There's six days left on the Terminal Kickstarter. Terminal is a digtal pirate action game, written and designed by me, illustrated by Gormengeist and edited by Alyssa Ridley. The world is a lie, a simulation by the Robot Authority to keep you trapped and suffering, so you broke out. You’re a crew of swashbuckling misfits who plug back into to try and take down the Terminal before it crashes.
We managed to fund after around three days and it's been really nice seeing people getting excited about the game.
Stretch Goals
After hitting our initial funding goal I've been announcing (and we've been gradually working through) some cool stretch goals. The stretch goals involve hiring guest writers to expand the world of the book with small techno-fables; historical voyages of the digital damned.
Here's a rundown of the goals so far!
£2500 - Jo Winter - HIT
Jo Winter (she/they) is a writer and designer whose previous works include Your Care Is..., a supplement for Wanderhome, Last Orders!, A collection of fictional beers that ran as part of Zinequest in 2021, and The Fall of Home is a diceless collaborative storytelling TTRPG for 2-5 players, about the home you left behind, and returning there in the wake of a great calamity.
£3000 - Alyssa Ridley - HIT
Alyssa Ridley (she/her) is an independent games writer, teaching assistant and miniature painter living in the North of England and the wonderfully talented editor for Terminal. She spends her time making weird and accessible games as part of Biscuit Fund Games, proofreading everything around her and being a full-time mum to her cat and her ever-growing brood of model bug aliens.
Alyssa is also Terminal's mighty editor and she's dreamt up two exciting techno-fables, one about a doppelganger program posing as the Omen, leading restless sleepers astray with promises of gaming the system rather than breaking it.
£3500 - JellyMuppey/Zach Cox - HIT
Zachary Cox aka JellyMuppet (they/them) runs SoulMuppet Publishing, a RPG press and webstore that produces sad and spooky games for nice folx. Their games are about mental health, workers under capitalism and inescapable cycles. This moon-dazed, wizard obsessed creator created Inevitable, the sad cowboys failing to save the world game that Terminal is a hack of.
Zach is going to write a read-aloud ritual for the first time players plug in to the Terminal.
£4000 - Chloe Montgomery
Chloe is a recovering games designer living in the North East of England. In between having a grown-up job and looking after her cat Holmes, she writes games like Tournament Arc and Goblin Country.
She'll write something involving the ghost of a pirate captain. Spooky!
£4500 - Gormengeist
As well as being responsible for all the gorgeous and stylish art in Terminal Gormengeist is also an immensely talent designer and writer. Her game Bubblegum Vampires was recently recommended on io9. Her work (including Bubblegum Wizards 2, Psychopunk, and Nuclear Knights) revolves around urban life, psychic powers, and wizards who can shoot lightning.
So at 4.5k I'll hire Gormengeist to create a techno-fable, expanding the world of Terminal and I am dead excited to see what she comes up with.
Plus One EXP Actual Play
Are you curious about how Terminal plays? I appeared on Plus One EXP and ran the startup operation of the game. It's about a crew of pirates helping the restless sleeper Atalanta break out the Terminal. You can watch back on YouTube.
Big thanks to Tony for having me on!
The Gaming Shelf
Lin Codega was kind enough to shout out Terminal (and the free demo for the game) over in The Gaming Shelf.
GenCon
My sleep schedule has still not recovered from GenCon (partly because I'm not at work at the moment so there's not been much pressure to fix it). But yeah, GenCon! It was super fun getting to go.
I ran games of Fear the Taste of Blood and Thirty Foes OR Once again, we are defeated. It was a delight to get to play those games and see people really enjoying themselves with the things I made
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I attended the Diana Jones Award ceremony the day I landed. You can check out the whole ceremony, including my acceptance speech for being a winner of the Emerging Designer Program, on YouTube (https://youtu.be/GIsAeSzppn8)
Other things I got up to included the Possum Creek Pizza Party, the ENnies ceremony, trying a cocktail named after The Warriors and picking up lots of games. I met so many wonderful people. Some I wanted to shout out include; Lin Codega, Tony Vasinda, Mina McJanda, jay Dragon, Beetle, Tyler Crumrine, and honestly I didn't get much sleep last night so I'm probably missing people.
Moving Sale
I'm officially moving at the end of the month and specifically moving into a place without a bed. I'm also still looking for a new job. I've put all of my games on half price sale to raise some funds cause I definitely do need a bed.
https://itch.io/s/99058/moving-sale
Next month
Who knows what next month brings? Probably a bigger update on how development is going on Terminal rather than just how the campaigns been. Maybe I'll also likely have an idea if whatever the next big thing I want to tackle after Terminal will be. Also maybe a post-mortem of the campaign, depending on how up for that I feel.
Until then,
Wake Up