Hi!
I’ve mentioned this in a couple other places before now, but this semester I’ve been taking an intro game design class that I got unusually super invested in after I started work on the final project: create a single player print-and-play game from scratch. I could already tell I was going to be interested in this at the stage where I had to churn out 50 super rough ideas to pick from when I realized I was already having trouble trying to narrow them down to 10 finalists, even before starting work on the actual chosen one. Some of those other games I may do something with or I may not, I haven’t decided yet.
Rocket Journey 9000 is a board game very loosely inspired by the games Galaxy Trucker and FTL: Faster Than Light. Of course, I freely admit it has none of the things that make either of those games interesting. Combat is extremely basic (and probably unbalanced tbh), and you can’t build your own ship. In fact, let’s not mince words; RJ9K is a very simple game that you probably aren’t going to be replaying much after you beat it the first time, if at all. I didn’t even feel ready to “publish” the game because I wanted to keep making improvements, but I realized that adding in the kinds of changes I wanted to incorporate (like making the game actually feel like a Galaxy Trucker/FTL hybrid) would involve completely overhauling the game and essentially restarting all over again. So after hearing my professor’s lecture on what it really means to “publish” a game and why it’s super important to actually reach the finish line and why so many people stop before then, I put aside those feelings and put the game on itch.io for a university-wide playtest event that happened today. Most stream time was spent on the graduate and undergraduate capstone projects, but I did get a little bit of time for my professor to pitch my game and now it’s officially out there.
Am I proud of the game? I guess it’s alright, there’s obviously room for improvement since I’ve still got a mountain of internal feedback to process. But the important thing is that I finished, which means the game exists. Therefore, RJ9K is objectively better than all of the super great game ideas people like us build on privately and never actually finish. So take that :P
I may make a new game based on what I wanted RJ9K to be, but that’ll be a separate project. I might also try creating one of the other games I made pitches for that I was interested in but had to put aside for RJ9K. What I end up doing will depend on what I end up doing next semester, which I genuinely don’t know yet. This semester completely destroyed my mental health and idk if I can take another one under these circumstances, but there are also some things I want to do that I don’t think I can do if I put things on hold for a whole semester.
Anyway, enough rambling. Go here to get the game if you’re interested. If you’ve got feedback I’ll listen but there’s a good chance I’ll end up ignoring it in favor of my own notes unless you’re onto something I think is really really cool. Again, this version I’m willing to call “complete”, for better or for worse, and I need to move on in some capacity.
Thank you for reading a wall of text written by someone who thinks rotmg sucks and can’t let go for some reason, on a topic entirely unrelated to rotmg on every imaginable level.
i can always appreciate some hard nerdy work