One of the first posts I ever made on this blog, which I wrote largely to try out the Substack post editor, was this one about the “scenes menu” in Space Fam, my recently released Firebrands / Our Traveling Home hack about being the crew of a space ship and processing your trauma together. In it I walked through the design of probably the most important page in the game: the list of scenes you can pick to frame when it’s your turn, which you return to again and again throughout play. Between that post and now, I landed somewhere pretty different from what the post was looking towards, so I figured I’d finish off the story in this update.
Podcast Transcript: Designer Commentary: Space Fam
TranscriptCommentFor Ken Lowery’s Disc 2 jam, I decided to finally release the game I’ve been working on for nearly four years: Space Fam.
This is a game about, you guessed it, found family in space. In particular, it takes a lot of inspiration from The Long Way To A Small Angry Planet in that you’re the crew of a ship escorting a traveler from point A to point B, and along the way you deal with your feelings of guilt and stress about living under an oppressive government.
It’s a hack of Our Traveling Home by Ash Kreider, and it’s like 90% of the way to really great. But that last 10% is always the hard 10%, and I decided it was time to let this game just be what it is and push it out into the world.
As a part of that, I wanted to look back on the design process. What went well, what didn’t, what would I change if I was going to spend another 30 minutes or 30 years on this thing. To do that, I sat down with two of my friends who playtested the game, and we talked about all things Space Fam.