Just in the nick of time! This took a lot longer than I expected.
So this is a silly little 1 player paper & pencil adventure game about collecting loot. It's sort of a mixture of Gacha games, the slow and steady progress of MMOs, and a little bit of crafting-y puzzle-y things. In trying to research Gachapon design techniques I discovered Shopkins and was horrified, so I had to channel their hyper commercialized aesthetic a little bit.
There's two uploads- a PDF that's good for reading (the pages are in order), and a PDF that's for printing (the pages are collated like a booklet). Theoretically, it should print onto 5 8.5x11" pages, double sided, but I haven't tried it yet.
P.S. if you read the "Reading" PDF - try to put it into the "pages side by side" mode!
Love from ya boy,
Marek
Comments
I looked at the Reading pdf.
I looked at the Reading pdf. infact I also looked at the other pdf. To be honest I probably won't play the game but I'm intrigued by the pdfs and the imagery. Looks like you put a lot of effort into it. Nice work.
Thanks for checking them
Thanks for checking them out. I like how this medium allows you to scan games in that way- disinterestedly flipping through it and maybe thinking about how the mechanics would play out. It reminds me of how thecatamites always describes playing rpg maker games by playing them for a minute and then opening them up in rpg maker and looking at all the guts.
Visiting the Spank Pit
Brilliant take on exposing the reality of time-sinks...! To me, the three quotes you put at the end are pretty much the archetype responses to the genre for those who go deep into it.
You know there's some 13 year-old kid who will see this and be transfixed. He'll ask a bunch of his friends to join him on his quest in the land of Sylpheez, be mystified and inspired by the real-time, real-world game mechanics, and slavishly play when he comes home from school, and then sail to the Shushup Desert as required just before bedtime. None of his friends will want to join in - they just don't "get it" - so he plays in secret, but keeps notebooks and sketchbooks until he's of college-age and finally asks himself, "What the hell was I doing all that time?"
Well done overall! Don't forget to develop expansions with HOURS OF BRAND NEW CONTENT, THE BIGGEST UPDATE YET.
Nothing would make me
Nothing would make me happier than to have exactly one person sincerely play this game, and for it to occupy the same place in their mind that games like Dragon's Court or Well of Souls occupy in mine.
Mmmm
If I had this game as a kid I definitely would have played too much. I'd have modded it too.
I used to play that Well of Souls, but I'm not familiar with Dragon's Court.
Nice to see you back ...
... and with something special for us. One of my many hidden vice, guilty pleasure thingummies is amassing a huge collection of tabletop RPG material despite the fact that I've never actually played one. Actually I suspect that this might be more common than imagined. There is always the tantalizing possibility of an infinitely diverse and dynamic gameworld that might be constructed from the most interesting parts of these many different systems of rules and worldbuilding. And now Sylpheez is added to the possibilities. I imagine it perhaps as a sort of pocket world to be escaped, a game that must be played by characters under an enchantment or mind control. Great piece of work - I'm not surprised it took longer than you originally thought as it is clearly something that has had a lot of work put into it; it will have an honoured place in my ridiculously large collection. You make me want to go back to my ideas of writing a small RPG. Are you aware of the 200 word RPG challenge btw?
There are some magical
There are some magical properties about this form, especially how when you read games they come alive in your mind. It's funny, a lot of what you're talking about here were things I was thinking about when making this- like the way that the rules and settings of paperback games can merge together easily. I was thinking about the individual pages of the zine, descriptions of mechanics or places that could be added or removed at a whim, and how different that is from digital games, where the interdependencies between systems can be so brittle.
I hadn't heard of the 200 word RPG before, I like that idea. Although I must say that I was trying out some of the terse RPGs on itch and some of them are pretty disappointing. 10 nouns that you mix with 10 adjectives do NOT a procedural generation system make.
I'm glad you pinged me on twitter regarding the Troika post, because I might have missed this wonderful comment. Troika looks really awesome- by passing glance it reminds me of Soft X-Ray / Mindhunters, which is this wonderful, wordless comic book that partially inspired me to finally start working in paper. I kept imagining what the strategy guide for a Soft X-Ray / Mindhunters RPG would look like, with cut-out maps of the strange locations there...