Anna's Trove

If you've been following my work for any length of time, you'll probably be aware that I create a lot of stuff. Over the past 4 years I've put out ~25 games and expansions. That averages out to a game every 2 months!

So what am I doing in between releases? Making more games of course!

I did a Patreon post back in 2021 about unfinished games and abandoned projects and I thought it would be interesting to share some of the things I've been tinkering with or planning.

Apocalypse Diaries

Thousand Year Old Vampire meets Post-Apocalypse was the premise I pitched to Tim Hutchings. The idea was to create a solo journalling RPG about being a clunky robot that has survived after humanity wiped itself out. I chose to follow a robot in this game because it explained why players could live so long and fit the losing memories aspect quite nicely.

Using the same D10 - D6 progression through the prompts as TYOV, you would see the wasteland change and recover as you steadily broke apart. Or you would get scavenged in the first ten turns and turned into a jukebox for some Mad Max style survivors, who knows.

I still want to come back to this project and Tim and I have spoken about picking it up again though that was quite a while ago now.

The Witch Market

My plans for an Interactive Fiction game! The Witch Market is a strange otherworldly bazaar full of weird characters like The Fate Trader, The Tooth Fairy, and The Name Giver. You start the game cursed and enslaved to work one of the stalls and have to balance running the stall during the day and exploring the market for a way out at night.

It's inspired by Fallen London and Cultist Simulator with the strange resources that need to be gathered to unlock story opportunities. Still very much in the early planning stages and I've got a bunch of coding to learn before I give it a go. Who knows, I might pivot and make an RPG out of it.

Rad Rex's Amazing Bases

Inspired by Paris Gondo and The Life Saving Magic of Inventorying, Rad Rex's Amazing Bases blends the magic of home makeover shows with Mad Max. Each sessions sees your band of base improvers fighting mutants and raiding secret vaults in order to make the best possible base for your client. Afterwards, we skip forward 6 months and see how they're getting on depending on your score in each of the different Base Qualities. Are they loving their newly converted battleship or have they been eaten by mutated crabs that crawled in through the faux-distressed vintage wooden floorboards?

Chef Saga

I've been wanting to create a whole series of "NPC" games. Apothecaria puts you in the role of the potion seller while Chef Saga puts you in the role of the restraunteur. And I've got ideas for postal workers and priests and so on.

Chef Saga is actually on my list of games to make and I'll be working on it fully next year. It uses a similar system to Apothecaria in that you need to collect Ingredients to create Recipes and have to forage for them in different Locales.

As you play, you'll build up your own Restaurant and Menu, face unexpected guests, and eventually be renowned across the realm.

My intention for it is to be completely vegetarian as I can't get behind the idea of killing animals for cuisine but that doesn't mean there won't be challenges. You'll still have to overcome dangerous situations to gather Ingredients like Climbing Chillis which require you to speed climb cliff faces to catch them and Golem Gardens - surprisingly, predating Delicious in Dungeon by 2 years - which need to be defeated before you can harvest their veggies.

Contain

SCP meets Warehouse 13 in the style of DELVE. In this map drawing game you create your Facility which houses all manner of different artefacts, each one of which you get encouraged to write Reports on. As you experiment with the different artefacts, you'll learn more and more about them until you can eventually neutralize them or find perfect containment.

Unlike DELVE, this game is more about the writing than the drawing though deciding the layout of your Facility is important as rival groups, artefacts that break containment, and rogue agents can cause serious problems!

On top of that, I really want to include a system that lets you have Agents that you send out on retrieval missions which function like short RPG sessions. Much like Chef Saga, this one is in my schedule and will be a joint production with Sleepy Sparrow Games who made Dead Air.

Fury Road Services

Run a service station on the Fury Road (need to come up with a different name obviously). Serve customers from the different gangs, improve your services until you can attract the bosses of each gang then kill them to take bits of their cars to build your War Machine!

This would be a journalling RPG that's intended to be played on scrap paper, toilet roll, backs of cereal boxes, and whatever other junk you can find.

You can hire named mercenaries to go do missions for you but if they die, they're gone and you can end up out of people to call on if you don't play it smart... or get unlucky.

I really like the concept of this one but its a back burner project for the time being.

Are there any of these that you'd really like to play? Who knows, maybe if there's overwhelming support for a shelved project, I might pick it up again!

And if you lot like seeing behind the curtain like this, I'll do another of these posts next month with even more of my junk drawer projects.

Thanks for reading!