Project Amble Devlog #1: from general vibes to more specific vibes
This is an early devlog for an unannounced game in progress from Choice of Games, arbitrarily nicknamed Project Amble as of a couple of minutes ago. I'm keeping a lot of the details under wraps for the moment because very little of it is set in stone: the outline isn't even properly started yet.
Towards the middle and end of writing Honor Bound, I began getting restless and thinking a lot about other game ideas. This tends to happen when I've been working on a long project for a while: my mind wanders and I start making weird lists like:
Or:
Although sometimes character ideas stick around, these scraps rarely go anywhere: I just write them down in order to exorcise them and focus on whatever I'm making. (I'm not planning to use any of these directly for Project Amble.)
One particular idea did keep tugging at me, and for some time during 2024, usually when going on hikes or bike rides, I thought about it a lot.
That idea isn't actually what Project Amble is going to be. I might return to that one in the future if it still feels great next time I'm planning something. But while I was wrapping up Honor Bound playtesting, I knew I wanted to send Choice of Games some ideas for what I'll work on next. I was also fairly sure that I wanted a break from the Creme de la Creme setting. I've been writing in that world, with games adhering to certain rules (low-violence, social-focused, a particular historical flavour, no overtly supernatural elements, education-related) for six years now and I liked the thought of writing a fantasy game with more magic involved.
So I wrote up the aforementioned idea into an elevator pitch (you can see an example of my Creme de la Creme one here.)
Then I happened to search through some old pitches from 2019, when I was coming up with Royal Affairs.
One of them that I'd completely forgotten about caught my eye. It was second-world fantasy with overt magic, and I'd explicitly highlighted Pathologic, my current favourite game, as inspiration despite not having played it back then. Five years on, I needed to reframe the concept a fair bit—it was more focused on maintaining a village, which I didn't fancy, and the story I'd set up didn't feel strong enough—but the vibes got my attention and at this stage, that's enough.
I took some time to collect the elements I liked and had some conversations with my wife Fay, who's also a game writer, about it. We'd already talked about ideas for fantasy games and twiddling dials of "creepy" and "sweet" to the correct configuration (I'm in the mood for creepy), and so those conversations fed into discussions of very broad-strokes story ideas and more setting information. I put together the elevator pitches and sent them off!
Starting the outline
After a couple of weeks, my CoG editor let me know that they'd like to see an outline developing the elevator pitch for this game. I was actually a little unsure to start with, because I'd put a lot more thought into the story for the other one and had a sense of more of the characters, but I also knew I could take advantage of coming to it very fresh, with a very general sense of what the player's doing and aiming for but without much sense of the broader setting or most of the characters.
Setting and story
The first thing I needed was to figure out the cause of the major problem everyone's dealing with in the setting. It's a magic problem, so I did some work sketching out what magic is, how it interacts with religion and society, what its costs and limitations are, and some of the things the PC would be able to do, magic-wise (much of which is still to be decided as of today).
When I'm deciding on setting details, I'm always thinking about how the player interacts with it. I don't pin down huge amounts of things straight off, especially at the outlining stage, but instead I figure things out once it becomes relevant. So I often jump around from one subject to another, but focusing on what the player's going to be doing.
This means the setting and story are the same thing when planning. There's no point sketching out a town in which there's a welcoming festival without knowing what's going to happen there and how the PC can engage with it. Setting also combines with characters: when imagining a character who does scientific stuff with magical herbs, this kicks off thinking about what the herbs can do but also what technology is available to the characters. If glass lenses are readily available, do they have telescopes to help them navigate their uniquely dangerous environment?
(It isn't readily available, and they don't. Unfortunate for them, funny for me.)
Characters
Each major character is tied to a role or location in the story. Project Amble is a game about journeys, peril, and discovery: it's especially important to ensure the characters illuminate aspects of the setting and are fully tied into the overall plot with strong opinions about it. Plus of course they have to be interesting to be around and have varied relationships with the PC and with each other!
I don't have the major characters fully pinned down yet. I do know what the villain and their motives are, and how the PC can join their side if they want to.
There are six romanceable characters currently and they exist only in a handwritten pencilled mindmap with a couple of bulletpoints about what their role is in the setting, where they're from, and some very general personality shorthands. I don't know their names or genders, or what language(s) the setting draws on, but I do have a sense of how the PC may be able to interact with them.
At least one of them is villainous and will be able to be redeemed or made worse.
At least one has killed someone; at least one will kill someone during the game.
If I can make it happen, I'll make it so that all of them can die in the right (or wrong) circumstances. I'm not sure how that'll happen yet.
What I have right now
- A PC with a lot of problems to handle
- The events and problems that kick off the plot
- Some nebulous thoughts about stats and mechanics
- A setting, major locations, and some problems that'll be happening within them
- A very broad-strokes idea of what happens in each chapter, and a slightly less broad-strokes idea of what the first chapter will involve
- A character list, as above
Next up
I'll be looking into the PC's stats. Along with this, I'll be thinking about the overall shape of the plot in more detail. Mechanics and story are so intertwined that I prefer doing them at the same time: it's vital that I don't end up with stats unevenly used, and that the stats work with the PC's situation and role in the game, not against it. I want the stat page to tell players a lot at a glance about the game and its concerns.
At this very early stage, I find it most useful to start with a big-picture perspective before narrowing down the details. Sometimes appealing details come up naturally and I pounce on them, but otherwise I like building a solid foundation and adding more and more until it's an outline.
Most importantly, it needs to make sense to someone other than me and my wife, with whom I've been chatting about this for the last couple of days.