I've always got a few cauldrons on the fire at any given time - can't really manage otherwise. There's usually one or two primary projects going and then a bunch of secondary, trial, and satellite projects popping in and out as the mood strikes. So I figured I'd post those on their own separate page, as opposed to burdening the Art page overmuch - that one is more for finished stuff, I suppose, and this is more for what's on my radar right now.
This is a mystery adventure game / visual novel I've been focusing on recently. You can find more info at the Crowdfundr page, which I am just gonna keep running indefinitely, because that's basically the main advantage of Crowdfundr over Kickstarter and the such (I am not a huge fan of the artificial urgency unless a project requires a very specific and non-trivial amount of external funding to even come into existence, and this one is going to get made regardless). There is also a demo on my itch page, which is small but comparatively feature-complete (though, like, in an early beta sort of way).
I'm having a good time with it so far, though I have been taking a few weeks off from continuous development, now that I've got all the features into more of a late beta stage - what with functional saving and loading (not in the demo) and the RPG style mechanics along the lines of Disco Elysium's dialogue based skill system (also not in the demo - heck, might not even be in the final game, but I figured I'd build it into the framework anyways, because that way I have it.
It's going to be a series, probably. Most of the early work done on Chameleon's Dish was originally done for a different project called Queen of the Fireflies, which is set in the same cinemagick polyuniverse, but QoF was, indeed, one of those projects that, due to its scope and ambition, required a very specific minimum amount of funding, and the Kickstarter for that fell just about 75% short of the goal. So now I'm cannibalizing, repurposing, and scoping down. But that story, among several others, will probably still eventually see light of day, in a modified format.
This is a work in progress somewhere in the middle of its development cycle. It is, in a word, a tabletop system (and setting-lite) for cosmic horror, existential horror, and weird fiction roleplaying. "But Aleks," I hear you say, "Call of Cthulhu already exists and is a time tested classic." True, but firstly, what does that have to do with me, and secondly, as much as I enjoy the CoC system, and the broader BRP system it is built on, I am mostly done with H.P. Lovecraft and I am completely done with "sanity mechanics." I cannot hold my nose and tolerate those things in my own games anymore. I am not going to evangelize and judge folks for sticking to legacy systems, but I personally don't have to stick to it, and therefore I shall not. Being someone who suffers from PTSD, plus several fun comorbidities, in real life, it's getting kind of heartbreaking - I don't have an opportunity to GM very often, and even less so when it comes to the genres of horror and weird fiction, so when I DO get such an opportunity, I'd rather not sit there and watch my own players basically pantomiming my own struggle at me for entertainment. Fuck that noise.
Anyway, the biggest news here is that I'm finally, after several years of focusing elsewhere, dipping back into tabletop roleplaying games design with a mid to largish sized system. I tend to design my systems from scratch, simply because that's what I most enjoy doing, but there have been a few preferences that I end up revisiting over and over, and which have basically turned into templates over the years. Mostly, I really like d6 based dice pool systems with degrees of success and progressive resource drain spirals, and I like d100 percentile systems for the more straightforward approach.
This project falls into the former category - cubes, cubes, and more cubes. As it stands, the system is very similar to a few of my previous offerings, namely Errant, At The Crossroads, and The Grizzle. While the percentile systems works well in the BRP, this is, once again, not that, and I figured that a greater emphasis on sharing narrative control, busting the "success" / "failure" binary, and a more integrated "doom spiral" mechanic made sense for me.
It's gonna be pretty cool, you'll see. Will it be essential, and will more than a few people ever play it? Probably not.
In keeping with my tendency to only make things in the most outdated and underloved paradigms, I've been wanting to do one these in ages. Recently, I got a pretty big chunk of development done on one such game, or framework, rather, during a game jam (though I didn't submit to said gamejam due to a last minute debugging nightmare), so now I have it, and can hopefully build on it, until I have the greatest Wizardry clone that nobody asked for (outside of Japan, that is).