Exactly three months to the day as I write this, Prismatic Wasteland declared 2025 “The Year of the Beta,” and I decided to take up the call. I have decided to kick the dust off a project I had teased a while back that fell by the wayside and finally take the steps to make it a reality. Right now, I’m working toward an Alpha release, but I plan on blogging my process to ensure that I stay on top of the project and maintain my ultimate goal of releasing a beta of the game later this year.
In between the publishing modules, I have been creating my own setting. It is a retro-futurist post-apocalyptic world where technology is limited, energy is scarce, and the landscape is rapidly shifting into a hostile wasteland. Initially, I had been designing the setting to fit it into the Cy_Borg system; however, along the way, the amount of mechanics I needed to add or hack started to pull against what I had in mind creatively. It also began to feel outside of the rule-light mantra of the game when nearly 50% of the mechanics needed to change and new ones needed to be added. So the project languished, as I had never set out to make a new game system.
The original teaser image, the name is obviously changing…
Some part of me knows that creating a new game is a fool’s errand; so many great TTRPGs already exist. How could the world benefit from another? Truthfully, I think I am OK with the idea that it may not. I personally find value in the process of creating, and this is the challenge that I keep returning to in my mind. It may not scratch any itch in the marketplace, but it is the one that I feel. But maybe that’s a little too pessimistic; I have searched high and low and have yet to find a system that matches the design goals I have in mind for the project. Which brings me to the point of today’s rant…
Finding Clarity In Iteration
As a corporate graphic designer, one of the luxuries I have grown accustomed to is something called a “brief,” which is a distilled set of goals for the project along with the audience demographics and stakeholder preferences. These are used as an imperfect scale by which the project’s success is measured. It then becomes the goal of the project’s leadership to keep the work focused on these objectives. One exercise I have often employed as a design lead is to further focus these broad objectives on the ones that most impact the design approach.
So, in retrospect, even though I am basically starting over on my setting, the exploratory work I have been doing isn’t a loss. It has led me to establish a set of design goals for the project. My initial spark of inspiration has been iterated into something more tangible. And truthfully, I don’t know how I would have arrived at this point had I not thrown myself into an idea and started creating. In the business world, this is a sin, but as a self-motivated creative, it is wildly empowering and cathartic.
So where did I wind up?
Main Design Goals
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Be an easy transition for modern D&D players
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Stay as rules-light and easy to learn as possible
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Have resource tracking be key to the experience but stupidly easy to manage
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Highly customizable player characters
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Be clear enough to paint a defined picture of the setting, but abstract enough to inspire others to create inside it
In addition to the goals listed above, there is also one key goal that is more practical. I also plan to enshrine the SRD in the Creative Commons. In order for this effort to be worthwhile for me, this step needs to happen, and once I reach the point where I can share an Alpha version I will be publishing it under a CC license. At that point, I hope to gather playtest feedback from the world at large and incorporate it into the beta edition of the game.
Keeping Myself Accountable
In the coming weeks, I plan to share the rationale behind my design goals and what they mean to me. I also plan to give updates on my progress as the project develops as a way to remain self-motivated and avoid procrastination. Hopefully, this process will add up to long-term success as I learn the optimal way to design with a team of one.
