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Hey hey,

Just found the jam through Madeline's newsletter and would very much love to work on something for it, but alas I don't know who I'd want to work with so I'm making an open call! I'm Janie, she/ her, 25 from Minnesota in the US, with a primary interest in solo games. If you take a look at my work on here you can likely tell I'm but a fledgling dev, but I'm trying to push more stuff out. Got no talent for visual art (though I'm not against trying), can do some graphic design and layout with photopea and scribus respectively (though I've got no training and little experience), never published anything longer than a page (though hoping to change that). Basically, if you want to know what I can and can't do/ what I'm all about, again feel free to look at my account.

My discord is janiecox so feel free to reach out to me on there, though I'd love to get to know anyone and everyone who's here so please talk to me in here too! Last note, and I haven't gone to do this with my already published stuff yet, but I'd like anything I make to be free and CC BY-SA 4.0, so if you want to make money or have strong control of your work I wish you the best but we probably shouldn't work together

Gonna pick this up when I get paid, perfect way for me to try thousand year old vampire again, but until then, here to say that community copies are gone

Reading through this, I know it's dark fort like, maybe I should've come in expecting more of that idk. I do still think setting up the tone aside from that would do nicely

Context for hexgrid: My first sector encounter was a whale that made me get a new hex map, so that's why I don't start on a left corner. Also, used acronyms (Data station is the circle in the asteroid cluster down south) 

Spent three hours on a run largely between exploration and a Data Station. I didn't feel much like I was role playing in the hexcrawl but I like how the sector contents made me consider routing, the map feels useful for more than just an excuse for encounters which i appreciate. The dungeoncrawl did get me thinking about Luna's feelings and the place that she's in through emergent storytelling (e.g. a dead end with a laser trap and when i return i fight a gizmo in a room with a damaged gizmo, there's a story there), but mechanical choices were a lot sparser. I'm a big fan of the rp that comes up in crunchy dungeon crawlers personally even though I know that's not the primary focus. The difference in feeling between the two modes of play was very easy to feel, in part due to the music but also the different dice mechanics. Combat was engaging the first couple times in both modes but quickly became uninteresting, some sort of crit mechanic for ship combat could spice it up a bit. Also, with a +1 to hit and ties going to players, half of the T-1 enemies on the Data Station are auto-wins. I ended up going straight to loot and xp when I saw them and I started with a pulse rifle. Leveling up as Luna felt good, and I was kind of missing that throughout the hexcrawl phase. Never found an upgrade, so either making those easier to get or creating a more consistent alternative would be good.

Energy was never an issue for me, feels like it should've been. To be fair, I didn't realize ship weapons cost energy my first couple fights but went back to remove what I should have lost and it didn't affect my overall feelings, making sure players don't skim over that is a good idea though. My math might be wrong but I think, with dying stars giving an average of 12.5 energy, you're favored to be energy positive in the long run, not accounting for the shift coordinates give you. You can always go back to one you've already found too. I guess I'm also not certain on how long a run is supposed to last, since that would effect how much energy you want players getting naturally and not through purchase. I assumed it'd be fairly quick given a core part of the experience is looping music while you play, and I'm not against that not being the case, I think that can work, but setting up expectations for that early might be nice.

Maybe petty but I got 4 laser traps in a row and that sucked so maybe some more options for room contents, like a d8 or d10, would help alleviate running into trap after trap. Just speaking of traps, I am not a fan of the few instant lose if you roll bad encounters here. Lockdown and the whales potentially being an autolose because of unlucky dice create dread in a very unfun way. With the 20 hexes I had explored, that's 20 chances for a .16% chance to just lose. Again, if I got the math right, that's 3% odds that the game ends by your 20th hex, in which the Data Station I found didn't have a Mother Proxy, it had an Exo Mech which I didn't have the advancements to let me hit its DR. This ties back to me thinking the game'd be quick. If it's supposed to be drawn out, grindy, and full of dead ends, put that facing forward in the tone and the explanation of the game. That's not the vibe I get from the art, music, and mechanics on an initial glance though.

I never got healing for my ship even though I felt like I needed it. I think after one run I get the economy better now and could play it better. I think it works well especially as a way to bring the ship and pc modes together.

Here's a couple misc rulings I came up with for my playthrough since they weren't explicitly stated:

- running out of energy isn't an explicit game end, so "spending a turn doing nothing" is fine. I essentially allowed myself to run random T-1 enemies whenever, only did so a couple times. Also carried this over to dungeon crawl.

- Choose which ship weapon to attack with before dice are rolled and energy is taken on a miss

1 hi i’m Janie

2 i got one submission in last year, am hoping to bump the number up and spend a bit more time on them this go around too

3 i’ve been kind of getting back into the asethetics of mechs lately

4 i’m planning to collaborate with someone i know and i’m interested in seeing how the collaborative process works and differs from working on my own

Game looks amazing, and the fact you could fit all of prose, artwork, and even repetition of the IRON rules sprinkled throughout onto one page while keeping it looking nice is aspirational. Great work on this

I really like the strategy that seems like it could develop in routing based on your stats plus seeing the whole map at once, could probably spend a lot of time just trying out new builds and paths

Scratches the itch for spell creation that I haven't been able to find anywhere else. Genuinely phenomenal

Genuinely love how it's written and it's crazy how much you could fit efficiently onto the 1 page.  Very excited to try this out!

I was hoping one of these would show up!

1. I ended up getting what I submitted done from concept to completion in about 6 hours. My initial idea was too ambitious and rather than changing course until the very end I just didn't get much work done on it the entire jam

2. I think, especially for a one pager, working on the page rather than a design document helped me understand the vibe and scope of what I was going for a lot better.

3.  Learning Scribus provided a lot of small challenges but nothing a google search or revert to last save couldn't fix. Otherwise, I think wording everything so that it was concise enough to still fit on the page while still providing all the information you needed to understand it had me rewriting sections again and again. 

4. Honestly, I was waiting to dive into everyone's submissions until the jam was over, but of the few did I did look at near the start, Precious Cargoes had a really nice presentation and fun idea.

1. Hey! I'm Janie

2. I've been checking a lot out, trying to expand my RPG horizons, but I just started running a Righteous Blood Ruthless Blades campaign and aside from not fully getting the rules the first time around we had a lot of fun.

3. First time jammer, first time designer!

4. My hope is to just get one completed project under my belt. I've heard great things about this jam and am excited to see what everyone ends up coming up with!