2015 72h project (jeSter & Evil Scientist): "Walk Among Us"

[Evil Scientist]

Vic/ approached me to design a 72h RPG together (for the contest) and I agreed, so here we go.

The working title is "Walk Among Us". The game is about time and dimensional travelers from Earth accidentally winding up in a weird city. Or weird strangers ending up in a normal city. It's all relative.

Stay tuned...

[jeSter]

Well, a few hours remain till the 72-hour deadline and the game is just about finished.

The text is done and the rules feel complete now (sans playtesting). We have a nice flavor text and description of the setting full with locations and GM advice, mostly written by Evil Scientist, and rules for character creation, action resolution, advancement and handling of various situations mostly written by me, although both of us contributed throughout the whole document with ideas and pieces of text. We even have basic character sheets and example characters, or rather... strangers.

We've worked on google docs, which helped a lot.

We don't yet have any illustrations...
...or a cover page...

[Evil Scientist]

I really had fun collaborating with jeSter, and it's a pity that I didn't have enough time to contribute on the last day.
Google docs turned out to be very helpful indeed!

The game will soon be available in stores near you. I mean, there will be download links. Here.

[Evil Scientist]

[jeSter]

Collaborating with ES on this project was a fun 3-day experience, and I'm glad for doing it! Thanks, Evil Scientist for agreeing to work on it! The part I liked best was how we built upon each other's ideas, fueling the other's thought process (the basic concept of TWAU was ES's idea). This way the design progressed very smoothly.

[Rob Lang]

Great work guys, I'll give it a read.

I love the idea of working with someone on a game. The give-and-take aspect would be refreshing. Are you guys in the same timezone? How did that work out with such a short deadline?

[jeSter]

We are in neighboring time zones (1 hour difference) which certainly helped. However my job did not allow me to work during most of the day and ES could not devote much time in the last day, so our online times did not overlap that much. Most importantly though, we worked on google docs which helped a great deal. The workflow was as follows:

After an initial chat session on hangouts where we exchanged some ideas until we both had a good grasp on the general concept of the game and the main sections of the document, each of us started working on a section (ES started describing the setting and I started working on the character progression, as our idea of the rules was not clear yet).

Then, we worked separately for a while, and met up again to review each other's work, write some comments (the collaboration features of google docs are great), discuss ideas (when we were both online). Often, when reviewing the other's part a cool idea would pop up and we'd incorporate it into the text. Also, some ideas that seemed cool at first thought but were not that good were weeded out at this point. Afterwards, we'd pick a section again, work independently on it and meet up later to repeat the cycle until everything felt complete.

Overall, I fell that it worked very well. When checking the final document there are some details that should be revised a bit for consistency (I noticed inconsistencies in a couple of the examples) but we didn't have the luxury to do a final review review due to the deadline. However, we managed to include a GM's section, character sheets, NPC sheets and even example characters and NPCs, in addition to the basics.

Naturally, we'd appreciate your feedback!

Edit: typos

[Evil Scientist]

Yeah, we didn't have time for through-out proof-reading,
though (at least, I hope so) I managed to catch all the [insert game title here when we finally agree upon it] tags in the text