Jam-Based Diet
or "Refilling the Creative Brain by Doing Other Things"
I wrote about this somewhat in my last missive, but the emotional and mental impact of the Bloodfields campaign was a real one. It’s loads of excitement and joy, but piled around lots of tedious, non-creative work and now a huge worry of not living up to the expectations of my supporters. I see now why many creators are working to get into a non-crowdfunded way of supporting themselves. While I’ve still been working bit-by-bit, I could feel my own confidence and belief in myself faltering under that new weight of needing to deliver.
To help move past that, I’ve done two things: First, I have taken more time to enjoy non-ttrpg things - video games, movies, tv shows, and trying to do more non-ttrpg reading again (it’s a good practice to get into and really does help). Second, I have been working on submissions for a number of game jams!
Game Jams are, I think, a fairly commonly known thing in both the tabletop and video game space. It’s a set time period where creators come together to all make works of a certain type or theme or whatever the specifics may be. For me, the ideal game jams let me create fully-featured, but bite-sized games or adventures that let me remind myself that I can make complete, cool things. It’s like a quick shot of anti-imposter serum straight to my brain.
In the past, I’ve done Game Jams for The Company (a wonderful corporate horror rpg), a system-free setting jam focused on pocketmods, and a jam where I could only us MS Paint to complete my game. Jams allow me to flex muscles I rarely use (or haven’t ever used before), learn new skills, and complete a project in the very short term. Several of these projects were completed in a single day. Most of them are things I never would have created entirely on my own, but that I am so happy I took the time to make as they’ve added to me overall catalog, my overall skills and just the overall way I think of games. They are a great way to get started on the scene AND a great way to reinvigorate your creative self, if (like me) you are feeling drained or overwhelmed. Plus, being smaller projects I’m able to reasonably release them at very low cost, Pay-What-You-Want or even free and use it to continue building my audience in new places I may not have been able to otherwise.
I’m about a night’s work away from wrapping up this latest gam jam entry: Many Towers, Many Masters. It’s a hack of Down We Go focused on four different weird schools of magic and a party full of arcanists. It’s a rules-light, OSR-inspired towercrawl game. Lots of differences here obviously from my primary work with Mothership - fantasy rather than sci-fi, focus on lots of role abilities and more classic dungeon-type scenario design. Technically, this will actually be my first “zine” layout that is completed, but the aspects of upping my layout skills in Affinity has already been extremely helpful (and improved what I’m doing with Bloodfields).
About two weeks ago, I also put together a quick-n-dirty pamphlet for Disaster Tourism’s recent game Evergreen Wilds, about spending a season as a park ranger in a national park. I used his still-ongoing game jam to create something more in my standard setting but in a very different type of game. The results of that work was Iani Chaos Martian International Protected Park - a new park utilizing the existing rules from Evergreen Wilds. You are a lone ranger responsible for massive swaths of a fairly quiet martian park for space tourists in the not-so-distant future. It can be as hard sci-fi and lonesome as you’d like or as potentially tense and alien-filled as the prompts allow (which I really worked to keep in mind). I feel like working on this really helped me not only stretch my muscles in a different visual style and work with some 3D art but also it helped me think of non-horror stories to tell a sci-fi setting (and just helped me dig more into solo games - a growing interest for me as I’ve come to really enjoy them recently).
When I started both these jams, I was feeling overwhelmed and down on myself regarding my main project, The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station, but now I am working to wrap up Many Towers, Many Masters as fast as I can because I can’t wait to get back into full-time work on Bloodfields. I believe in myself more now than before and through seeing smaller work completed and taking in what I’ve learned, I have so many more ideas about the other creative work that’s been kicking around in my brain all this time.
If you are reading this, you are likely the kind of person I can’t recommend taking part in a game jam too enough! The good thing is… there’s HUNDREDS of them going on ALL THE TIME. Find a community or a game you enjoy and dig in, make something, and come out with a better sense of your creative self.
MORE COOL THINGS
I recently got the chance to play the first two act of Mousehole Press’s newest game, The Slow Knife. It’s a game about dreadful villains doing dreadful things and a person at the center slowly working towards their revenge. It uses cards and a corkboard with post-its and string to create a growing web of characters and events. I loved playing it, wish we’d been able to play more, and am really impressed by Jack’s focus on building something that uses a whole new method of play while still feeling like a distinctly Mousehole game (he also created Artefact, Orbital, and Bucket of Bolts - all of which I’ve had a great time with in the past). That kind of unwillingness to just remake new games with the same mechanics you are used to working with as a designer is something I hope to replicate as I work on more projects in the future.
It’s on Kickstarter for about one more day if this all sounds cool.
Episodes II and III of our Force and Destiny campaign set during the time of The High Republic are live over on The Jodo Cast Youtube channel. I’ve been having a lot of fun playing a Jedi Knight with a new padawan and returning to the narrative dice system at the heart of the modern Star Wars RPG systems. It’s crunchier than the other games I’ve been playing in a lot of way but the actual narrative results from each roll almost always comes out with something really interesting and additive to the story. Plus, playing in a milleau as well worn as Star Wars just has a really fun pace to it.
The Bloodfields at Blackstar Station is still available for pre-order via Backerkit!
Thanks for reading! I’ll be back sooner this time than I was last time as I’m digging WAY back into everything now that I’m feeling a bit refreshed mentally and physically after the last few months of wildness. - Christian