Phew, slid through the end of that month with just enough time to finish 2 (and get halfway on another 1) of the 4 jams I'd started designing for on time. Actually, as I write this the biggest one ends in exactly ten minutes. But I submitted my game for that yesterday so that's none of my business anymore.
Okay, so. Here's the Jams I joined, games I worked on, and other game dev stuff I did in January, a sort of
January Wrap Up
Jams I joined:
Jam Games I actually worked on:
We Were One for the Playtest Zero ParryJam
Kitchen Kitten Adventures for the Tiny World TTRPG Jam
Seven Kisses for the Gaming Like It's 1929 Jam
Untitled Dress Up Game solo TTRPG for the Glam Jam (I clocked that I couldn't possibly finish both this and Seven Kisses on time together (same deadline) so I decided upon advice from a friend to just finish this game post-Jam and release it on my own time).
Other Games I worked on/released in January
New in Town, a solo journaling TTRPG inspired by Animal Crossing Wild World, created on my game design podcast 10 Minute TTRPGs (available wherever you get your podcasts, including YouTube)
Jams I submitted to
(I will submit to the ParryJam, but that deadline is still a ways away and I'm not done with the game, yet!)
January Experiences
I only recently joined the Playtest Zero discord and it's been a really great time. Once a month meeting up on call with a bunch of indie designers to playtest WIPs and gather/give feedback, share thoughts and play some really cool games is, as is shocking to no one, a really fun and valuable way to spend time. I'm certainly not immune to the phenomenon of being so deeply into a game that you can't see the forest for the trees anymore, so having to kind of resurface from the depths so take a breath, thrust my fledging game out into this pocket universe and asking people I've in part never met to please play it and tell me what they think was a very welcome way to get new perspective, daunting as the concept can be.
I can't wait to bring a non-jam game in progress to be tested and to test more games. I've said before on other platforms that looking at literally any display page on Itch.io or even just at my own games library there feels like this
[ALT Text: a meme screenshot from the 90s sitcom Sabrina the Teenage Witch, where she is overwhelmed by countless hands offering her pancakes]
But that's also how it feels to peruse the discord of tips, playtest other games, and hear what everyone's working on.
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Resuming 10 Minute TTRPGs was also daunting, maybe the theme of the month but hopefully not the whole new year. I had been forced to take a hiatus only some months into starting the show for health reasons (#BetaBlockerBaddieLife), so the first episode I recorded for the year was also the first episode I'd recorded in over 6 months and I felt, even more than I usually do with this show, genuinely ill with nerves up until the moment on the recording when I heard myself spilling out ideas for New in Town. New in Town is such a delight to work on, I'm currently writing a larger version than the ashcan that I always publish for the show and greatly enjoyed working also on the layout and illustration for the blank journaling pages I've already uploaded to join the currently downloadable version of the game. I'll be making separate posts for games I've already released as well to give a look behind their processes and any updates on their way, so I'll go into more detail on New in Town there.
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While I'll be making (a couple) posts about the process behind Seven Kisses still, I will say here that this was a game where I think the crunch from the jam actually helped it be what it became. My god, if I could beam the experience into your minds of the evening 40 hours out from Jam end where I had just spent all day refining the mechanics and trying to simplify what initially seemed to have to be 152 different individual chart slots into about 70, of which at the time of my usual bedtime I like to keep I'd only managed to write about 15 of... I was struggling.
Brain was a fried egg. A scrambled egg. A fried and scrambled egg. That was two days ago and this morning I was still so tired I couldn't even play video games with my friends.
It took almost 3 more hours of groaning out loud and going "Does this make sense. If this happens does it break the game. Do I have time to speed test this. If diamonds are money, hearts are romance and clubs are violence then does it make sense still that spades are like. Secrecy and people almost blowing your spot up. Yes. Yes. No- Yes. Yeah. Fuck. What else can happen to you in the 20s if you're having an affair I've never had an affair.", but somehow basically strapping myself to my screen in that tight time jam, motivated by exhaustion and the desire to finish this before sleep so I could spend the last day of the jam only doing editing and layout, helped me approach the task of writing the massive event chart from every conceivable angle, including especially ones I couldn't have thought of before.
Something else that I learned about game design from making Seven Kisses was that if the game doesn't like the same mechanic you do, it won't accept it. By that I mean there was a mechanic element I became absolutely enamored with while I was still in the beginning of designing the structure of this card game. Already established for Seven kKisses was my chain building mechanic and the desire to incorporate a gambling/fate feeling to the card mechanics.
Chains
A Chain is a series of 2 or more cards that connect to each other. Cards can connect in 4 ways.
- If the card dealt is the same suit as the last card placed before it, the Dealer says “Same Suit” and the cards connect. (Ex. Both cards are diamonds).
- If the card dealt is the same value as the last card placed before it, the Dealer says “Match” and the cards connect. (Ex. Both cards are 6’s).
- If the card dealt is one unit higher than the last card placed before it, the Dealer says “One Up” and the cards connect. (Ex. The first card is a 5 and the next card is a 6. Note: In this game the Royals order is Jack, King, Queen, Ace, so Queen would be One Up from King.)
- If the card dealt is one unit lower than the last card placed before it, the Dealer says “One Down” and the cards connect. (Ex. The first card is a Jack and the next card is a 10).
[Quote from Seven Kisses by Cutestpatoot Games, 2025]
And then I read Adam Bell's first Haunted Walrus newsletter, which I can only emphatically recommend, and it was love at first sight with the concept of a 'backwards hand' of cards. I tried for hours and hours to make it work. Narratively it made perfect sense for my game, an element I described in a comment to him, of the dynamic of when you are in a real mess and you can't even see it, but your friends see it and they're trying to tactfully save you from yourself, while managing to be moderately delicate (something I can't fully relate with in life, I'm about as subtle as a bulldozer and have as much natural tact as a wet fish, but I try).
But the game...just did not want it. In fact, as you'll see in other blog posts, I scrapped more mechanics for this game than for any other game I've ever designed, but it absolutely, in my opinion, made me a better designer and sharpened my intuition for when a mechanic is going to fit or break a game.
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Finally, I've finally answered my own constant question "Should I just start blogging again?" Clearly.
See you next post,
Angel
Cutestpatoot Games
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