Oppian Wives

Devlog

• Draft 0.1 is Ready for Playtest!
  February 12, 2025 by Smoggy AU

  Hooray! Better late than never - I've attached the first draft (ready for playtest) of Oppian Wives to the main game page. I've now got a couple of cycles of playtest and revision ahead of me. Any com... Continue reading
• The Final (Writing) Push
  January 29, 2025 by Smoggy AU

  So I gave myself a week to write this up (that was two weeks ago), I’d been making heaps of notes and stuff and building PPT slides and capturing ideas as I went through my development process, so I... Continue reading
• Procedural (Action) Scenes
  January 13, 2025 by Smoggy AU

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  I got really hung up on procedural scenes the first few times through Hillfolk, as they don’t seem connected to the rest of the game at all. It’s like this whole completely different and disconnec... Continue reading

  
• GM or GM-Less?
  January 06, 2025 by Smoggy AU

  This is one of the bigger questions that has been bugging me about Oppian Wives and its design, because somewhere deep inside of me I feel that it works as a GM-less game… but that might not be the... Continue reading

  
• Oh no, I accidentally created a ‘minigame’
  December 19, 2024 by Smoggy AU

  Minigames have a place… but not here. I’ve written previously about my need to strip things back to their core when it comes to rules – I hate vestigial rules that don’t make sense and little... Continue reading

  
• Currencies, Bennies, Points, Tokens – Rewards and the 'Core Loop'
  December 16, 2024 by Smoggy AU

  Core Gameplay Loop I quite despise the fetishisation of ‘core gameplay loop’ ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsion_loop ) and it’s variants (often applied to digital games and how to moneti... Continue reading

  
• The Milieu (shared imagined space)
  December 09, 2024 by Smoggy AU

  The Milieu The milieu (Meel-Yuh in my Australian accent!) is the contextual stuff in an RPG – the social setting, the known facts, scene / set dressing, and all the other external ‘stuff’ which... Continue reading

  
• Roman Mosaic Building
  December 04, 2024 by Smoggy AU

  Just a really quick little play in Affinity Designer to make this Mosaic. Technically it's not even very 'Roman' yet. But it's a start and a sketch. I'm sure I'll learn heaps about Roman mosaics throu... Continue reading

  
• Why Women? And Politics?
  December 02, 2024 by Smoggy AU#background, #core loop, #game dev

  As I said in a previous post, after reading “Goddesses, Whores, Wives, & Slaves” by Sarah B. Pomeroy, I was struck with a great interest in this, as it is a fascinating look at the live and labels... Continue reading

  
• Social PVP Mechanics in RPGs
  November 27, 2024 by Smoggy AU

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  A review of social PVP mechanisms Given my intro, I now set out to establish what the ‘broad strokes’ of the game were – the beats and points of interest that would make it an engaging roleplayi... Continue reading

  
• Setting Out Well
  November 26, 2024 by Smoggy AU

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  November 25, 2024 So, setting out to write my second ‘proper’ RPG, after my first game (You’ll Meet the Devil at a Crossroads - YMTD) is a bit daunting, especially since I’ve decided to narrat... Continue reading
• A political game
  November 25, 2024 by Smoggy AU

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  #Starting

  This is the beginning of the devlog for Oppian Wives. The idea came while reading Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves by Sarah B. Pomeroy. I set a few design challenges for myself with this game. No... Continue reading