Posted February 24, 2021 by Thomas Novosel
#design diary
You and I both know that ‘A Greeblin’s Journey’ is a solo journaling game about leaving home without a name to go on a journey to a place very unlike where you are coming from. But what actually will be in the final game? Like the contents of the booklet?
I have so far mentioned that there is going to be more prompts for the Impetus die and the Topic die, as well as tables for creating a Greeblin. But here is a breakdown of the table of contents in the draft that I am working on.
(I plan on when the game’s funding period is over sending out a new updated PDF showing the game’s development progress based on feedback and playtesting. So keep your eyes open and on the lookout for that!)
The order of the contents and the precise naming that I will use is not final and will likely change between now and the final release date.
So, looking over this table of contents, what does this show as changed in my plan from the initial game draft and my plans, to my current plans for the game?
This is new and is something that I decided is worth being explored. Even before playtesting I was wondering how I could make the length of a game, as well as the scope of play be flexible to the amount of time that the player desired to play.
In my last game, Runaway Hirelings, I emphasized and designed around the idea that the game could be played in as short of a session as you want, or for as long as you wanted and felt that the game was interesting. This meant that the game had to have a game loop that scaled up and down. Runaway Hirelings being a game about escaping a dungeon meant that the smallest unit of play was escaping a single dungeon room, and that the largest is however many rooms you could connect together until you escape the dungeon.
In actual practice though, I discovered that the max length of play for Runaway Hirelings was around 2 hours to 2.5 hours long. The loop just couldn’t keep the same amount of energy and players would get tired from the creative needs of the game at any point around or after this length of time.
For ‘A Greeblin’s Journey’ I am wary and concerned about this being an issue in extending play. So what I plan on doing to allow players to enjoy longer and shorter games is by having modules that allow the player to explore additional parts of the journey when playing. These are modes such as the time to travel journal entries, which take place between major events and are a sentence in length. It varies the writing amount but also allows the player to sit with the most recent events that occurred around their greeblin without taking the same amount of writing work.
This is also why there is going to be an optional module that allows the player to explore their Greeblin’s life before going on their journey. This section of play uses a similar style of journaling (combining two prompts), but the result of the pre-journey adds mechanics that the player may use during regular journaling on the journey. Think of these as rewards that add complexity to play by giving the Greeblin (and the player) special abilities that allow them to modify and alter their journey by repeating motifs and symbols found in the home that they have left.
This is a big, massive change that is going to expand the text and the replayability of the game by a large amount. In the current draft of the game that can be downloaded, the player has one Impetus table, and on Topic table that combined generate the prompts for the journaling in the game. What is being changed, is that instead of one set of tables, there will be six sets. Each is called a path and has list items that are about which way the Greeblin takes to adventure. This allows the player to choose a different path each time they play.
Maybe this time the Greeblin will be heading towards a castle in the clouds via an underground tunnel system? Then the prompts used will reflect this.
Paths are the beef, the meat and potatoes of the gameplay loop. Having different kinds of paths means that a half hour play session can be varied from game to game while keeping the same length. But it also introduces a way to use paths that allows the player to run a solo campaign if desired of multiple half hour to one hour game sessions over the course of weeks.
This section is keeping in the theme of expanding the length of gameplay and allowing the player to dictate the length of their play session. The length of play section shows different combinations of modules and describes what type of experience they allow a player to experience along with estimated play times for each combination. The goal in adding this section is to show players what to expect from making use of modules, and how the modules are designed to be combined together to create different game lengths as well as campaign play.
In the current draft of the game available to backers and players, the average game session is between 20 to 45 minutes long. While this time length for a game allows a player to quickly play a full session and enjoy the entire arc of their journey (and leaves moments and the exact details of the journey open to interpretation by rereading the artifact of play; the journal). But, what if you want to explore your character further? What if you as a player, are not able to get as full of a game experience in that amount of time and gameplay?
This is what the length of play section is built to detail ya’ll! It is about customizing the game experience based on your needs and desires as a player so that by the end of a game session you are not exhausted, but are also satisfied with what you’ve experienced.
What If you want to extend your journey? Then the result of the current path is checked against not the end of play table, but against the ‘Not Quite There’ results table. After journaling your result there, then you go along another path to continue and complete your journey.
That is my goal with modules. They offer additional game complexity that can be elected by the player to engage in, adding time to the games length without repeating the basic game loop exactly the same over and over. The hope is that by adding variety here, will prevent fatigue and allow for longer and shorter games.
I of course am worried about the difficulty and design challenges that come from adding so many moving pieces that can be interchanged, subtracted, added, and more. But I am confident that I have the chops to do it, and as it is a solo journaling game, I can playtest it till it is tuned to a knife’s edge.
So until next time, I hope this gets you excited for what is coming in the future and what I plan to add to the game to make it as good of a game as I can. With how we have funded so far, this has covered the art that I have made so far as well as the development of the games text. With additional funds made towards our initial funding goal, that will allow me as a designer to add more art to the finished game. It also will allow me to make a beautiful PDF that is designed to look like it is a Greeblin’s journal that is teaching other greeblins how to travel.
For an idea of the direction I plan to head in, check out this WIP draft of the cover art!