Preorder reminders
If you weren't able to back the Cloud Empress Kickstarter, Backerkit preorders will open at the beginning of April.
You can sign up for a preorder reminder here.
'Cloud Empress Plain Text Mess' Version live!
Work on Cloud Empress is progressing nicely and I expect to have the setting book off for editing by the end of the month.
A full plain text version of the Cloud Empress rulebook is now available over at my itch.io page.
The 'Cloud Empress Plain Text Mess Version' is a pdf of the rulebook, it contains a full set of equipment, apparel, crests, spells, and rules. It's a mess because it still needs significant development editing, copyediting, and proofreading -- be warned! Sharing this version is a bit like leaving the house half-dressed. I continue to see the benefits of sharing stuff work in progress. I think some readers are excited to open the plain text version. I'm also sure many of you want to wait until the Cloud Empress rulebook is complete with editing, artwork, layout, and game design.
Interview with Hinokodo
Miru 2 is on Kickstarter until Friday, March 10th. Back it here!
This month I’m joined by Hinokodo, the author of Miru, a solo adventure game about killing a god 100 years in the future. In this interview, we talk about solo game design, artificial intelligence, and new possibilities in indie publishing.
Thanks for your time! First, I’d love to hear a bit more about Miru 2. Can you give us the pitch?
Thanks for having me! MIRU 2 continues a day after MIRU ends. Without spoiling too much, You are being chased by a terrifying god. You’ll explore an uncharted territory full of diverse landscapes, dangerous situations, and nihilistic nightmares. On the surface, MIRU 2 is an engaging solo-first hexcrawling game. It has all the classics; turn-based combat, treasure hunting, inventory management, survival simulation, map drawing, and story choices that make each playthrough unique for everyone. The belly of the game is a story about abandonment, religion, cyber dystopian hellscapes, the human condition, and the consequences of your actions. All of this is wrapped up in a staple bound 54pg two-color zine and only requires a couple of D6 & D20 to play.
If I understand correctly, Miru was released (and sold out) in 2022. What prompted you to release another Miru title and why did you choose to make it a sequel?
I love the idea of series. Personally, as a creative, I feel like it’s such a waste to spend so much effort building a setting for just one story or painting or project. I think there’s something fascinating jumping into a new world, enjoying the ride, and then getting a satisfying answer to the question: “What happens next?” and so I did just that, while also pushing myself to explore a different tone and genre. I think of the MIRU series as a sandbox to push my creative game-making chops. I have the underlying story, now what window to view it through? I also think of MIRU as a zinequest project. In August, I thought, if this goes well, I’ll do this again with MIRU 2 next August during zinequest. But then I found out Kickstarter switched it back to February and so almost immediately after shipping everything out, I got to work on the sequel. If there’s a MIRU 3 (and that’s the plan) it’ll launch sometime late into zinequest 6.
I personally like looking back at those early seed ideas that turn into my games. What were some of the seeds for Miru?
I appreciate it when storytellers weave their worlds across the creative things they make. Finding out that IT is just a small part of a much bigger Stephen King world really blew my mind. I’ve been obsessed with the Zelda timeline for years now. “How do the stories connect?” There’s something fun about that. And so maybe around 2015, I decided that the things I make will all take place in the same ‘universe’. Part of that universe is a story that centers around an A.I. that decides she wants to become a god. (I was a film student a decade ago) I have 3 scripts written and another 10 ideas about this universe. One being a graphic novel about the origin of this A.I. (her name is ALORA) and another is MIRU. If she has an origin story, surely she has an ending story. How would that play out? What would a world that was taken over by a well-intentioned A.I. look like in a hundred years? Would anyone oppose that world? The story wrote itself I think. But the medium to experience it was something that took longer to figure out. I dabbled in a few game ideas in the past, one of them, BITPARTY, played with this idea about making an analog video game. At the time, I was frustrated with how unapproachable D&D was. My roommates played, and when I finally got the courage to ask them to join, it became this grueling character preparation thing that took a month to figure out and by then I had lost interest in playing because of how complicated everything seemed to be.
Fast forward a few years and I was thinking about that analog video game idea. Most RPGs are solo games. Zelda is a great example. Can a Zelda game be translated into a solo analog game? MIRU is the result of that experimentation. I never played D&D (I didn’t realize there were other options), I never really liked the idea that someone at the table wasn’t getting to play the game with everyone else, so if I were to make a game, there wouldn’t be a DM figure. (paired with the fact that it was conceived during the covid pandemic, like 15,000 people die a month in the US from it back in August 2022 and the same now in March 2023, I still consider us in a pandemic) Getting a group of people together to play a game was a challenge before covid and it’s even more so now. And that’s why MIRU is a solo-first game.
There’s a ton to love about Miru, but the graphic design is phenomenal from cover to cover. As someone building my own graphic design skills, how have you improved your skills over time?
I went to art school. (and then changed majors to film, and then dropped out) My original major was in Graphic Design. I was just a punk 17yr old completely unaware of the realities of the world. There’s this idea in the graphic design industry that’s stuck with me all this time; “less is more”. And there’s a funny translation that happens with that phrase. The public calls it ‘minimalism’. They see bold text on a white background, simple shapes forming an animal, posters with only 2 colors, etc. But most graphic designers see text arranged for maximum attention and readability, a complex subject broken down into digestible pieces, only using the most necessary colors to minimize confusion while maximizing contrast and aesthetic appeal. “Less is more work.” should be the phrase. The good minimalist designs out in the world are hours and hours of problem-solving. While, MIRU probably wouldn’t be considered ‘minimalist’, I do try to keep the ‘less is more’ mind frame. I made the titles high contrast so they catch your eyes as you flip back and forth between the story and the rules while you’re learning the game. I’m constantly whittling down the text to say exactly what needs to be said, using the fewest words possible, while also eliminating as many edge-case potentials that I can. My biggest advice here, as much as possible, is to try and give everything intention. Graphic Design is all about problem-solving and translating complex ideas into digestible ones. I’m always asking myself “does this solve my problem? Can I arrange these elements so that all the text stays at 10pts? Does this hierarchy of elements confuse people? Can I be more clear with my intentions?” And so on. If you’re asking these types of questions, you’re on the right path. After that it just becomes about learning how to use the tools of your trade. (For me it’s Affinity Designer & Publisher)
Solo designs can be really tough! I’m working on a solo version of Cloud Empress and I anticipate it being one of the hardest parts of the project. How have you managed the rules complexity of Miru and Miru 2? For instance, I find that if there are too many rules in a solo game, people really struggle to get it to the table.
Absolutely. This probably ties in a bit to the graphic design question and my frustrations with attempting to play D&D. There’s this idea in web design called “mobile-first”. It’s where designers build for the phone first and then expand from there to build the desktop view. The reason for that, is that to make elements readable, digestible, and usable on tiny screens you have to break everything down to the essentials. Then as you scale up, you can add back in details that will be more appreciated at a different screen size. The same can be applied to game design. I call this a “solo-first” approach. It is much easier to start at the essentials and scale up for complexity, rather than the reverse, because you’ve already done the hard part of boiling down your ideas into bite-size pieces. At least for me, MIRU and the games I make have a singular story in mind, and so many of the rule elements play more like a board game. It might be useful to you and folks in your position to glean through the rule books of your favorite board games that share similar mechanics with your game and see how they’ve boiled down complex ideas into digestible player actions.
The more barriers you lower for players, the easier it will be for them to play your games. Easy games get played. What’s easy, usually comes down to the digestibility of the rules. Magic the Gathering is actually a very complex game, there’s 40+ unique rules in every deck and you play against an opponent with their own 40+ unique rules. Magic the Gathering works because the rules are usually easy to understand. It is not a simple or rules-lite game. But it is pretty digestible. There’s a lesson somewhere in there.
We’ve talked a little bit about the Mimic Publishing network/collective, but I am really interested in your efforts to create an anti-corporate, environmentally-conscious publishing group of independent creatives. Where did Mimic come from and where do you see Mimic going in the future?
Yeah! This is something we’ll really be ramping up in the next month or so. The Mimic Publishing Collective first began in 2019. My partner at the time, now fiancé, had an idea for a game. It centered around Millennials and the hardships of life. Could you balance a job, friends, money, etc. while completing your life goal. In a weekend, I had a playtest version ready to go. I was obsessed with her idea. It was a party card game. It’s still in the tweaking/testing phase (We shelved it after looking at how much it costs to print cards. Ha!) Part of that process was coming up with a publisher to operate under as we were just going to self-publish it. I really enjoyed our collaborative experience, and problem-solving all kinds of solutions for millennials (for the game) got me really thinking about how I move through the world. I’ve never been in a position with money or employees, but as a starving artist with left-leaning views, my whole life has been a struggle about finding my place in our capitalist society. I need my autonomy. But I also need a roof and my bills paid. The last few years I’ve been ‘self-employed’ and by that I mean, I was an Amazon Contractor making deliveries not unsimilar to being an Uber driver. I drove a Prius and delivered packages all over Austin TX for about $80 a day. In Austin, you learn it’s ok to be weird. You learn to embrace weird. Starting a publishing company with as little hierarchy as possible while splitting ownership in a horizontal manner, so that no one sole person is calling the shots is pretty weird compared to how most businesses start out The legal system and most folks in general, have a hard time knowing what to do with a weird business like Mimic. In upstate NY there’s a collective of dairy farmers. They have this legally recognized pact with each other and operate under one umbrella public-facing company. It costs money, time, and skills to market yourself. In the milk market, whoever can get 7-11 the cheapest milk wins. The independent dairy farmer can’t spend 30% of their time and cash on marketing, sell through 7-11 (They have stores called Stewarts up there), and survive on the margins left. BUT by working together, the dairy farmer can spend 2% of their time and cash on marketing, sell through 7-11, and not only survive but help other independent dairy farmers thrive. Now upstate NY is like a dairy farming utopia. (Chobani anyone?) This is something I’m hoping we can cultivate with Mimic. Independent creators, operating together, so that we each thrive. All while maintaining ownership and a higher % of profits of your creations unlike traditional publishing models. We’re also much more eco-conscious than your typical business. It helps that our indie gaming scene is mostly printed on zines and books. Paper is actually pretty eco-friendly, as far as carbon emissions are concerned. Sourcing ethical paper is still something the industry needs to work on. Mimic makes and sells products that are meant to last a lifetime. We try to keep our footprint as low as possible, but we also offset twice the emissions we do produce, just to go the extra mile. Last year we offset over 4.5 tons of Co2 equivalents with our donation through Cooleffect.org. Simply JUST offsetting is not enough for companies to do, so it tends to have a bad rap in the eco scene. You’ll see a company like Shell continue to be Shell, but claim to be making efforts to go ‘net zero’ by offsetting their carbon, by donating to non-profit projects they run themselves… It’s wild. To us it’s simply the cost of doing business and we don’t charge extra for this. (Shell has a scheme where they ask customers to pay extra at the pump to offset for them, what??) In order for us to continue doing business, we need a world that’s liveable, for humans at the very least. MIRU 2 is printed on uncoated recycled paper. Under our current conditions of society, there’s only so much a few people can do, but we’re doing our best to do what we can.
Thanks again for your time Hinokodo. Where can people find you online?
Thanks for having me! I’m HINOKODO everywhere. But I’m mostly on Twitter and Instagram.
Twitter: twitter.com/hinokodo
Instagram: instagram.com/hinokodo
Itch.io: hinokodo.itch.io/
Mastodon: dice.camp/@Hinokodo
My Discord: discord.gg/wRduxRsfFb
And mimic publishing has a similar setup.
Omg thank you so much! So excited! 🥰
I'm going to try running a session for my family this weekend, then hope to run one on the Mothership discord soon!