itch.io

Is this still up to date? I want to hand your commission pamphlet to my Mothership players at an open table campaign.

Just played this with two friends and it was such a lot of fun! Fun premise, evocative prompts and welcoming presentation. I really enjoyed discovering the animals and their ecosystem together.

Love it! Small request... could you make the weather conditions that cause exhaustion bold? That way I'd have all the weather info on one sheet!

Latest playtest copy of my jam game was not at a stage where I wanted to publish it online. Sad to say I missed the deadline. 

“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” ~Douglas Adams 

But I am committed to finishing this now, and I have the jam to thank for thar.

Talldave when Im behind my laptop Ill send you the commented doc I had while reading!

Hi,

Loving the feel of the PDF copy. Mine has an issue which I'm not sure is just me or something else. When opening the PDF that I downloaded today in Acrobat Reader on Windows 10, some pages have backgrounds that do not load, causing white text on a white background. From the preview on the Itch page I can tell that there is supposed to be a background color there. Screenshot below. 

Cheers! 
Peter

Hi ajstamm,

I've copied the reply to your question from the kickstarter comments below. I think you added a question on creating a new card here. The creature card represents the creature itself, so you can treat it as such. When the gods interact with it, you may change it to reflect any transformation it has undergone, as you would with any other creation.

Copy-paste of Kickstarter reply:
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Incarnis was not designed with solo play as a core focus, but it is something we want to encourage and support, so any feedback in this regard is much appreciated. The module Feuding Pantheons on page 34-35 includes automa which we think can be dropped into a solo game nicely to add some agency outside of your own control.

You are exactly right about the landmarks. In Incarnis, Domains are what make things mythical. So a 'mundane' city has a form (this could simply be 'city'), but does not have a domain yet. As you say, it can receive a domain during play and become something mythical. A Sky city, an underwater city or even a new god.

Fabled creatures are first and foremost creatures rather than places. During playtesting, we received feedback that it was confusing to call a creature a landmark, so we phrased this as a creature dwelling. Either way, the intention is simply that you create fabled creatures and give them a place in your play area. Feel free to move and change your creature around as your fiction demands!

We hope you have fun with the game. Please feel free to message us if you have any more questions or feedback.

Hey, I just noticed you already uploaded something. You're ahead of me on that count. I enjoyed reading it! I tend to take notes when I read stuff, happy to share if you're interested, but I don't want to overstep :)

Yea, I should really count my blessings on having people around who are up for a messy playtest. If you wanna do an online play test sometime for your game, hit me up.

Since my last post I've followed the following recipe.

Ingredients

• The bare minimum of what counts as a unique idea.
• The philosophy of rapid development and minimal viable product; break your product up into a series of stages. Only do the bare minimum to get to the first next stage and nothing else. Then, share the result to get feedback, and only then move on to the next stage. It is scary. Do it. 
• Knowledge of games to steal from. If your core idea is unique, your building blocks don't have to be; the only way to realize a unique idea is to stack building blocks in a unique way. It does not matter if the building blocks are unique or not. The way you stack them is already value that you create (if you want to sell, be aware of copyright).
• A safe space to fail in. Like a group of friends who will enjoy a playtest night together even if the game bombs.

With the above ingredients in mind, the recipe is just the stages of your product, with something to show at each stage. I am using the following:

Recipe

• unique idea. I've pitched my idea to the community as soon as I had anything close to an idea. Product: idea pitch.
• Core moves. I then wrote down the core moves of the game (Powered by the Apocalypse style) and left details and even some key components blank, and turned on the bat-signal for a playtest. Product: Incomplete moves list.
• Play-test to fill the blanks. I then ran a playtest session with friends who will enjoy an evening together even if the game bombs, and who are cool with me filling those blanks in on the fly. There's just something about a live session that sets my brain into motion in a way my writing desk does not. In game development, playtesting is king. Do it ASAP. Do it often. Just one session was enough to fill the minimum amount of blanks  I think I need to fill to write a minimal viable product of a public playtest kit on itch. My aim is to finish the playtest kit in the next few days, encourage people to hopefully give one round of feedback. Product: Playtest kit that addresses intended blanks (v0.1). Contains complete core moves (the game's ingredients) and procedure of play (the game's recipe).
• In the first playtest, there were known blanks. I play tested to spark inspiration to fill them. The playkit is a bare minimal core with no intended gaps. I hope that I can quickly find people to use the playtest kit with the purpose of finding unintended blanks, and use their feedback to create a new playtest kit that fills these unintended blanks. Product: playtest kit that addresses unintended blanks (v0.2).

This is the product I aim to deliver for the game jam.

Of course there are next steps:

Repeat the last step. Products are v0.3, v0.4 etc. Do this until a playtest round no longer yields significant blanks.  Product: core game that has no longer been showing significant design gaps (v1.0).

•  Then, if if I want, I can expand my core game by repeating the whole recipe all over again towards creating v2.0. The only difference then would be that a unique idea is no longer a requirement, as I would still be building on the idea of v1 0.
• Use that feedback for one update round, and then finish this game jam with a play tested player kit v0.2 that is playable, fun, and begging to be expanded. 

I'm Just saying this because it has been my roadmap, so far it has been working for me, and hopefully it will inspire you towards something that works for you. By keeping it simple and minimal, it was possible to go from 0 words on paper to a play test within a week. Do the thing!

Oof.. this is soooooo tempting. I'm late to the party. But the question is.... can I?

Hi Leafo,

I can't find any e-mail from Itch.io after the one on Tuesday 3rd asking to contact from another address. Strange! But regardless, thank you for letting me know that it should work now. I tried it right away, and my backers have now received their keys.

Kind regards,
Peter

Thank you! Much appreciated :)

Hi all,

I tried to send keys of my game to my Kickstarter backers, but need admin approval to do this for the first time. It's been 21 days since I received word from them, and still haven't received that approval, with no apparent explanation. Does anyone know about anything that's going on that would explain the radio silence? I'm 100% sure that I'm sending to support@itch.io , but received only 1 reply, 21 days ago, and nothing after that. I thought maybe it was just the holidays and everyone's on vacation, but I do see admin activity. Help! :)

Thank you,

Peter

We've released Incarnis on itch.io two weeks ago after a successful Kickstarter campaign, and tried to send the backers their keys through the interaction tab of Itch's developer dashboard. Only after pressing send were we notified that approval is required to do this. There was no warning  about this on the interaction tab before pressing send. 

The problem is, that in order to tell people that they can trust the e-mail from itch.io , we had to send out an update prior to sending the keys, telling our backers that they can trust the pending email from Itch. This update was now two weeks ago, and in the meantime we have been distributing our game with workarounds, where we would have loved to do so through the storefront so that we could see the number of visits and downloads. 

This issue could have been easily prevented if there was just a simple warning on the interact tab before pressing send, so our request is to please place one to avoid unexpected issues for other developers in the future.

Looking into it, we noticed that there have been similar reports asking for this approval step and possible waiting time to be signalled clearly, so that developers can take this into account when releasing their game. There was no response about placing this warning back then, but hopefully we can hear your thoughts on this now. 

Kind regards,

Peter