Hi everyone! Just wanted to let you know that a game I designed is launching on Kickstarter as we speak!

Sefirot is a board game that uses gorgeous tarot cards. It’s about reaching enlightenment and self-knowledge. It’s from the same world as the tabletop RPG I made, The Hidden Isle. Each game also generates its own Tarot reading! How esoteric!

You can play solo, cooperatively or competitively, or – and this is the bit I’m most excited about – there’s also a solo “adventure mode” where you go on a journey through a dream landscape, meeting and overcoming characters inspired by tarot figures. We’re calling it a “Taroguelike”.

To be clear, this isn’t my own personal project: I was hired by Causa Creations (another Viennese studio I’m good friends with) to come up with some new rules. If you back the Kickstarter I won’t get any of that money. But I still think it’s a very cool project and I’d love for more people to play these rules I devised!

My contribution was:

• The original rules felt a bit static and needed an update, so I devised a more intuitive ruleset and added some extra mechanics to help things flow a bit better. The co-op mode is co-oppier, the competitive mode more competitive, the solo mode more meditative.
• I also devised this new Adventure Mode, because I have loved Tarot-based narrative ever since I read The Castle of Crossed Destinies when I was 16, and I really wanted to create a solo adventure that used the cards as an anchor for your imagination and took you on an otherworldly journey. I hope I’ve succeeded!
• Creating more detailed tools for divination and Tarot reading. (I’m still working on these but I’m making good progress.)
• Creating rules for integration with The Hidden Isle. Both games are from the same world, so it seems logical they can interact!

So, the Kickstarter is running for a few more weeks, but if you back early then you get a free altarcloth! Neat! You can also grab our Tarot decks; if you back at a certain tier you can even snag one of the few remaining gold-foiled decks, which are just *chef’s kiss*

By the way, we’re still looking for feedback on the new rules. If you want to give them a spin, head to the Causa Creations Discord and post in the “silver-seals-testing” channel.

But Jamie, aren’t you meant to be making digital games?

Ok, so I really want to talk about my current project, but I can’t announce it yet for PR reasons. Here’s what I can tell you:

• It’s a digital narrative game
• Set in a dark steampunk world
• About exploring a city on the brink, and sparking a revolution

If you’d like to learn more, here’s a sneaky link! And here are some screenshots:

The post I made a tarot board game – and a sneak peek of my next video game! first appeared on Clockwork Bird.

If you need a reminder, the game uses beautiful Tarot cards instead of dice, is set in the Renaissance and is about fighting tyranny and injustice.

There’s also a flexible magic system, and your character’s spiritual growth is tightly intertwined with moment-to-moment play and the Tarot deck itself.

So, if that sounds up your street, you can find more on the Kickstarter page!

The post Only 48 hours left to back The Hidden Isle, our Tarot-based RPG! first appeared on Clockwork Bird.

Here’s a quick summary:

The Hidden Isle is a pen and paper RPG that uses Tarot cards instead of dice, set in the 16th century on the secretive island of Dioscoria. It focuses on roleplaying and collaborative storytelling.

This is a game about swashbuckling adventures across Europe and the Middle East, stealing forbidden texts from oppressive regimes, protecting an island of outcasts using ancient magic,and toppling empires with just the right speech at just the right time.

This game’s dear to my heart for several reasons. Firstly, the way we use Tarot cards is really unique: they’re used for everything from skill checks, to character inspiration, to scenario generation, to thematic visions and buffs during regular play. It’s been so much fun figuring out how to make a functioning game that is also deeply inspired by the spiritual and esoteric side of the Tarot, and I think we’ve accomplished it!

Secondly, it’s set in the sixteenth century, an amazing and terrifying era. This was the age of gunpowder, the first stirrings of colonialism, the peak of the Ottoman Empire, an age of unprecedented religious tensions… It was the century of Elizabeth I and Suleiman the Lawgiver and a bunch of Renaissance artists whose work still graces countless museums and Shakespeare. Diving back into that world was a huge treat.

Thirdly, this game was a labour of love for both me and Danny, and while we’re no longer working together, it remains a huge testament to our friendship, our collaborative style, our values and inspirations as game designers, and to what it meant to work together in the first place. We met because of storygames, and the last project we did together was also a storygame. I guess the Wheel of Fortune really does turn full circle.

So, if you’d like a chance to step into this mysterious, esoteric world with us, go ahead and back the project on Kickstarter. We’re extremely pleased to be working with Causa Creations – who are putting this whole thing together – and Eliot Baum and Viv Tanner, whose gorgeous, elegant art is plastered all over this post. This team really is the best, and I have total confidence that they can pull off this massive crowdfunding effort. After all, they’ve done it before!

I’ll try not to spam you all during the campaign, but I will put out one final blast 48 hours before the campaign closes, in case anyone needs a reminder. Until then: Agents of Dioscoria, remain open-hearted!

The post The Hidden Isle, our Tarot pen and paper game, is live on Kickstarter! first appeared on Clockwork Bird.

I’m afraid I have some disappointing news to share with you. To rip the band-aid off quickly, I’ll get right to it: Danny, the other founder of Clockwork Bird, has had to leave the studio. 

Why?

The reason is simple: Clockwork Bird has always struggled to make ends meet, and we finally ran out of money. To be honest, we’ve squeaked through a number of crunch-points similar to this. Before Silicon  Dreams was finished we almost ran out of capital twice, and were saved by coronavirus grants from our local government and by some project-changing prizemoney and feedback from Game Dev Days Graz. After Silicon Dreams launched, we would have been totally sunk if I hadn’t already been offered freelance work writing for Star Dynasties. And at the start of 2023 we were on the brink of financial ruin once again, and were saved by an out-of-the-blue offer to design and write The Hidden Isle, our beloved tabletop RPG project.

But this time our luck seems to fully run out: despite looking for contract work to keep us afloat, we couldn’t find anything this time around within the timeframe we needed. It seems like there’s not many large narrative gigs out there, or if there are, we couldn’t find them.

This is a pretty upsetting place to be, since Danny and I are best friends and we really enjoy working together. But it is what it is, and we both agree that it’s probably for the best. When we founded Clockwork Bird, we defied established gamedev wisdom: we were taking a narrative/writing/game design expert who can also code (me), and pairing him with a narrative/writing/game design expert (Danny). There’s no doubt that combination led to some excellent writing, narrative and game design (see Silicon Dreams, and see The Hidden Isle when it launches!), but in gamedev you’re normally told to shore up our weaknesses – in my case, mostly art – and only dig into our strengths when that’s been taken care of. We ignored that wisdom, and while it was a blast, it was not, in hindsight, the most sensible way to grow my business. I’m still glad we tried.

What next?

Well, Danny is looking for other gamedev jobs in our area so we’ll see what comes of that. I’ll post about any cool projects that he’s a part of, so you can keep following his progress.

In the meantime, the studio’s coffers are not completely empty, so I’m going to use what’s left to create a small narrative game that plays to my strengths. If I only need to pay myself, rather than two people, then this new game only has to sell modestly to keep me going. So you haven’t seen the last of Clockwork Bird, but it will be a one-person operation from now on. You will still be able to follow my progress by staying subscribed to this newsletter. Perhaps one day, when I am rolling in millions, I will be able to bankroll working with Danny again – we’ll just have to see what the future brings.

So, that’s it for now! Sorry I don’t come with happier news. Hopefully my next update will be much more upbeat!

The post The Clockwork Bird duo are going separate ways first appeared on Clockwork Bird.

If you’ve forgotten who we are, we’re Clockwork Bird: a two-person indie game studio that made Silicon Dreams, that android interrogation sim from a few years back.

Sorry we’ve been so quiet the last few years! We’ve been working behind the scenes on a few projects but haven’t been able to share anything with you… until now! It’s time to finally reveal what we’ve been working on for what seems like forever.

Embark on a Tarot adventure! Wield magic and fight tyranny across the Renaissance world in this tabletop RPG powered by card divination. Coming to Kickstarter in the fall of 2023. 

If you’re immediately stoked, you can sign up to be notified when it launches here.

A tabletop RPG? Don’t you do video games?

Yes, but we also love pen and paper games and were thrilled when we were approached to design one. We’ve used the game design insights we learned making digital games to make this the best tabletop RPG we could! Danny’s first game projects were pen and paper games, and we both use Tarot for spiritual practice, so we’re coincidentally an excellent fit.

I’m rapidly skimming this email! Can you explain what this is in exactly 96 words?

Sure! The Hidden Isle is a pen and paper RPG that uses Tarot cards instead of dice, set on an awesome island of free thinkers and magic-users in the 16th century. We unlock the full inspirational potential of the Tarot by using the cards for inspiration, character and scenario generation, and to suggest big changes to the world.

It’s focused on collaborative storytelling, not mechanical crunch. So, the game mechanics are pretty flexible, players can intervene in the story by giving their characters visions of the future, and character growth has its own integrated, Tarot-based mechanics.

But what can I do in it?

Duel janissaries! Steal from the Vatican archives! Start a hit song in Renaissance London! Consort with demons, angels and jinni! Make friends and influence people – with magic! Whisk an occult scholar to safety in the dead of night under the nose of the Portuguese Inquisition! Turn a man into a pig!

Wait, a TTRPG with no dice??

None! None at all! It’s all cards! We love cards! They’re beautiful!

And you know what we do with those cards? We generate character backstories, we do scenario divination, we give the players visions of the future! 

What was that about scenario divination?

You can generate scenarios entirely from scratch just using the cards and some handy guides we made. Which means GMs can turn up having done exactly zero minutes of prep and everyone can still have a great session with an unexpected, creative mission!

Do I need to know Tarot to make it work?

No! If you’re familiar with Tarot then that’ll help, obviously, but we’ve made a bunch of helpful tables and materials to help you feel like a full-on oracle even if you’ve never seen a Tarot card in your life.

You can use any Tarot deck, but we recommend the Sefirot deck. The game was designed with this deck in mind, since it was created by the same people who are doing this project. Also just look at it omg this thing is gorgeous

Does this have some cool classes to play as?

You betcha! Right now you can play as an Occultist, Illusionist, Hunter or Champion. In the full game there’ll be a Prowler and Scoundrel too, for the sneakier among you. We also have other characters planned for stretch goals.

Who is making this thing?

Clockwork Bird (that’s us, Danny and Jamie) are doing the game, narrative design and writing. Viv Tanner and Eliot Baum are doing the art, and it is fantastic. And the whole project was started, and is being run by, Causa  Creations, another Viennese game studio who happen to be friends of ours.

This sounds awesome, can I play it right now?

You can! Causa Creations are giving out free playtest kits, and honestly, we want to know how you can break the game. So if this sounds fun and you think your friends might have a blast, go to the project Discord and request a playtest kit, or send them an email at [email protected].

So when can I get the full version?

The Hidden Isle is coming to Kickstarter in Fall 2023 for the full release! That includes:

• Six character classes
• Five historical cities to play in
• A description of Dioscoria lovingly written by the fictional explorer Beatrice of Grantabruge
• A magic system inspired by historical magical practices
• Tarot tables to help you divine, improv and roleplay like a pro
• Tips and tricks for game masters

If you want to be notified when the Kickstarter launches, go sign up here. 

We’re also putting together some stretch goals, so this list may well expand!

Can we do anything to support you?

Please sign up for the campaign and share the good news!

Phew, that’s it! We’ll make another post when the campaign goes live, but we won’t clutter your inboxes with any unnecessary notifications. 

We’re really excited to finally tell you about this! We’ve lived, breathed and conjured the 16th century for most of 2023, and it’s a joy to share it with you. We honestly think this is a fantastic roleplaying system: it’s story- and character-focused, it uses beautiful Tarot cards, its magic is way more interesting than “shoot a fireball”, its world is literally the world of the 16th century and is therefore as rich and deep as you want it to be, and it has so many cool mechanics and rules that squeeze as much story-juice out of every session as it possibly can. And if you’re a GM, you don’t even have to prep anything!! We’ve had positive, enthusiastic feedback from veteran TTRPG players as well as total novices, so it seems like our design is doing a dang good job!

Anyway, thanks for listening, and it’s good to be back! This is Clockwork Bird, signing off.

The post New Kickstarter incoming: a Tarot-based TTRPG powered by card divination first appeared on Clockwork Bird.

Hey cyberpunks, it’s finally here: the free Silicon Dreams content update “Fatality & Fame” is out now! You can grab it via Steam or itch.io at a 20% discount!

We’ve talked a lot about how we think this game is ripe with stories to be harvested, in this update we’re pleased to introduce you to two of them, written in collaboration with Matthew Goodwin. Every good cyberpunk detective story needs a cyberpunk murder, right?

Meet JH-422, the first known android murderer. It killed a government official in broad daylight, this should be an open-and-shut case. The second addition is RL-404 (aka “Raleigh”, aka “Error-404”), a holo-streamer and stunt performer. Her owner has been up to some shady dealings and she has information that you need. Collaborate with your colleague to protect Kronos’ name.

Also coming in this update is the narrative flowchart. This will display after each interrogation showing the crucial information from the interrogation and revealing subjects who may still be keeping secrets. Use it to guide replays or just to reflect on crucial points as you prepare for your next interrogation.

As always, thank you so much for your support! We’ve seen a lot of really great feedback, comments, and reviews from our players and it warms our cybernetic hearts <3

If you haven’t already, we hope you’ll try the demo out and buy the game if you like what you see!

The post Fatality & Fame is out now!!! first appeared on Clockwork Bird.

Hello again, cyberpunks! 

Time is flying by but we wanted to take just a few minutes to share some exciting news with you! The Fatality & Fame update is coming very soon to Silicon Dreams and will be released as a free update to the base game! Keep reading below to see everything that will be included.

New characters!

We’ve created two entirely new characters that will be added to the interrogation roster, written in collaboration with bestselling cyberpunk author, Matthew Goodwin. 

JH-422

• Geriatric Care Unit
• Accused of murder

RL-404

• Internet personality
• Performs “stunts” on stream
• Called to aid the investigation of its owner

Narrative map

After each interrogation you’ll be shown this “narrative flowchart”. The narrative map will show you which crucial pieces of information you discovered during the interrogation, and which secrets remain to be seen. You can also check it from the main menu, and you’ll be able to see which information you discovered this time, and all the information you have ever seen while playing, helping you keep track of what content you haven’t found yet.

As mentioned in our previous post, before launch our heads were filled with so many ideas about the new characters and stories we could add to Silicon Dreams. As it currently stands, without a massive (and likely impossibly large) increase in sales, Fatality & Fame will be the final content update released for Silicon Dreams.

We’re really excited to get these characters into your hands and think they do a great job of presenting some uniquely challenging interrogations. We’re targeting the second week of October to release this update, so keep your eyes peeled for the launch announcement!

While you’re waiting, why not check out Cyberpunk Day coming up on October 10th! Check out the incredible line up of authors, game developers, and more! Danny will be streaming the new characters, so check the event schedule and mark the date on your calendar to get a sneak peek!

The post Fatality & Fame first appeared on Clockwork Bird.

Danny and Jamie here to tell you what this Clockwork Bird’s been up to since we released Silicon Dreams. The short version is: critics loved it, it sold ok but not great, and we’re planning a free update with new content in the next few weeks! (More info on that to come in just a few days!)

For now, let’s look back at the past few months and share what’s been happening.

Part I: Development

Originally SD was supposed to be a six-month project. That estimate had tripled by the time the game was released. Why?

It was the first time either of us had worked on a commercial project with a team: Jamie had only worked solo, and Danny’s only experience was with small student projects and “The Embers of the Stars”, which was an in-your-spare-time kinda thing. (play it here!)

Commercial game development is a crazy incomprehensible beast with so many moving parts.. So that was a part of the problem, but also:

• We thought (foolishly!) that we could scrape by on bad visuals if the story was really good (this is not true at all :/ )
• The pandemic threw everything for a loop
• Through dumb luck, we kept getting more funding. At each point, it made most sense to push the game further rather than cut our losses and start something new

What was originally a six-month scope turned into a 15-month scope as we made mistakes, realised how to fix them, and fortuitously got the funding to sort it out. This was bad/inexperienced organisation on our part, and we wouldn’t have planned it that way, but we’re hoping we can take the lessons learned and make sure this never happens with a future project.

Part II: Release

Press coverage and steam user reviews were pretty outstanding! We want to give ourselves a pat on the back and share some of our favorites with you:

PC Gamer said it’s “An extremely intelligent sci-fi interrogation sim that’s unpredictable for all the right reasons. … the writing is incredible.”.

John Walker (writing on his personal blog Buried Treasure, then later on Kotaku) said “a STUNNING android interrogation simulation, the Blade Runner game you’ve always wanted to exist. … The credits rolled, and damn, it was perfect. … This one’s a must.”.

DreadXP said “The writing is phenomenal … a multi-layered masterpiece.”

And yet, we’re still only approaching the 2.6k sales mark with almost 15k wishlists. These numbers are not terrible for a tiny indie game, but they do not equate with financial success. (We need to sell about 7k units just to break even.)

Why are sales so low?

We’ll be the first to admit it: SD is a niche game. Both of us are self-described oddballs. We firmly believe there should be more space for oddball games. There is so much uncharted territory to make players feel all sorts of things. For example, in Silicon Dreams, a big part of the experience was allowing players to feel uncertain, cheated, unable to predict what will happen next. General game-design principles would say this is a bad idea – but why? Why are confusion and discomfort emotions that are banished from games? There should, we think, be experimental games that put players in unexpected, perhaps uncomfortable situations.

But, experimental means fewer people are going to click “Buy” on Steam. We think a lot of people came to the store page, realised it was kind of weird and weren’t sure that they’d enjoy it, and clicked away again. That’s ok – I’ve been that person too! But it had an impact on our sales, obviously.

We struggled to show off why the game is great

We’re not marketing people, and over the course of development we learned a lot about how to, and how not to, communicate the core of a game to potential players. 

We made a game that’s rich, complex and subtle, but requires attention. You’ve got to sit down and get to know the characters over the course of half an hour to see what’s special about it.. There’s barely any movement, no flashy action sequences, no breathtaking landscapes.

The mood is a key part of the game’s appeal, then – and visual presentation could have better sold that mood. We didn’t lock in the final visuals until 2 months before release, because we thought they were fine. They were not fine. A player should be able to look at your game and in a few seconds know what kind of thing they’re looking at. Our visuals just didn’t convey “cyberpunk android interrogation sim” until the eleventh hour. A compelling story won’t carry your visuals if the player never reaches the story because the visuals didn’t communicate what the story had to offer.

Part III: The Future

We always hoped the game would sell enough to justify all of the other stories we had planned to include as DLC or post-launch updates. We had new characters and storylines planned, including entirely different campaigns where you’d play as a different interrogator. We even hoped to add modding tool support to allow players to add their own stories. 

But the sad fact is, without a huge increase in sales, it’s just not possible to justify the expense. Given the sales numbers, it’s very unlikely that we’d ever break even if we spent our time adding that DLC to the game. (Though, as a fun side note: most of the character files are just stored as .json files inside the game folder ready for mod support that’ll never come. So you can just edit those files and it’ll basically mod the game. You could theoretically add 99% of a new character this way, although it would be pretty cumbersome to write.)

So what’s next? We’ve taken a lot of time to analyze what went right and wrong during SD dev so we can start the next project on the right foot. We have lots of ideas and are super eager to get to the next game, but before that, we have one final update in store for Silicon Dreams! Keep your eyes peeled for the next blog post discussing this new update sometime next week!

Closing Thoughts

To those of you who already own it, thank you so much for your support! If you haven’t already, a Steam review offering your thoughts on the game would be really helpful for us. To those of you still waiting, there’s a free demo! Give it a chance, we’re pretty sure you like what you see ^^

The post Silicon Dreams: A Micro-Postmortem first appeared on Clockwork Bird.

Here’s the lowdown:

• Rewind isn’t available until you’ve finished at least one playthrough. (Dying counts!) A lot of players said their first playthrough was really tense, and we worried that introducing rewind might take that away from them.
• Once it’s unlocked, though, you can choose a save slot and rewind that game to any scene you played through. Then you can continue playing from that point forward.
• It should be handy if, for example, you finished the game but want to figure out what other endings were possible, without having to replay the first 70% of the game!
• It’s also useful if you want to start a new game without going through the first few scenes, which might not be so interesting for you.

A word of warning, though: rewind will only work for scenes that you played after 9.6.2021! Until that point we didn’t have a system in place to save the scene bookmarks that the rewind feature relies on. But any scenes you played after 9.6.2021 can still be rewound to, even if there are earlier scenes in that run that the rewind feature can’t get to.

The new feature is available on Steam or Itch now. Happy winding!

The post New feature: Rewind! first appeared on Clockwork Bird.

If you missed it in all the excitement, you can grab the game from Steam, or it’s also available from itch.

When press have played it, they’ve reacted somewhere between “The writing is great but it’s quite rough around the edges” to “it’s a multi-layered masterpiece”, which is wonderful! Sadly the larger press outlets haven’t taken much interest, although we’re very grateful that PC Gamer included it in their weekly “5 Steam Games you might have Missed” roundup.

We were also fortunate enough to be positively reviewed by the legendary (can you say that about someone still alive?) John Walker, over on his hidden-gems-discovery-site Buried Treasure. We were gobsmacked by lines like “the credits rolled, and damn, it was perfect.”, “this is the most extraordinary narrative juggling act” and “this one’s a must.” We are very, very happy that people are connecting with the game and seeing that it’s special, despite its flaws.

The sad reality is, however, that we’re a tiny studio releasing our first game, and getting any sort of attention (especially on Steam, doubly so for an indie narrative game) is a tall order. Despite this attention the game is still nowhere near selling well enough to ensure long-term studio survival, which we think is a shame! We’d like to keep making quirky, unusual games that really connect with people, but without more sales that’s going to be extremely tricky.

If you’d like to help us out, the number one absolute best way is to leave a Steam review. This will show the almighty, inscrutable Steam algorithm that people care and that it’s worth showing to others! Right now we have 34 Steam reviews (not bad!) and every single one is positive (not bad at all!), but our Steam rating is sitting at merely “Positive” when it could be “Overwhelmingly positive”. We need more reviews to get there – Steam holds off judgment until a certain number are in, we don’t know how many – so if you’d like to help out and have enjoyed the game, a positive review would go a long way!

And if you haven’t played it yet, what are you waiting for? There’s a free demo! You’ve got nothing to lose!

This bird still has wings, but the skies are stormy…

Creating this game was a lot of hard work, but we’re so proud it’s finished, and it’s connecting with people! We’re excited to keep adding to the experience by making updates to improve functionality and address the bugs that you lovelies have found. [Jamie: Arh! Yes! I’m working on that!] We’re also really keen to add more characters to the game, but sadly that largely depends on whether we can afford to or not. If there’s enough interest in the game long-term, we want to get back to writing and expand on the world of Silicon Dreams by releasing DLC featuring more storylines – but right now, given the tough launch week, that looks unlikely.

We’re so proud and happy we made this game, and wouldn’t change it for the world – but it looks like the market for niche narrative games is even smaller than we thought! 

The post Silicon Dreams: a hidden gem! (Too hidden for our liking) first appeared on Clockwork Bird.