Winter Development Update (1.0 release info!)

This post has some bad news and some good news.

the bad news

Songs will not be crowdfunding for a physical edition. It will still be getting a 1.0 release, to be clear, but I have no plans to make a hardcopy book. My apologies if this news disappoints anyone!

A brief explanation of the reasoning behind this decision: managing a crowdfunding campaign for a tabletop game is, essentially, a full-time job, and I have one of those already. The time and stress it would demand of me to maintain a campaign, even a small one, just wasn't feasible for the structure of my life right now. Austin Ramsay and Ruby Soleil-Raine, both good friends of mine, launched their own tabletop crowdfunds some two to three years ago, and both of their games have taken years to fulfill. I don't want Songs to live in limbo for that long.

the good news

With the scope of Songs' future reduced significantly, I can announce that Songs for the Dusk version 1.0 is now essentially in production! I've gotten in touch with a couple of really cool folks in the tabletop scene to take care of layout and art.

1. Caro Asercion is going to be handling final layout for Songs. Caro's briefly touched the game's layout before, but they're going to make the PDF into something really worth looking at, and I'm excited to see what they do.
2. Yuri Runnel is going to be handling game art. Without a Kickstarter art budget, I've decided to go abstract for the art I'm looking for, and have commissioned them for a series of glyphs that'll represent the various playbooks, crews, and chapters, akin to the work they did for their Greater Secrets expansion for Beam Saber. (Since Songs is going for a digital final release, these glyphs will be in color, too!)

Once again, I do want to say that I'm sorry I can't dedicate the time to bring this game to paper, but I remain really excited to deliver a final digital copy to you all. 1.0 carves even more dead weight off of this game, and playtesters have loved it. I'm excited to present it to you in a brighter, cleaner format than you've ever seen.