Six inspirations for early access TTRPG development
Welcome to the worlds by watt newsletter. I’m watt, creator of the ecological science fantasy tabletop roleplaying game Cloud Empress. For all things Cloud Empress, go to CloudEmpress.com or support me on Patreon.
With Rust Wings canceled, I’ve spent the last month contemplating how my crowdfunding campaign could have been improved. With these lessons in mind, I’m all in on an ‘early access approach’ to my next title, Burial Cloud. Before I clarified this approach in my mind, though, I honed in on the current and upcoming games I’m most inspired by.
My six game development inspirations
1. Mythic Bastionland (Big Books)
Chris McDowell produces beautiful, hefty books, thematically linked to one another. People love hardcover books and are willing to pay for them. I overestimated my core audience’s interest in cards, tokens, and map books for Rust Wings (these could be future offerings, but will not be the main selling point). I want future releases to center around the books themselves.
2. The Seven-Part Pact (Huge and Uncompromising)
Jay Dragon has been working on The Seven-Part Pact for years. For at least a year, you’ve been able to grab a full playtest version on her Patreon. There’s already a tremendous amount of hype building for the crowdfunding campaign. The game seems uncompromising and special, in a market with thousands of other TTRPGs.
3. Kingdom Death Monster (Modularity)
Adam Poot’s behemoth board game Kingdom Death Monster feels like a singular artistic statement (one that also includes the disappointing oversexualization of female characters). Kingdom Death has become a lifestyle game for an entirely new audience of board gamers, and what I find most interesting is the modularity built into its system. KDM uses ‘nodes’ where adversaries and events plug and play into a rules framework, drawing on a player’s larger collection of expansions. Choose a campaign, a few monsters, and nemeses at different node levels, and get a whole new experience. There’s a buffet-style experience waiting for players to season the game to their liking.
4. Hades/Hades 2 (Early access)
Acclaimed and successful developer SuperGiant had already published a top ten game of mine (Pyre) when they launched Hades in Steam early access. For a year, SuperGiant worked with its audience to refine the frenetic and evocative, and ultimately market-dominating roguelite. Early hands on the product built community and improved gameplay.
5. Cairn (Free distribution)
Yochai Gal is a hero of the indie-TTRPG industry for his willingness to give Cairn away for free. He’s not the only one who gives games away, but Yochai spent years supporting Cairn as a way to build the broader TTRPG community, the NSR, and bring in new TTRPG players into a niche corner of the hobby.
6. Buried Giant Studios (Transparent publishing)
Cole Wehrle has been posting about what early access development looks like for a board game publisher. There’s this broader sense of Buried Giant being for fans by fans, though. Cole breaks down Buried Giant’s business model in one video and describes tabletop game development as primarily a community/collective endeavor in another. At the same time, Cole stresses the unique role of the designer to make decisions, support the community, and share their vision for the art they are creating.
Early access TTRPG development
So how might I incorporate these inspirations in my design practice? I’m committing to an early access process for my next title: Burial Cloud (formerly called Sky Burial). I plan to write quite a bit more about what early access development looks like for TTRPG design, the successes and strains of using this approach in future posts, but here are some initial ideas on how I plan to apply the framework to my creative process:
Create complex, big, and artistic worlds that players, GMs, and readers can’t find elsewhere. Focus on uniqueness over appealing to a broad audience. Let the audience find my games rather than chasing the audience.
Share early drafts and unfinished prototypes.
Make frequent releases of smaller rules modules, locations, NPCs, and lore.
Give you (the community) a vote in what I make and how these modules will be bundled into game books.
Cultivate community playtest groups and worlds by watt run playtest opportunities.
Maintain ample feedback pathways.
No rush development, where a game takes the time it needs to marinate, ideally far in advance of its crowdfunding campaign.
Frequent posts about design inspirations, goals, and process to center the vision of a game world.
Accessible products - Print and play and/or print on demand options available between crowdfunding campaigns, especially when titles go out-of-print.
Maintain a singular thematic and artistic style for worlds by watt.
Co-publish titles to broaden a game’s reach in the market, or when a title does not fit the worlds by watt vibe.
A lot of this I did for Cloud Empress’ initial launch. I did some for Rust Wings. None of these bullet points seem like radical ideas or secret development strategies alone, but combined, I think they’ll be a tremendously positive, iterative change for the way I work.
A game called Burial Cloud
Two recent examples come to mind for how I’ve started putting early access design principles into practice.
Folks on Discord helped talk through the new name, Burial Cloud. Up until a week ago, I was calling the game Sky Burial. Despite research and a check-in with Tibetan organization that said the title ‘sky burial’ would likely not be inappropriate or offensive to Tibetans, the question about cultural sensitivity came up several times on Discord, given that air/sky burials are traditional burials within Tibetan culture. After explaining the research I had done a few times to a few different people, I realized that even if the name ‘sky burial’ is not culturally inappropriate (from all the evidence I had), I would likely be forced to continually explain the name’s disambiguity for years to come. Through a series of votes and community suggestions, I landed on the title Burial Cloud, which feels thematically unique but tangentially related to Cloud Empress. If you’re interested in these types of active feedback conversations, you can join the worlds by watt Discord here.
You also helped me pick the color treatment for Burial Cloud in this newsletter! A stunning watercolor approach by pbbeta, which pbbeta now does by hand on real watercolor paper! Examples above!
That’s it for this post, but I’d love to hear your thoughts or examples of early access game development. Post a comment below!
Very cool to see this. Always fun and fascinating to see what kind of influences go into work.
Also interesting to see Kingdom Death Monsters on here! Haven't seen anyone talk about it in a long time. I was very intrigued by it, but that price tag and the likely difficulty in getting it to the table kept me from buying in.
Looking forward to the process of the new game. Your discord community is extremely positive and welcoming. You are doing great work here.