenreliania at gmail dot com.

What we are looking for out of playtests:

• Groups using the cards as prompts or inspiration during a campaign in another system
• Groups playing with the default rules, as a short free-form narrative campaign.
• Individuals using the default rules as a kind of solo journalling game
• Individuals reading through the cards just for the fiction

Secondly, we are putting CGA Hell development on hold, and starting work on Synonauts, a 2D survival crafting game, comparable in some ways to Terraria. In Synonauts, your world has been struck by a highly unusual artifact that has caused Dreams to intrude into the real world, making almost everything uninhabitable. You, as survivors, were able to flee to the one area unaffected by these intrusions, and must now find a way to navigate the Dreams, harness their strange new creations, and reach the Artifact to free your world from its alien influence.

The focus of the gameplay is exploration and expansion. To start, you will be constrained to one biome by the Dream Haze, which you cannot exist in for more than a few minutes. You'll need to gather resources and build some kind of equipment to allow yourself to spend a reasonable amount of time in the Dream Haze before you can start heading out and finding new resources to make use of. Eventually, you will be able to establish Pylons that dispel the Dream Haze in an area, allowing you to set up waystations and secondary bases, either to make travel easier, or to allow easier farming of alien resources as you hang up your immunity equipment and pick up your farm tools.

Combat will be a secondary focus, not intended to be hard or complicated, but smooth and meaningful. We want new enemies to be something you have to learn to fight, while avoiding both encounters that you just have to heal through, and a one-size-fits-all combat approach. We don't want to prevent you from cheesing enemies, but it shouldn't be the go-to.

Synonauts is early in production, but we aim to have a fully playable game loop within the next fortnight, and a meaningfully playable game experience (available in early access) early in the new year. We expect to be working on the game for likely 2 years if comparable games are anything to go by, but that is likely to be very flexible depending on its popularity. If the game makes significant sales, we are likely to pay an artist early on to get a lot of artwork made to a higher standard than we ever could, while worse sales will likely see us incrementally improving the graphics ourselves over time. The game will be available on itch before Steam, and depending on our finances, may rely on itch sales to cover the Steam fees.

The reason we are shifting to Synonauts is because CGA Hell would take another 4+ months to complete before we could get any income from it. This was fine, but one of our partners has recently been experiencing some significant hardships, and we feel a need and desire to support them in a meaningful way sooner than CGA Hell would allow us to. By putting Synonauts out in early access, we can earn a steady stream of income on a game that we can confidently work on every week. We have a solid idea of the game's scope, and there are precious few avenues for unexpected difficulty to crop up - It is ultimately just a matter of putting in the hours, and making content.

TL;DR Deck of Voyages is a narrative roleplaying game, and a supplement for any other tabletop system. We are looking for playtesters, see above for contact details. CGA Hell is on hold. We are going to release Synonauts, a 2D co-op survival crafting game, in early access in the new year. Expect weekly devlogs once the prototype is functional.