Designer Commentary: Space Fam (with Claire and Caveat)

Transcript

For 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.

Further Reading

Space Fam on itch

The Disc 2 jam.

A commentary podcast episode for Space Fam is available here.

I wrote about the design of Space Fam's "scenes menu" here​.

I wrote about the design of the Space Fam character sheet here​.

Our Traveling Home by Ash Kreider

Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern by Takuma Okada

Space Post by Jason Morningstar

The Watch

Night Witches by Jason Morningstar

Socials

Sam on Bluesky and itch.

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