TTRPGkids Dev Log #4: EDU Guide, Player Safety, Idea Voting, and more!
Check out the latest on the TTRPGkids works in progress to stay up to date on upcoming releases! This Dev Log will mostly cover work on A Construct’s Nature since it is coming on fulfillment time, and it will also cover general status on other projects like StoryGuider and Greeting Games!
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A Construct’s Nature
I’ve mostly been working on fulfilling A Construct’s Nature (and associated stretch goals and add-ons), and it is still on track! With the list of remaining items getting smaller and smaller, it starting to feel more manageable as time goes on, and I am REALLY excited to fulfill this soon.
Since last week’s update, I have finished the following!
- Touched up the alt text reading order for the main game
- Written the EDU guide
- Created a trigger warnings/player safety guide
- Finalized all the individual shipping costs and sent them to the Backerkit team for upload
- Set the date for shipping charges
EDU Guide
While A Construct’s Nature is primarily meant to be played for fun, it can also be used in educational settings and was intentionally built to scaffold (gradually progress understanding) of the mechanics, journaling concepts, social-emotional skills, and more both for providing a good player experience AND for being easily usable in schools. One of the main drivers behind the slides was also to improve accessibility for those who work better through having a clickable medium to work with, those who benefit from having a narrator, and for large groups (like classroom settings) that need to show the material to several people at the same time.
The guide is meant to be A LOT more than just “this can help with the following skills” – it talks about how to use it for different learners, goes over safety tools that work for large groups of young players, has assessment questions in various formats, discusses how to integrate into lesson plans with examples, and quite a bit more. Here’s the table of contents, and if you are an educator/facilitor or know someone who could benefit from this and would like to discuss, 100% please send them my way (contact page is here).
Player Safety
I’ve also made a seperate player safety document that covers triggers in particular chapters so folks can review ahead of time or so facilitators can make sure the game will work for their group’s needs.
I made A Construct’s Nature to be all-ages friendly, but I know that within that, there can still be elements that are triggering to people. There’s perilous situations that the character may find themselves in, and there’s a whole chapter that takes place underground (which really can bother some people), so I wanted to still create this document even though it would fall under a G to PG rating as a TV show.
I’m not posting pictures of the contents for this one because it does contain some bigger spoilers for the story, but know that it is there, so people can review, if they wish, before playing. It will be a separate digital file so that it’s also easy to not get spoiled by accidentally opening the physical book or the core digital document to the triggers list page.
Next Steps for ACN
Still open on the list for ACN are the following:
- Get final sound files for slideshow from VA/editor
- Add sound files to slideshow
- Complete stretch goal EDU games
- Charge for shipping (will be between 5/28 – 5/30)
- Start shipping physical copies (as soon as charges complete)
- Distribute digital copies (as soon as all digital goals met)
- Set game live on DTRPG, itchio, and IPR (after all backer rewards kicked off)
Greeting Games
Greeting Games
The Greeting Games campaign is still on the back burner for now, but as soon as ACN is fulfilled, this is the next priority for work, and I’ll be kicking off artists in June. In the meantime though, voting is taking place to choose which idea from the Redwyrmling will make it to the printed card! The week 1 poll ends today and the week 2 poll just went live. You can find both on the Greeting Games community page here, and, if you missed the campaign but want to get notified for making late orders, follow the TTRPGkids Backerkit account and/or the TTRPGkids newsletter to stay updated.
StoryGuider
My late summer project is StoryGuider, which is a collection of 36 choose-your-path style adventures for little kids! This past week, I played one of my favorite adventures from this with a group of kids at Motor City Comic Con (MC3), and it was a BLAST. At one point, there were like 3 kids falling off their beanbag chairs laughing at the “Loch Yes Monster” kind of evil-genie-ing everything they wanted by saying “yes” and technically fulfilling their request, and it felt pretty amazing to see that. I’m really geeked to be getting this out to more folks soon so they can experience that as well.
Right now, this one is solidly in pre-launch, so follow along on Backerkit to get ready for when we make the game… and you can find the pre-funding campaign here on itchio to get a nice bundle of TTRPGkids games on sale and support the project ahead of time.
As a note, if you’re only interested in the digital version of StoryGuider, this is your best bet cost-wise. You’ll have the download key for the digital version of StoryGuider, which will get all updated content from the crowdfunding campaign, provided funding is reached.
Other TTRPGkids Projects
As if all that is not enough, I’m still working on everything with the blog AND it is convention season. I have something like 9 events at Origins Game Fair that I’m getting ready for and am gearing up for 2 panels at GenCon (and press coverage!! I got a press pass!!). If you’ll be at Origins or GenCon and want to chat, let me know! Also, you can check out my Origins event line up here if you’d like to swing by a talk and chat after (provided I’m not running straight to the next talk). I’m looking forward to seeing some of you this summer!
Thank you for checking out this update, and I hope this overview of my work is either a good resource for your own project planning or that it’s a nice “keep-up-to-date” spot for what’s going on with TTRPGkids! And, if you have any feedback about how the dev log is set up, please let me know – I’m new to doing this, so I know it’s going to be a bit of a learning process to fine tune it to what I want to share and what people are looking for, and I appreciate the advice.
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