Eyes in the Night Postmortem
June 15th, 2024
We've now wrapped up development on our paranormal investigation Pathfinder 2e adventure: Eyes In The Night for the Indie NASA Adventures Game Jam! I wanted to write a little on how I feel about the experience now that it's coming to a close. Hopefully it will be of interest.🌌
How it Started
Eyes started as some self-indulgent "what if" writing I did following the end of the best campaign I've ever played in. I wanted to put to words what I thought my character would do after the curtain fell, both for myself and as a fun treat for my friend and GM who had an equally memorable experience. What started as a way to remain in the headspace of my character for just a bit longer turned into an actual project when I came across a NASA themed TTRPG game jam and decided to enter.
At first I considered writing an adventure for Lancer rather than Pathfinder. Sci-fi tends to make better sense for space-themed adventuring after all, doesn't it? But when I told my friend-GM, TJ, what I was planning, he offered his expertise and collaboration on whatever I decided to work on. It didn't take long to realize I was already sitting on a lot of writing I had been doing in my spare time, the what if I was daydreaming about could be transformed into something others could enjoy instead of sitting in my drafts forever!
Is a two-shot even a good idea?
What the heck is a two-shot?? When we started work on Eyes, we agreed that we wanted a bite-sized adventure, naturally. He's a busy industry game dev, I'm a busy college student, and we both wanted to actually finish no matter what life threw at us. We ended up on the idea of a "two-shot" adventure, something a little more substantial than a traditional 3~4 hour oneshot, but quick enough to complete in 8~12 hours even for slow groups or new GMs. It's sort of like a two-parter arc in your favorite episodic series! ...hopefully there's a demand for that kind of thing, to be honest I didn't do much research on the topic and just settled on something I thought would be fun. I wonder how this adventure length will be received...
Get the first draft out of your head!
The night we began work on Eyes, I experienced something I suspect has changed me forever. The day before our first design meeting I sat in front of my computer and spent 6 hours researching observatory proportions, tinkering with the grid size, agonizing over the room layouts. By the end of this grueling game design gauntlet I had a quarter of an outline of our main map. When I admitted all this to TJ he offered to help out, booted up Inkarnate, and started hammering out this map out of thin air on the spot. I was silently sitting behind him, cringe-panicking as he threw together room outlines in seconds. "No, stop, you have to do it with intention! It'll never be good if you don't slowly measure each and every piece," my pathetic brain whined. But as I watched him work my horror turned to admiration. In less than 30 minutes he had a working outline, in 10 more minutes any issues that had cropped up due to the hasty design was done and dusted.
That's the most important lesson I've learned through all this; you have to get to a first draft quickly. Get your ideas out of your head and onto the page as soon as you can so that you can take a step back and see what looks wrong. When an idea is in your head it's formless and very difficult to judge, trying to perfect your ideas before they're put down is a colossal waste of time! Hit the ground running!
After that, everything else came more natural. Whenever I found myself bogged down or as I call it "tinkering", I make sure to try to rush myself along. Either with a mental note or a timer if I need it. The first draft needs to be done so that I have more time to polish it up!
Duets are beautiful
Before Eyes I had started many projects, but I never finished one. That could be for a million different reasons, but I'm more interested in finding out why I finished this time. And I think the answer is kind of simple. This time I had a partner!
It was so much easier to show up to design meetings when I was beholden to someone other than myself. I felt my desire to work explode, and I could show my work or ideas to someone else and get feedback instantly. When I felt unsure or had was stuck on a problem, TJ usually got me unstuck. Of course I did the same for him when I could, but as a game dev he had more of a wealth of experience to call on than I did. This is sure to vary depending on the group, but in my case, for the same reason we had fun playing Pathfinder together, we were great work partners too. I highly recommend taking the opportunity to collaborate with a friend if you ever get the chance, I think it was just what I needed to see this through to the end. There's plenty more I'd like to say, but it's best I leave that for another time I think.
Now go play Eyes In The Night! Or just read it, i'm not picky! Either way I'd love to know what you think.✨