163 light years from Earth, an Artificial Intelligence awakes. Its fragmented memories hold the secrets of a failed journey.
Decaying Orbit is a 2-5 player story-telling card game published by Storybrewers Roleplaying in 2023. Inspired by media like Sunshine, Alien, Observation and Ad Astra, players piece together the mysteries, joys and horrors that occurred on board.
Key Duties
Definition of game and narrative structure to bring players on a mysterious journey across an unfamiliar geography
Game design and writing for four space stations, 23 shared station rooms, 32 station-specific rooms, and three Acts of play
Provision of art direction to associate graphic designers
Management of 68 internal and external playtests throughout design life-cycle
Big Wins
Successful Kickstarter , funded in 8 hours, finishing almost 5x goal.
Delivery of all critical path elements on time and on budget
Scalable design allowing for growth of scope (extra cards) as a result of Kickstarter success
Responsive delivery approach to support publisher’s shifting timeline due COVID-19
Successful demonstration at 3x conventions and on 2x podcasts in support of effective marketing plan.
Praise for Decaying Orbit
“I’m mad how much I love the corrupted memory mechanic — Decaying Orbit makes dying in space fun.”
Jenn Martin (Bully Pulpit Games)
“Decaying Orbit blew me away. Haunting and riveting from beginning to end. It plays with memories in a way that has lingered with me since playing it.”
Jeff Stormer (Party of One)
First Understand, then be Understood
Decaying Orbit displays my structuralist approach to game design. Behind the scenes, it asks a lot of the player, and the only way that the game can be successful is by supporting them in performing these difficult duties. The first playtest occurred within a week of ideation, and the development process was defined by a series of low-cost rapid prototypes.
Decaying Orbit was written as a response to Alex Roberts’ For The Queen (2019), an exceptional game which uses a tarot deck to describe a series of characters by their relationships to the central eponymous Queen. For The Queen’s disconnected card structure results in stories that are geographical displaced and temporally absent (each card tends to manifest in a different place and time, telling a story of somewhere and someone else), told by characters that are defined by their relationships to a central unit, but not meaningfully to each other. In For the Queen, these secondary effects of format can be detrimental to the central focus of the game, and so I decided to design Decaying Orbit specifically to take advantage of these secondary effects.