We Are Late to this Devlog

I was slow to write about launching this game. I'm not sure why. Since this game was made for the Short Rest cozy game jam, I didn't mind taking it slow. 

Making this game was particularly difficult for me since so many of the stories and games I design are about trauma and healing, but usually from the perspective of first the bad thing happens then we try to recover early on or long term. To fit the constraint of the Short Rest game jam, I had to make quite a few changes to the initial idea. 

At first the cyborgs were were going to have energy generation, different cores, and this was going to be the core mechanic. They were going to use energy to power what they find in the endless scrap heap, share energy with each other and with the Hive, and if they run out they were going to have to return to the Hive to nap. There were going to be a lot of rules for moving the energy around based on your core, your connection to the Hive, and other abilities you had. You were still going to be in a war is over postscarcity environment but the idea was to simulate "having fun and self care while dealing with limited personal energy" sort of like the concept some people use of "spoons" or "spell slots" to talk about dealing with chronic fatigue issues. 

Early in designing, I reached out to Tayler of Riverhouse Games,  @leviathanfiles on twitter, who was hosting the jam. Taylor was incredibly helpful and gave me a ton of feedback on the idea as I brainstormed through what was cozy and what wasn't. I was very concerned about following the constraint of coziness since that was the point of the jam and it pushed me in very new directions. I would pitch ideas, he would give a little feedback, eventually i came up with changes that he was much more interested in from the cozy perspective. This is why instead of energy management there was just the passing of time, the lists of stuff, and the whole design of repurposing parts of stuff you have and find came from. 

I was still struggling with "what was the point of the game" until I realized that these characters are super soldiers with no one left to fight and nothing to do but be happy. The entire setting existed as a sort of "reward" for fighting in this war that was probably quite traumatic for them. This game wasn't about the trauma but about the healing and whether that meant someone writing their memoirs about the healing, just having fun, building cool stuff, raising robot chickens, or helping someone else build a tower to the stars, the emotional core of the game became clear to me. That's when I brought in the idea of the maps to help showcase what we have done and to record who we are as we play. That's also when I hit upon the tone of how I wanted to write the rules, the recurrent reminders that yes there had been something bad but it was gone now. You have weapons you'll never use, go ahead and turn them into farming implements or sculptures. You are taken care of, everything is well. 

I think it says something about me that to get to a cozy place, I had to have a massive battle against the greatest of evils that fundamentally rewrote reality in order to make the idea of war an impossibility. But still, that's how we got here. 

I'm really curious at seeing how other people play it and I'd like to make some improvements to it. One idea I had was that I'd expand the lists with player suggestions over time. If it ends up being 200 pages of lists and a couple pages of rules, tha'ts fine. I don't mind. Who knows what the future holds?