So I finally decided on what I'm going to run with! Took me a while as I've been busy and haven't been able to dedicate much time to the jam, but planning on getting a game done for sure.

I decided to run with doing another tabletop game, this one based off an old Speedgame entry I did back in 2019 called Project Starsoul. The verse I led with then was Romans 15:4. I plan on keeping that verse since it is conceptually the bedrock of the game, and I'm going to be implementing all three verses of this Speedgame in some way.

• Song of Solomon 2:15: The foxes will be a special unit that is chasing you and are a sort of antagonist. Also in a way, the "foxes" are metaphorically the miasma that hangs over and travels over the land. What I call the abyssal clouds. The "vineyards" they are ruining are the few settlements and people living across this post-apocalyptic land.
• Isaiah 9:2: You are the light in this land of darkness, the great light is the hope you bring.
• James 1:3-4: Endurance will be represented by the difficulties and challenges you will face, and if you stay determined, you will succeed; i.e "made whole"
• Romans 15:4: For context, this one signified scrolls and ancient artifacts from a lost time, found and used as blueprints for restoring a broken world, and bringing hope.

I won't describe my notes in detail, but feel free to glance at them or read them, I'll explain them over time as the game rules solidify this week.

The underlying system will adapt the system I built with Project Ember Adventure #1, created during the Speedgame Hardmode. I'm modifying the stats, how certain choices work, modifying combat, and including a sliding scale of difficulty. The storm marker will work as a difficulty scale that will make the game harder as time progresses since every three marks a new abyssal cloud will appear on the game map. Using each cloud's center to determine movement, each cloud will move 2-4 units per turn, determined by wind speed and random factors. After the 9th mark on the meter, the marker would go back to the beginning and the process begins anew. When a cloud's center reaches the map boundary, on the very next turn the cloud is removed from the map.

There will also be random encounters and loot represented on the map as an X to indicate a point of interest. Some points of interest may be a location, treasure, or a random event that you can decide to go towards on your journey to a specific place. The risk/reward scenario here is that you will have to contend with the clouds moving across the map and the challenges you will face. You can move through the clouds, but each cloud has a concentric circle that determines how bad the consequences are the closer to the center you are.

Character-wise, you'll start with 3 characters and work your way up to five characters, each with their own perks, strengths, and weaknesses. Last time I wasn't able to implement special powers and abilities, this time they will be necessary for the game, and I'm going to make sure they are included to spice up combat and not just have the player rolling die to deal damage.

Looking forward to getting this going and I'm excited to build it!

Hey Elijah, I know what it feels like! I've participated in so many of the Speedgames and so many times I didn't even submit on time! So my game just was left super unfinished, and not fleshed out enough. And the ones I did submit, only a small percentage could even be called a complete jam game.

But your thinking about learning skills and new things, and using those skills for the Lord is right on point. Always something important to remember! The rest is just craftwork, trying one's hardest, and keeping at it!

Lots of great work already, Karen! Nice!

Interesting that you're going from the perspective of the fox and playing as it. I like how you're drawing from the verse such great meaning and depth. Looking forward to how you execute on the idea.

Hey all, looking forward to jumping into this jam with something!

I kinda like all three verses but I'm unsure of a specific idea to go with. I was planning on maybe revisiting my first jam game, and I had some ideas on how to implement these current verses and still retaining one of my old verses, but still thinking if I want to go for that idea or not yet.

There was another jam game I made in 2019 that eventually became Project Starsoul. I really liked the idea I made then because the concept and execution felt fresh, but don't know if I want to go with that idea either.

So anyhow we're six days in, so I need to pick something, or come up with something else and go with it! Let's see what happens.

Thanks for playing Karen!

Yes, trying to get everything to fit on one page was a hassle and I tried my best to make the rules as clear as possible! In later revisions, I'll try to add more clarity. I'd still like to keep it to one page, but what I'll end up doing is putting it on a larger paper and do a tri-fold design.

To answer your questions so you can try the game again at a later time:

• You simply choose which adventure you want to go on at the beginning of the game, and all enemies and the boss will have that adventure's difficulty score as their baseline DS. Example, 8 if you decide to go for the artifact, and each enemy you encounter and the boss, will start at 8 DS.
• So a location is based on one of the six locations you roll 1d6 for. During gameplay, when you reach one of the two locations, you roll 2d6 to get a coordinate for the third location. You only roll twice in the whole game for that third location, because there's only one X and one Y coordinate. Ex:
  • I roll 1d6 to reveal the first location, I get a Ruin.
  • I roll 1d6 again for the second location, I get a Caves.
  • Now I roll 2D6 twice for each location to get their X and Y coordinates and mark it on the map.
  • While playing, when I reach the Ruin, I roll 2d6 to get the first coordinate for the secret third location. When I reach the caves, I roll again to get the second coordinate.
  • Then you start moving towards that third location, this is the endgame. When you finally reach it, roll 2d6 and add the roll to the bosses' base DS (which is based on which adventure you picked, so it could be 8, 12, or 16).

Hope that clears up any misunderstandings!

Post-Jam Post-Mortem

Alrighty folks, we made it! I present to you Project Ember Adventure #1!

Each Hardmode that I've participated in, I've struggled to make something on time for the deadline. This jam is hard! This is the first time that I've completed a Hardmode entry!

Focusing on doing a tabletop entry was to try something new, and I wanted to focus on doing art while designing a physical game. What's funny is that I did very little art, and a lot more systems and game design! The character art on the sheet above was old art from Project Ember when I was doing something in Unity, I just thought I'd make some tweaks to it and throw it in for style and character. So that art doesn't really count in the art I was wanting to do! In any case, focusing on doing a physical game this time around was a good decision!

Jams are supposed to stretch you, and a lot of my growth as a game developer has been through jams. I leveled up like crazy in 2014 when I did my first game jam entry ever, and a Speedgame Challenge jam at that! All my games I had done before that were small things, simple things, with simple art. When I developed Warrior, I pushed myself technically and artistically. Then again in 2019 when I developed the first prototype of my JRPG Project Starsoul, and then Mercenary Knight Rose in 2020. I like adventurous, fantasy-sci-fi RPGs and Action-RPGs and always go for games that are more about some story and world-building and character than deep technical and systems design. Because of the big amount of worldbuilding I like to do, I end up over scoping on game jams and often don't complete an entry on time.

The past few years I've been growing my technical and systems design skill, while also trying to make shorter games that are completable during a jam phase. It's still been hit or miss, but I've been getting better at it. This time however, this was a departure from the norm in that I explored a physical game and focused on the abstract rules of a game first and foremost, then thought about how to dress the game with an aesthetic and world. Project Ember is a small part of a much larger world and project called Flames of Abathos, and that project has been cooking for about 21 years now or so, maybe more. It's my long gestating project that I liken to Lord of The Rings or Chronicles of Narnia in terms of scope and worldbuilding. In terms of gameplay, it is heavily inspired by the Strategy RPG Shining Force. Thing is, I've not done much with it in game jams or game development at all. 

Project Ember was supposed to be the start of making a game based on that world a few years ago but it also languished, mainly because I had to figure out algorithms for pathfinding, enemy AI decision making, and state machines for all the different states a Strategy RPG requires. it was a tall order. Now in days I could use AI to help with learning, understanding, and building that, but I've been focused on trying to finish up two other games before that happens, Altered Temples (Action-RPG Roguelike) and Bio Nemesis (Survival-Horror). Now however, the tide has changed.

I felt inspired and compelled (God's little whispers) to do something different this time around, and I followed that intuition. It came down to doing something for Project Ember or Project Starsoul, and I went with Ember because I thought it would be nice to do a small game with that idea. I researched what it takes to make a short tabletop RPG or one-shot, looked up some games I had seen before in the style, spoke with some friends who were more knowledgeable than me in that regard (Thanks Donnie and Brennan!), they gave me some good food for thought, and I went to work.

It was a breath of fresh air focusing on interactions and systems in a physical setting and engaging a different part of my brain. I love boardgames and tabletop games but never designed one, even though I've had little ideas and sketches of stuff in the past. Being able to dig in to a project like this over the weekend, and complete it, rough edges and all, was deeply satisfying. I plan on playing the game more and improving different aspects of it, including adding in more player agency to help balance out all the system's randomness and die-rolls. There were a few pieces that had to get cut mainly because I could not iterate or test them enough to satisfyingly include them. Next version they'll be there though! These include discoveries, such as special encounters, treasures, surprises, and characters to add to your party. And it also includes abilities, known as Flames that the characters can wield with both passive and active effects.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with this year's Hardmode entry and the successes I had during its development. It also helped kick in a different sort of design and playtesting sense that I believe helped me improve the game, and that I don't always see so clearly when I'm doing videogames. I'm super looking forward to bringing over what I've learned here into my other game development projects. And I'm also really psyched at now beginning to make tabletop playable games too!

Stay tuned for more Burnerknight Studios work!

All the best,

Raul

The Mario sound really brings it together lol.

Day 3

Yesterday I spent some time completing the game loop, taking notes, and thinking about progression and came up with some interesting thoughts. Then this morning I did another playtest run, took notes, and added my own feedback for gameplay elements where things weren't clear at first and needed clarification, or things that I hadn't thought of until I actually hit the situation. All in all, the game is shaping up to be something pretty awesome! 

I added in the playing cards you see above to be drawn at random. The different card suits will signify a character, encounter, surprise, or treasure when you happen upon a location. I need to define what that list will be, so I just stubbed in some quick things, and it's added some real nice interaction into the game.

This here is the game loop further refined a bit, and on the right were things I picked up on while playing that I needed to consider, clarify, or decide on. Yay for playtesting! One big change is that now you choose what kind of adventure you want to go on, and it increases the difficulty of everything by adding a higher DS (Difficulty Score). There's a "find an object" run which initializes the DS to 8. A "save someone" run with a DS of 12. And lastly a "Destroy a Monster" run with a DS of 16.

Never mind all the numbers below, but what it all basically comes down to is tracking each enemy's DS (Difficulty Score), and my own character's stats like Lifeforce, Defense, etc. I found some extra characters during my journey, got turned around at least twice due to a random event during camp (you can see how my path sort of loops on itself in the game map or just ends abruptly), and also managed to increase my Max LF and DF stats during camp.

Another big change is that now you roll for three locations rather than have the goal in sight from the start. Basically, you roll first for the first location by finding the X and Y coordinates using 2D6. Then you draw it on the map. Next, you roll for the second location and do the same. Then you need to go to both of those locations in order to discover the X and Y location of the third area on the map, this is your goal. There's going to be a boss there. And along the journey lots of encounters and difficulties!

There's a lot of rolling to do, but it's also added an interesting pace to the whole game. It moves along pretty nicely, doesn't get bogged down, and there's plenty of mystery thanks to the randomization present, as well as a meaty gameplay experience.

Going over the map, discovering events and doing actions, running into monsters and surprises, it all gives the game a very nice RPG flow, so I've hit my goal for this jam!

Now comes the polish! I need to add more art, tighten down the hatches, and pretty up everything for delivery tonight!

Here's a one pager of my initial game loop. Feel free to try it out and leave any feedback if you want. Should be playable in 10-15 minutes or so. You'll need pen & paper to keep track of player character and enemy life, and maybe some tokens for each enemy. Two D6 dice as well.

Day 2

Here you can see that I've scribbled some numbers, drew a graph, and wrote lots of little notes and number crunching here and there. This was last night as I began playtesting the game with a rough design outline and seeing how my initial ideas stacked up. I quickly realized, "Oh, some of this stuff won't work as I initially thought!" So on the fly, I began tweaking and adding to the rules and taking away. Literally jamming with the game like musicians in a jam session!

It was fun, and I don't always get to do this during videogame development. It's been nice to start by focusing on the rules and systems design of the game and I'm really looking forward to solidifying everything and throwing on some art!

Today though I need to complete the game loop. So, last night I got as far as completing this first map, with a total of:

• Stats are LF - Lifeforce, FP - Flame Points, MV - Move, DF - Defense (I forgot to use it this playthrough! oops)
• Four turns of gameplay before I reached the Goal at the top right of the map represented by G. The Start point is represented by S.
  
• I rolled 1D6 each turn to determine how far I MOVE. Initially I wanted each character to have their own MOVE distance, but I quickly realized that wouldn't work because I don't want to split up the party, they should move as one unit. Moving them individually might cause complications, but it is something I would like to plan for and design around and I don't know if I have enough time to iterate on that.
• Turn 1 had four rounds of combat, and one of my characters almost got knocked out! Still need to tweak the math and how I want to resolve damage. I haven't even implemented special powers and abilities yet!
  • Basically after we MOVE, we roll 1D6 for an encounter. 1-3 means no encounter, 4-6 means an encounter.
  • If an encounter happens, roll to see how many enemies you'll fight. This here is where it can get crazy. I could quickly run into a situation where your party of three may face six enemies with a high DS (Difficulty Score), and after your round of attacks, you get creamed by them. This here is something I need to keep tweaking.
    • I also need to decide the enemy types and how to roll for them, and what their starting DS will be.
• After an encounter, or no encounter, you initiate the CAMP phase. At camp, you rest, heal some LF, and initiate an event. I considered using cards to determine what event, but I think I might just do a list that you'll roll for with 1D6 or 2D6 maybe. We'll see.
• Turn 2 and 3 were easy peazy. Turn 4 I reached the Goal.

Now the micro loop is Move, Encounter, Camp. Repeat until you reach the Goal. At the Goal, which may be a town, cavern, fortress, etc you initiate the event for that Macro Loop (think of it as the end of a Big Turn rather than a smaller turn composed of moving, encountering, and camping). I don't know, I might call it a Chapter or something. Anyhow, after the event for that Big Turn/Chapter, you move on to the next one, and the cycle repeats. Move, Encounter, Camp. We do this macro loop three times and that's game.

We might have a BIG BAD you have to defeat at the end of the three loops, or something else. But that's the tentative gameplay loop in action. Now I need to tweak and fine-tune somethings, and then I'm going to send it off to some friends to see if they'll playtest while I work on some art!

Great to see the progress you and your daughter are making, Matt! Can't wait to see how it keeps going!

So here's the preliminary idea that soon I will be doing a rough playtesting to solidify the design.

• Player chooses 3 characters, each with their own abilities and traits, from a pool of 9 total.
• There are two phase structures composed of smaller phases
  • The micro phase is composed of movement and combat. Player moves based off their MOVE stat, and rolls for an encounter. If they encounter an enemy, combat ensues, otherwise the player rolls a card for an event or action.
  • The macro phase is movement and combat repeats until the characters reach their destination or goal. The round ends, and progress continues to the next round. A total of three rounds, with a final event or action will lead to victory unless the characters are all knocked out.
  • Characters may level up. They will have inventory, of which the player will roll to decide what they can get for their party.
• Each character and enemy's stats are Lifeforce, Flame points, Movement, and potentially Defense.
  • Monsters may carry items.
• Combat will be rolling 2D6 + LF + Weapon against difficulty score of an enemy.
• Resolve score, decrease LF of enemy, then roll for enemy

About to start doing a rough playtest to solidify the ideas and design.

Making good progress, Karen!

Day 1

Alrighty folks! A few days ago, I spent some time researching how to approach a tabletop RPG or a one-shot. I wanted a:

• single-player experience and that could be expanded for multiple players, 
• characters would have just a few stats
• players could use game pieces of other games or whatever they have available for gameplay. 
• With the reveal of the theme, I figured Creation would fit well with the idea of a gameplay artifact or "sandcastle", something players would make during play and at the end would become either a keepsake or something they would destroy (maybe consume like a candle or something they'd burn up - safely of course lol).

Between last night and early today, I continued my research, examining soloventure games such as CHVLR (Chevalier) and Wretched and Alone which are bleak, psychological games that explore the difficulty of surviving near impossible scenarios. Gameplay involves:

• Using a deck of playing cards with suits, and each type along with each number represents a series of tasks or actions and the chance of a consequence represented by removing a block from a Jenga tower. 
• If the tower collapses, it's game over. 
• Each phase you draw a card and log or journal (by audio or video, writing, typing, etc) to reflect on the day's events and your state of mind.
• Win scenario is extremely low, around 1% with a 99% chance of failure. Very bleak. Ace of Hearts with 10 tokens removed is your only win condition.

Some other games I was looking into were Goons & Ghosts, and the game that inspired it called Tunnels and Goons. Both of these games have: 

• Simple stats (3-4 stats) and an ability or skill, 
• Simple rules 
• Difficulty scores you roll a 2D6 die against to determine success or failure against something. 
• You make progress on a series of adventures, basically a scenario, until you win.

The games are a lot more lighthearted than CHVLR or Wretched & Alone, and last 2 - 3 hours. I like the variety of ideas these games incorporate, and the gameplay rules involved, especially the creative use of different things such as dice, jenga blocks, and playing cards. 

Using that as a springboard, I started ideating what my game may play like by drawing from my favorite JRPG game called Shining Force. and tapping into a project I've been building on and off for years now. I've been considering what that game would look like in tabletop form by adapting and fine-tuning the game's rules to its essence. Characters with different abilities, stats, and inventory items. Exploration and combat phases. Story progression.

I'm now at a point where I will be building my game's core features, and the MVG - minimum viable game.

Looking forward to what you come up with too Karen! I'll be making something tabletop this time around too!

Hi everyone!

Looking forward to this weekend and seeing what everyone makes! For the first time ever, I'm going to try my hand at making a tabletop game, some sort of one-shot RPG of some sort. I've got plenty of ideas that I can build off. Can't wait to see what I come up with!

Have fun everyone!

Thanks for playing David! I've been wanting to revisit this project for quite some time now! Maybe this is the year.

Whewww that came in clutch!

This is one cool project that I've been interested in and following for some time. Looking forward to its continued development!

I'm thinking of something retro-leaning since the theme kinda favors that. But also would be interesting to see something modern made with only 6 inputs in consideration as well, that's a nice challenge and constraint.

Thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback!

This was fantastic and high intensity and I loved all the physics! Great work overall on this one! Loved how the powerups starting really giving you options on tackling or avoiding the different cars and obstacles coming your way.

Impressive work doing a little RTS game for this jam! Loved the mood and feel of the game. Found it hard to get through with everyone alive, had to restart a few times. Especially near the ring teleporter thing where those enemies seem to hit harder than the other ones. 

I noticed that when I pressed space and wasn't near a computer my guys would scream out in anguish and then get bigger momentarily and then return to smaller size. I wasn't sure if this was this game's version of a marine's stimpack in StarCraft. I thought for a moment it might increase my speed and power but I didn't really notice anything different.

Overall a great little game with a Warhammer 40k style!

I don't know for how long I played but I know that I played for a LONG while. Trying to see how many different things were there, it was amazing all the dialogue options and different sorts of progression you put in. This was a funny and quirky game and I enjoyed it very much. I found only one way to survive, and I don't know if it even counts.

Thanks for playing!

lol ouch. K. Let me see what I can do. I'm trying to consider whether this is an optimal solution for the game's design, or if I just take away the Jester's ability to wrap around and provide another solution for you as the player *and* the enemies.

Thanks for playing!

That's an interesting idea that I didn't consider for the player character. Is it because you sometimes miss the enemy coming down on one of the far ends? (I know sometimes I do)

Love everything here, one of the kinds of games that just draws you into an experience. Also, Anthony, your art is always on point! Congrats to you guys for your hard work!

Ah, I may have forgotten to make a tweak on the UI canvas's scale ratio, I'll have to check.

Edit: Yeah, I do have it set to scale with screen size based on width. Could you screenshot what it looks like fullscreen? Might give me some ideas on how to potentially manage it at certain sizes.

Also, game is slightly unbalanced as I didn't have enough time to make tweaks, and there's a small bug in there that I'll try to fix sometime soon, there's also a timing issue.

It's there now! I meant to upload it when I submitted but Unity was taking forever to make the build, so I submitted it and would upload the build once it was ready. This was also almost 5am so I had to go to sleep lol.

Yeah, there's a really nice challenge with this jam at identifying and establishing scope, I've been digging these jams. My biggest issue from a personal development standpoint is hitting a bug or an issue where something isn't working, and burning time trying to fix it. My last jam took 4 hours and 33 minutes because of this. But other times it's smooth sailing, and it takes me a little under 3 hours, like some of my previous entries. Some times I don't care, so I'll go over a few minutes or 30 minutes.

I'm excited for this series of jams though, I like the idea of iterating on a project 3 times in a row and seeing how things improve each iteration.

Thanks for playing and thanks for the feedback! I plan on updating the game during the next two Trijams.

Thanks for playing! I plan on updating it during the next two Trijams!

Thanks for playing!

Thanks for playing! That's a pretty good score. I plan on updating the game for the next two Trijams, so stay tuned for more enemies, features, and audio which is terribly missing!

This is my first time participating so forgive my ignorance, but I'm guessing there's no main theme except just Mechs?

Can't wait to see what you do!