I think the game idea came first, and when your jam was announced and I saw the theme I was able to finally push the button on it, so to speak.
I recently played the cooperative tabletop game, “Horrified,” which features the players banding together to face off with a collection of classic movie monsters. The Creature from the Black Lagoon is one of them, and I was reminded of my interest in creating a game from that specific monster’s perspective.
It’s a solo game, which works out for my current schedule (I’m currently on a kind of road trip/work tour) and the fact that I’m on my own most of my down time.
The Swamp Mysteries were the final addition since yeah: the game turned out even more challenging without them. I was wondering how to give the player additional advantages without just adding more and more dice to their pool. I definitely appreciate the suggestion of organizing that table a little more. At least in the rules document, I was more interested in having them organized alphabetically, but having them sorted as persistent versus one-shot is a better quality-of-life adaptation, and will be standardized in a future release.
Thanks for your detailed reply, the kudos on the balancing (it was a bit frantic, but I think I did all right) and I’m pleased to hear the game provided some challenge for you. :-D