Background

A friend of mine says he only gets his best ideas in the shower, and not just any shower, but a chaotic one. Music blasting, maybe flashing lights, maybe someone cackling behind the curtain. For me, though, showers work because they cut off outside stimuli and leave some safe room to think.

Lately I have been bouncing between teaching and planning a wedding. Neither has been overwhelming, and it’s all coming together quite nicely, but it helps to have a creative outlet on the side. Going back to layout design, something I loved messing with in past games, has been a steady outlet.

I have a central productive focus in my life, and one silly one. The idea arrived at the right inlet of a very busy time, and so I took that time to put it on paper.

The Game

Pokémon Shale places you in a dungeon just on the outskirts of Pinwheel Forest, after some unknown disaster. The caves are left scattered with Pokémon that have “come here to endure, nothing more”.

Your role as a Pokémon yourself, is to explore and map the rooms you uncover, build defenses, and recruit Pokémon to help grow a small community within the dungeon. Along the way, you can take on tasks from the floor’s pseudo-legendary Pokémon and uncover hidden secrets tied to the ruins and their formation.

Mechanically, every room you enter generates either a resource opportunity or a challenge, determined by pulling cards. Whatever you reveal gets physically drawn into your map, building the dungeon as you explore it.

You then use your stationed units to defend against invading Pokémon and, if you weaken them carefully enough, attempt to recruit them instead of defeating them outright.

The core structure is inspired by the tower defense system DELVE, but the mechanics have been heavily reworked. Pokémon units are more complex, with distinct abilities and scaling. The system is balanced around a central tension: lowering an enemy’s health enough to capture it without accidentally knocking it out, versus spending resources to recruit or purchase reliable combatants outright.

All while making it pretty.

Interested?

Read more about the design choices going into Pokémon Shale here: https://holisticdice.substack.com/p/devlog-pokemon-shale-mystery-dungeon

I add one for every purchase, but I’m not able to do it instantly each time. (Bundles aren’t included).

Great project! How did you go about breaking it down into the new form?

I'm so happy to hear you're enjoying the game, and I love the idea of a French translation! I'd would like to chat a bit more privately about how we might go about that - feel free to email me at kaimedinacontactme at gmail.com and we can go over some preferences and ideas for making it work smoothly.

Also, I’m currently running a pretty interesting outreach project using the game alongside real-world archaeologists. If you’re at all interested in connecting with French-speaking archaeologists to run a session, I’d be excited to talk more about that too!

awe that is so heartwarming to hear! Hope you enjoy 😁

We live in a world of abstractions, where the mind constantly creates and updates mental models to make sense of its surroundings. Memory can be fragile, often fading as we move between spaces, with our internal maps shifting as quickly as we navigate them.1 Simulation is intrinsic to human nature, as is play— a topic I explored just a few weeks ago. Today, I’ll be exploring Hive Synapse Spy Agency, a tabletop game by Austin Lim and Anton Galang, as its background sheds light on the cross-sectionality of neuroscience, science-fiction, and the power of games to envision a new future.

We play to help understand the world around us in a safe environment. It is an adaptive behavior prevalent throughout nature2 that allows a creature to imagine scenarios and test abilities that may aid them when they are met with these encounters.

“Although adults might define as work infants’ struggle to balance and begin to stand or walk independently, infants appear to have intrinsic motivations for achieving these motor skills and show expressions of pleasure in achieving them. Thus, this motor practice appears to be play for infants.” - Garner, B. P. (2021)

So, we create simulations outside our mind in order to form simulations in our mind, all-and-all to understand the world best we can. We are developing creatures, who still use play to grow throughout our lifespan.3  Play is good for the brain.

Read the rest of this article here: https://holisticdice.substack.com/p/neuroscience

Hi there! Thank you so much for producing this and being involved in the Hive Jam! I wrote a bit about your game within the below post, and am excited to incorporate it in one of my campaigns sessions one day. Let me know if I mis-wrote anything regarding it.

https://holisticdice.substack.com/p/nested-adventures-through-layers

I am so glad! I personally was unaware of that difference between the symptom of psychosis compared to a diagnosis, so I appreciate you informing me on that as well.

Serious games are definitely getting bigger and bigger - while I don't know how much they're used just between friend groups, on a business side they can definitely be well utilized and ARE being utilized (education, therapy, war games, etc...)

Same to you @ collaboration! Albeit I'm a busy bee, I'm definitely open to something like that if ever a good idea pops up. 

Heyo!
https://holisticdice.substack.com/p/playing-with-loss-within-the-hive

Loved the game, hope everything here sounds alright!

Hi everyone! I want you to know that I haven't forgotten about you! I really love and appreciate each of the submissions, they each chose a great new light to bring people into new ways of play. While unfortunately we do not have enough entries for a charity bundle, I strongly recommend keeping an eye on places such as the Itch.io discord where folks share charity jams for people to join. Additionally, I am still writing the blog post! I want this to be more than just a highlight of the games, but going down aspects of them I really engaged with. On-top of the delay from life getting busy, I want to spend the time to do this justice, and so the post is coming but will be a bit. <3
Thank you all for helping the hive :)

This is really wonderful! Great work. If you ever want to playtest a run at it let me know, I'll be writing up the post on the game jam hopefully sometime this week. I especially enjoy how well you tied mechanics to the hive thematics.

This is great! I'll need to spend more time this weekend looking through it, but the Jenga mechanic seems a great way to portray this changing emotional loss discourse. The idea of harm reduction in hive minds actually triggered an idea for a game myself, but we'll see if I actually commit haha.

Good work, and I look forward to playing it sometime.

Totally! 

Good morning! I mentioned this game in a newsletter of mine but please let me know if I misinterpreted anything. https://holisticdice.substack.com/p/hive 

Children are not terrorists https://www.pcrf.net/  👍

The main charity raters out there approve the legitimacy of the charity as well. In fact I have seen not one logical piece of evidence to the contrary that has to do with this specific organization and I don't work off of hate or unbacked misinformation.

and I'm so glad I did! I mean the cause I would have supported anyway, but this is such a fun relaxing game that represents what I would make if I could.

Printing this out for my school's social space! I read over it a year ago, and this game is quite well made :)

You hit the style so well!

Good stuff

Thank you! Unfortunately this is what it looks like when I remove the hexagons due to the way I was editing: https://imgur.com/a/UQpfvjr

However here are the source for both images:

Skeleton: https://exeuntpress.itch.io/rabbits-and-demons

Gun: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1UV63xx3Mue8TbVxImTdBDbzH9uljLmFh (go to the GLIDE folder)

Hey friend! I just checked the download and everything seems to still work just fine. Did you unzip the download once you got it? Either way, here's a google drive copy you can try downloading, maybe that'll work better! https://drive.google.com/file/d/1m4zLR2ne-SOlKeL397AvK34UnrZvKYb5/view?usp=sharing though this drive link seems to be giving me trouble, so here's a second go: https://pdfhost.io/v/NDTY5oGe._The_Last_Step_RPG_V15

Apologies for the delay! Approved!

I'm down and fit the bill!

https://kaimedina.itch.io/thegoblinthought 

this is a great joy to hear! While I know people play my games, rarely do I get a word back, so this is just wonderful :)

To answer your questions, you always tell each other your turns, but they don’t have to give away everything about your creatures, just hint at parts to them. Additionally, if you do give something big away, consider if your civilization would be able to figure this out, or if they would act without knowing this history. Finally, as there are 52 weeks in a year (cards in a deck), and 4 suits (seasons), you do move through each shuffled suit fully before going to the next season (aka rotation). 

and worst case, my games are built to be flexible. So, house rules are always encouraged!

Keep on miscommunicating, and thanks for playing!

This is the kind of thing worth sneaking onto a library bookshelf, I love it.

I'm currently working on an ocean expansion to my goblin game, and will be referencing this as a resource!

Might use this for an expansion of my game The Goblin Thought! Depends if I follow through of course, but credit will be provided!

Might use this for an expansion of my game The Goblin Thought! Depends if I follow through of course, but credit will be provided!

Looks great! Excited to play. 

"Just print this convenient reference page 40 times to record the names of your 5,000 starting bees"

So good.

Love it!!

Got some magical, autistic, aromantic goblins for yah!

A Neurodiverse, Meditative Journaling Game (Singleplayer + Multiplayer Expansion)

The Goblin Thought

But unlike all the orcs, elves, witches, living pitch, oracles, and amateur film critics of the land, goblins thought differently.

When a goblin stands short, looks to the heavens, and screeches with all its might atop its hoard, it's expressing a mix of pure anger and joy in a world not quite made for it.

The goblin hoard - a pile of goods and trinkets - is a place of greed, yes. But it's the same greed that thrives throughout this land of men and beetles. It's the allowed selfishness that helps us learn and grow, walk and run, screech and scramble. The hoard is the goblin's memory.

What you see before you may look like trash, but it contains every nook and scratch of a goblin's living and breathing history. Without it, they are reset to factory settings and must start anew. Goblins can survive for a time without a hoard, but if they are gone for too long, they tend to forget things.

The goal of this game is to experience just a fraction of what it's like to be one of these marvelous misfits; to understand a mind separated and compiled by its own and others' experiences, which may not be as alien as you think. Build your hoard with every crook or crevice acting as a neuron firing with life. Make allies and defeat monsters, or simply exist and witness. 

Be a goblin, and look upon your story with pride.

Interested? Learn more here:
https://kaimedina.itch.io/thegoblinthought 

Using this in a STEAM lesson for my middleschool class (math x an astronomy drawing game I rushingly put together)!

👏 

Hey there! I saw you put Behoro in a wishlist,  let me know if you'd want to trade that + my other game To Care is To Cairn for a copy of superstition :) 

I'm @not_kia_ on twitter

Well I'm not the general public, and I got ideas to use in my work from it. Simple as that. Even if I didn't like it, there could still be parts that I enjoyed or brought about ideas.

Good stuff!

Love it!! I'm gonna link it within my expansion as a compatible game, good work!