Community Design for Orbital Blues Month (ft. Zach Cox/Jellymuppet)

Check out Orbital Blues Month - https://www.backerkit.com/c/collections/orbital-blues-month

April is Orbital Blues Month on Backerkit, the popular crowdfunding platform. 6 projects are co-crowdfunding, with shared rewards and campaign crossovers, all based on the Sad Space Cowboy game Orbtial Blues from Soulmuppet Publishing. 

Soulmuppet Publishing Director Zach Cox comes back on Wait, Roll That Again! to talk about orienting design around communities, and how they extended the life of Orbtial Blues through multiple projects. 

Thanks for listening to Wait, Roll That Again! 

Here's where you can find Zach. 

• Soulmuppet's Store: https://soulmuppet-store.co.uk/
• Zach on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jellymuppet.bsky.social

You can find out where to follow the show, and find my games, here: 

https://mixuppixels.com/

This Podcast is a part of KiwiRPG!
For information on Kēmu Whakatau o Aotearoa, see their website at kiwirpg.com

Thank you for listening! Please share this show with a friend, subscribe, and rate it on your favourite podcast app. 

Transcript

Zach/Jellymuppet 0:11

The success of these kind of games revolves around play and people not just reading the thing but using it. And we try to make games that soul muppet. We like to say that they demand play. You know, the best way for us to make a game is to make one that when you look at it, you pick it up, you read it, you go, damn, I have to play this. And you message a group and you send them pictures and you get them excited and you run a game next Tuesday.

Alex 0:50

April 2026 is Orbital Blues Month over on Backer Kit. So I brought a friend of the show's Zach back on Wait, Roll It Again to talk about their game, what everyone has been working on, and sort of the process of taking a game like this and supporting it into the future and how they did that back when they crowdfunded the original version of the game. This is a sort of different episode to Wait Roll It Again. I really enjoyed the conversation that we had. It felt a bit like friends catching up, which kind of it was. And so I've not done the same sort of editing that I usually do. You can tell, even this intro is a little bit more casual than usual. I'm also just trying to balance how I edit the show alongside a really demanding full-time job. But I really, really love this conversation. I think it's so interesting to think about how we as game designers can look at our games as ongoing projects rather than just finished, done things. Obviously, not every project is like that, but Orbital Blues has had a really successful, long life, and it's really cool to see these projects happening around the place. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Zach, which I'll pretty much leave undisturbed. Thanks for listening to Wait Roll It Again.

Zach/Jellymuppet 2:10

I go by Jelly Mucket on the internet. I am the uh director and founder of Saul Muppet Publishing, who you might know from games such as Orbitra Blues, Paint the Town Red, Inevitable, Best Left Buried, Mad as Hell, Doom Spiral, and maybe a million other things as well. I'm a UK-based games designer. I've been making games for about eight years and doing it as a full-time job for about four or five now. And yeah, I've been on the podcast before chatting about Paint the Town Red about 18 months ago now.

Alex 2:42

And now we're here for what season is it now, Alex? I I'm calling it the 2026 season of the show. Yeah. It was awesome to talk about Paint the Town Red. I can't believe that was 18 months ago because that game has become a real fixture of my local scene here in Vienna. We love the game, and it's been played at lots of events here. And we're about to do a GM swap in my campaign. So I'm going to be running us through the Aachen adventure, which I'm excited about. So yeah, no, it's really cool to talk again since uh since that happened. Yeah.

Zach/Jellymuppet 3:14

Well, I'm glad you're having a good time playing the town right. That means it was definitely worth the uh the podcast we did, even from a direct investment perspective of you, you know, my hours work, probably, and your home game buying a whole bunch of stuff. So, you know. That's that that helps me. But yeah, really nice chat, the idea. Come back.

Alex 3:33

And we've spoken since a few times at conventions and stuff, so it's been good to kind of check in with how you're one of the nice things about moving to Europe is now I'm closer to the UK and there's a whole hub, and you've got a really lovely scene over there, so it's nice to drop in every once in a while to say hello. We're going to talk about Orbital Blues Month uh coming up this April and kind of understand how this game that you launched back in 2021 has been supported by you as Soul Muppet and by the community, and what's got you to this point of doing a month, you know, which has become an interesting sort of thing that we see on Backer Kit um in the in the recent history of RPGs? Um so I want to take us right back to sort of April, May of 2021 when the original Orbital Blues crowdfunder happened. What was sort of the reaction to the support that it was getting as the campaign kicked off and as it immediately ended? How did you sort of think about this as a project that might have a larger life than just releasing it as a one-off book? Or was that never a consideration, basically?

Zach/Jellymuppet 4:40

I mean, I think that it's always really to start planning expansions before you've made the actual game, right? And that definitely wasn't something we were doing in-house. But Soul Muppet's first game, Bess Berry, while it's very popular, it existed like as a thing that everybody takes a pass at while they are doing their RPG career, which is like your take as a designer on the OSR DD question. Like, how does it work? And while I'm like really proud of how we execute that and how well that game did, how well it was received, and how much people liked it, still existed as like one of the heartbreakers, right? And I feel like that sort of meant that we understood what it was and what it was going to be and where it was going to sit in the market. It was going to be an option if you didn't want to play can or well, can didn't exist at the time, actually, it's a bad example. Maze rats or knave or into the odd or macchiato monsters or labyrinth lord or old school essentials. I can Morkborg wasn't even out by that point, I don't think. But you know what I mean? Like there was a whole load of things exist in that millow. Whereas Orb of the Blues was like something that felt very, very different. It was not any old heartbreaker, it was existing in like a genre in a place by itself. And I think that really excited people. They were flipping through it, and it like looked like the thing we were presenting didn't look like a lot of what was on the market at the time. And I don't think we really had an understanding of that while it was coming out, and the success of the project really appeared, I think, as a result of that differentness, that uniqueness. The moment we saw how excited people were about it, that everyone else was excited as we the creative team, myself and my co-creators, Sam Selene and Josh Clark, are about the game, how excited they were. We knew we had to make more stuff. So we started off by hiring a bunch of different writers and then committing to do five soft cover adventure z as like stretch goals for the campaign. And that took us a really long time. And we spent 18 months delivering those follow-ups and then eventually kind of came around and were able to do the further releases again with Orbital Blue's Afterbird, which was in 2024. Um and basically it's impossible to like know that something you make is going to be really successful, but if I can put it down to like a reason, that was it, it didn't look or feel because of Josh's art and Sam's writing and some of my mechanics, that it was like other games that uh existed in the space, it felt quite different. I think it felt like a quite refreshing to me mix of like story game and old school technology. Kind of something that like I don't think we see a lot of, but I think it's something that there's bits for people who like both halves, both styles of game. So I think it really emerged from there. But we knew quite soon that uh we wanted to follow it up with uh new releases, we just didn't know what or how or when, you know, and answering that question became something that was very difficult and time consuming over the next few years, you know, as we committed to more and more exciting ideas and our ambition for what Orbital Blues could be grew, basically.

Alex 8:20

Yeah. I one of the things you hit on there is that like when you're designing a game, it's even with collaborators, it's a very closed-off sort of activity until you involve playtesters, and even a playtesting community can be very small. But the most direct feedback that you get in the way the industry is right now is through crowdfunding, I guess, right? So you get that feedback pretty quickly that, hey, this game is lots of people are about it, you know? And so that's a really positive indicator to keep moving in that direction. So you did the five zines, the softcover adventures, and that took a while. Why did that take a while? Was it just because you the scale of the project had become so big, or was it because they were five zines that you were happy to promise, and then the reality of them was a bit more I don't know, it was a longer process than you anticipated?

Zach/Jellymuppet 9:13

We're working on five zines with five different writers on five different pitches that weren't part of a cohesive plan, right? It was just like let's come up with as many ideas as we can, hire the coolest people we can think of to write with us, and then come out of it, and then sort of realize we'd committed to Josh doing 65 art pieces over that pivot, right? Which is a lot of art, and Josh did it and was definitely the most reliable part of that process, but you know, writing so many books and getting them edited and laid out, it's it's time consuming. And like we were doing that, it wasn't like I could just stop Soul Muppet working entirely and just focus on the museums with the money from Optic 3s, that wouldn't have been possible. Like we had to keep making other stuff as well. So I was doing something, Sam was doing something, Josh and Sam and myself both all had day jobs at the time as well. So like there was a lot of, and I wouldn't be full-time on Soul Muppet until after Afterburg. So there was a lot of stuff to deliver, you know, in it, and I feel like that has really informed our uh kind of creative output since is to like when building that line, like understand what it is you are capable to do and create like a minimum viable product of what a good expansion to you looks like, because there's nothing worse than like overextending on a creative project and realizing that like you don't have the time or the money or the skill set to like make something to follow up on promises, right? Because that's what stretch goals are really, they should be promises that you should deliver. And obviously, we've not always been able to do that, you know. But it was important to us that we delivered those things we said we'd do before like even starting to think about anything else. But at the same time, Sam and I, who weren't doing uh any writing for those five Z had already started like planning and writing after Burn and working what like we wanted to do within that space. And those follow-up games were like informed by the stuff that we felt all with the blues needed, you know, a longer campaign, more GM's advice, more kind of stuff to do spaceships and more world building, basically. And that's kind of what came out after burn as the follow-up to that project, what sort of thing grew from there outwards. But you know, because be acting as the custodian of a game that is growing in popularity as a really small team is is thrilling and wonderful, but it also is like really challenging, you know. The success of these kind of games revolves around play and people not just reading the thing but using it. And we try to make games that soul mup it. We like to say that they demand play, you know. The best way for us to make a game is to make one that when you look at it, you pick it up, you read it, you go, Oh, damn, I have to play this. And you message your group and you send them pictures and you get them excited and you run a game next Tuesday. Because when that happens, the game is played. When the game is played, it is talked about and shared. People want to buy more stuff for it, they want to see what's next, they want to get the expansions, they want to follow you on social media to find out what the next Kickstarter is, they want to find more people playing more games, they want to listen to actual play, they want to look for reviews. Those things also come out of people's experiences of like actually playing and using the thing. Like the the dominant verb of everything is to me not buying, right? Buying is the thing that makes me the money, right? But buying only comes from reading and playing and talking and sharing, and all of those things are the response to play. I want to make games that are easy to prep, easy to run, easy to tell your friends about, easy to get to the table. Because then that's when the the whole virtuous cycle begins, and then eventually, like all the blues has is able to grow into something beyond what you can control, right? You know, when you have a third-party license, that's what you're doing. You're like opening the game and the setting up to other people who don't think and feel the same things as you, and that's really exciting, and that's where like the collaboration months shine the most, right?

Alex 13:39

Yeah, for sure. What do you remember from when people started to receive the game after it was complete? Like, what kind of feedback were you receiving from the the audience and and the community that had propped up around the game? Like, what do you remember? People saying stories from their first times playing it. Like, did you hear a lot of that stuff?

Zach/Jellymuppet 14:01

I mean, Solbup has got a really active Discord, so we had a lot of people on there. Like, that's always really helpful. Like, those kind of community spaces are really important for that. But like the most exciting thing about it is like having people get those books and like having people beyond you understand that this is a real thing that exists that can be held in hands and played with and enjoyed, right? For me, the moment when like you get a proof copy before fulfillment starts of your game is like it's fine, it's fun. But the thing I want is the first picture posted on Blue Sky of like my book arrived, and I remember like the first picture, I'll see if I can find it for you, that we got of all the blues was like from someone who had ordered everything, right? They had got from the initial wave, a core book, a core book of the alt cover, the dissect, the GM screen, the cassette, and there was a cassette adventure as well. And they'd like folded it and the art book. Did I mention the art book? They they got all those things and they'd laid them out on the ground because clearly the table they were on was not enough. And I was like, oh my god, that is so many things.

Alex 15:18

This is Alex here again, uh interrupting the show unusually. Um I want to tell you about one specific project that's happening during this month, and that is F Infinity, which is by the team over at Plus20 XP. Plus 20 XP are the team who published Fight or Fright when it became a physical game, and they invited me to contribute a stretch goal sort of planet for the game. And that stretch goal hasn't been revealed yet, but I can tease a little bit about it. It basically has to do with the history of how our planet and its moon was formed. So I took that concept and made a race out of it. So I'm really excited to hopefully get to share that with you if the project is overfunded. Check out F Infinity and the six amazing projects crowdfunding during Orbital Blues Month over on Backer Kit. One of the things that I love about Soul Muppet is now that I've had the chance to see you at a convention, to see the sort of booth that you set up. And I love the display that you've done for orbital blues. What has that sort of been like to see people react to it in person instead of just through Blue Sky or you know on Discord? Like to see people pick it up in person and that sort of thing. How how do you see the game taking on a life of its own in person like that?

Zach/Jellymuppet 16:36

Conventions are my favorite part of the job, but it's not even close. Like people are come to conventions because they're so excited about games, whether it's role playing games or board games or whatever it is that they're doing there. And they get to look at your stand and see all the things you have at once. And like the the spectacle of like presenting a really nourished stand is something that mole and myself, mole is our marketing and events manager, is are really like precious and particular about like and the orbital blues space. We want it to have the same quality that a book has, right? All of the soul market books we kind of try to do the graphic design so that they feel like they come with a sense of place that matches the genre and the worlds that you you inhabit while playing, right? So the intent is that you are like building a thing that feels like a world that someone else can step into and enjoy, right? And understand the genre and immediately get what's going on, right? There's a reason that for inevitable, we always lay the map out of the world, we get out all the bullet dice and the little gemstone dice and get the zine that shows you that. We open it to a big page with a load of art on it, and then next to that is a uh is a rock that I have had made that has a um a replica dummy 18. Oh god, what good year is it? It's got a navy, it's got a navy cult revolve, right? Or at least like a medallioned and in golden version of that, which is meant to, on the cover of the same book it's sitting next to, represent Excalper, right? It's the it's actually the iron wood, which is the gun of the kings of myth, right? And when you see that, you have the entire thing laid out that tells you everything you need to about the game, and is you know, the picture paints the thousand words, right? But the book has a thousand words in it, and like we're doing the job of prepping you to understand and find out what the game is about before you even actually pick it up and open it. Or talk to a staff member, right? The best orbital blue stands involve all of the different bits from the prop kits, all laying out and a paint the town red will have a, you know, all of the fancy books and the dice and the the map and the index cards and then a you know a bottle of food colouring and water so that it looks like a bottle of blood or whatever. And the Orb of the Blues one, if the tape deck is working, will be playing one of the three albums we produce for the game, right? We want you to know what is happening the moment you see it. And like that convention stand that's gonna exist in 18 months. I'm scared for customers. I don't know what they're gonna do because it's gonna have so many things on it of increasing weirdness and complexity, you know. God knows how I'm gonna pitch some of the things in all the blues month, you know, at convention stand. The answer is hopefully with great flair and success, but it's gonna be overwhelming, certainly, you know.

Alex 19:56

So you do Afterburn in 2024. The community is you know, large at this point. I think Afterburn does has a bigger crowdfunding like final goal or final total um than the original. Yeah, it's amazing. That's yeah. Was that something that you were expecting? I feel like the the common wisdom is that sequels don't tend to do as well as the originals, um, whether it's film or game crowdfunders, maybe. Or was it just because you had that consistent engagement?

Zach/Jellymuppet 20:29

I don't know if that's true. So I think that's reasonable to say. A lot of people argue by supporting the original project with more releases, you will make more sales in the long run. We have certainly sold less copies of Orbital Blue's Afterburn or Orbital Blue's whatever, whatever supplemental product than we have of the core book. But that follow-up project drove more people to the game that wouldn't have seen it originally at a really exciting way of engaging in it with a price discount as part of a crowdfunding project with a load of new fun stuff in it. And you know, people are psychologically addicted to crowdfunding, and people are more likely to spend $30 on a book that they're gonna get in 12 months than they are just buying the book today on the website, right? That is a categorical truth that I do not like. I wish I could just put things up and people would buy them, but people like that. Yes, and I think the thing that drove the strength of the Orbital Blues Afterburn project specifically was the higher biscuit value because this is again like getting into the sort of meaty and analytical side of it. There were less backers on Afterburn than there were in Orbital Blues, but it made more money because the average person wasn't just buying a 30 quid book or a 15 pound PDF, they were buying either two or three of the new products and spending $75 or The entry point we were doing was like a core book and then the afterburn expansion, right? Which was, I think, £55. So the basket value went up, doubled. So even if there were less people, the project made more money, right? So that's another thing about the follow-up is that like it might not have attracted as many people, and not everyone who bought the original game came back and backed it again for the new thing. But it got people excited about it, brought in new people, and also had a higher basket value. So kind of drove it up even more. You know, the average pledge in for all the blues, outlaws, and corporations is probably going to be really high, even though there's only one new product, right? Because a lot of people are going to be coming in and getting solo games and VHS collections and slip cases and core books, and everything is at a little discount.

Alex 22:52

So you finish after burn, you know, and the campaign at least finishes in 2024, and then the stuff gets delivered when it gets delivered. At what point after that do you start thinking about the next project? And when does that kind of become this orbital blues month, like this whole event through Backer Kit?

Zach/Jellymuppet 23:13

So we've been working on Outlaws and Corporations for about a year. I've been super busy with Paint the Town Red, with DupeSpire, with other projects. This is one that Sam and Josh have really been like taking the lead on from a creative standpoint. We agreed we wanted to do something that was like slightly different to Afterburn and not just deliver another book, but still deliver something weird, which is how we've ended up with this like TEP-esh format, which is like head to foot. So it's two books that meet in the middle within the same binding, uh, that are like mirrored in this context. So one of them is about outlaws, one of them is about corporations. Uh Outlaws is written by uh Josh, corporations is written by Sam, and like they are kind of in opposition to each other, you know, wanting different things and meeting in the middle and in being basically because that's all with the clues is is anti-capitalist, and there's a lot of capitalism in it, as normally the bad guys, and this is like about presenting that dichotomy, right? So they've been working on it for about 12 months. The month has been something that we've been considering for much less long than that. It's been on the cards for about seven or eight months. Uh, we spoke with Backer Kit, Gen Con. They were really excited about the idea of it. Like the collaboration months are something that are like really exciting to me as a creator. And I think they're excited to back a kit as well. Like, I think they understand that that is something that is not happening on Kickstarter. And it is a reason that people are excited and look to Baka Kit. It's a unique selling point of the platform and a way for them to sort of have something that is better than the market leader, right? And that is this sense of community and the kind of groupings of the pages together into these collections of these event months. Obviously, like you could argue this is all kind of like a descendant of Zine Month or ZineQuest from 2020 that's been around for six years now. God. But you know, it all kind of evolved from there, and now we're getting them specifically sorted by game. Like, I was looking at Mouse Shutter Month, uh Mothership Month 1, Mothership Month Two, with a sense of just frothing jealousy because that was so cool. Like all those creators, all these kick-ass people, a bunch of which I like for their own solo work, were then coming in and making stuff for this like really exciting collaboration month. And like it means that I love the I love the month like as a format because third party is like another part of that generous cycle from play that I was talking about. Oh, totally is this metric, which is other people making stuff for the game and telling their friends and speaking to their audiences about it, putting it on a new set of radars that you never could have done, and also making something creative that you never could have conceived, right? And ultimately writing comes from ideas, it comes from experiences, it comes from uh perspectives, and every writer has a different perspective. And by giving someone else permission to do whatever they wanted with Orbital Blues, that was really exciting, right? That's always something I've tried to do when like working with third-party creators, right? Either if they're working with us on a freelance basis or they're actually not partnered with us at all, they're just kind of in the ecosystem we've created, right? It's like if I want you to write an adventure for Orbital Blues, what do you think is gonna be? That's how those five z came about. I didn't go like, hey, I've got an idea for adventure, go and write it. It's like, no, bring me the thing that excites you, right? And that's why all the things we've done are, you know, influenced by different ideas, right? I could have never written Shega de Saudade by uh Giuliano Roverato, who wrote like an all of the blues adventure about like a specifically Brazilian idea of saudade, which is like sort of nostalgic longing for something that never existed, right? And is part of this is like a bottom over standard that has spawned like an entire like that's a that's a fantastic example of like something that even if I knew about, I would not be able to write an image about it. Because I'm not from that place, I'm not from that time, I don't have the experiences he has, and being able to go through and see that in all these different projects, all these different shapes, all these different forms, you know. There's you know, all of the blues paramour is informed by like you know, Josh playing lots of like RPGs infused with romance, which is something that I never do. I don't like it when that appears in my game. So I want to keep that separate, it's not something that excites me. But it is something that excites Josh. And it means that if that's something you want to write about, Josh wants to write about, and you want to play it, that's the thing for you now, you know. Um Wes Franks and Andrew Bowman are doing Formula Infinity for plus one EXP. That's a a NASCAR Formula One inspired Orbital Blues Universe Racing RPG. I don't know anything about NASCAR, you know. I do know that Lincoln once said to me that there's nothing in the world sadder than driving, driving very, very, very fast and slightly left. Like that's been haunting me for years. And I've always been like, but those ideas just could never exist, something that I made. So you get to by giving your thing to other people and saying, go, make something, create, you get something that you never could have imagined, and something that maybe your audience couldn't have imagined as well. And that's so exciting.

Alex 29:01

I think for me, that's what's so special about these months is that they're really a celebration of the sort of hacking culture of RPGs, right? People take a rule set that inspires them, take even just one mechanic, and they say, I'm plugging this into this project I'm working on. And what I think this does is it really puts the focus on games with communities.

Zach/Jellymuppet 29:23

I really love how indie games design has a tradition of playing with other people's toys, and that we aren't like jealous and angry about our mechanics, you know. Because lineage is something that is so easy to look at and to measure. And yeah, I think that all the best games designers play and they read and they borrow and they steal, you know. Exactly. You can't you can't copyright a game mechanic, can you? You know, you can copyright how it's written, but you can't copyright a game mechanic. No, which means that even if we weren't so generous with our licenses, people could steal our homework anyway. You know, exactly. It's I'm excited to get to be able to contribute to that because we've had these licenses for years, right? And for me, it's the hope that something like this for Org of the Blues specifically can kind of kick everything up into the next gear. Totally. And that custodianship of the game line is something we can continue to do for many, many years.

Alex 30:18

Yeah, it it kind of it's like a bigger game jam, basically, right? Like it's a it's a more focused, yeah, but but it's got like a it's got the backing of basically a major crowdfunding platform, which is what's exciting about it. Like there are these amazing projects that have come up that are so wildly different, and it's really, really exciting to see that sort of design culture of taking inspiration and just going wild with it on a big stage like Becker Kit. I think it's it's really cool.

Zach/Jellymuppet 30:49

Yeah. The the evolution of the game jam culture is really interesting. I I've loved game jams, I've entered tons of them over the years. Maybe not tons, I think five to ten or something. Not all of them are still on my itch, because like sometimes it feels weird putting out a game on the official soul market page that doesn't actually relate to the company, but whatever. Sure. Um, except that it's made by me. It's not part of a game line, whatever you want to call it. But the fact that like I think it's like meaningfully distinct from game jam culture because like unfortunately or fortunately, I guess, depending on how you put it, the collaboration month is like definitely more commercialized than a jam. Sure. A jam is usually uh, you know, much more on the collaborative enthusiasm side than the I want to run Craft A project, which helps my game do this. And I I love game jams, and I like I kind of want to make sure that like running a collaboration month doesn't like celebrate doesn't sorry running a collaboration month doesn't replace the need for companies to want to run game jams for their games as well. Like both can exist and both be valid. You get different types of people, you get different types of product, right? And the license is useful for both of those types of people, you know. I was really excited. We did a trouble jam for all the blues at one point where like everyone wrote a load of different troubles, and I've used some of those in my home games, right? Those were sold fun, and that was super cool within the early days of all of the blues. And I'm starting to plan for this summer paint the town red jam. And you know, we've been talking so much about this in our own. And kind of seeing what that could look like.

Alex 32:37

Oh my gosh. I I can't wait to tell my friends that hey, we should we should seriously start writing down all the ideas we have for adventures.

Zach/Jellymuppet 32:45

Yeah, well, like I was thinking about doing adventures, but like I feel like the actual I paint the jam to Reddit's adventure is about 5,000 words, which is like quite a quite big for a jam, you know. So like I think what I'd rather do is like do a character jam, basically. Oh yeah. Make a vampire, and then like list the places that they've been throughout their history, you know, and like write a little bit about what they're doing in each city and use that as a creative writing prompt. Like having a bit of a world building thing and an idea for like other people to jump off whole adventures from. Uh, you know, maybe in the future. But I'd really like to. I'm I'm planning, I'm planning that like working out what wave two of paint the town rug looks like is is really exciting as well.

Alex 33:30

You know, you better keep me updated on that. Come on and talk about in about 12 months. For sure. But no, yeah. For sure, I'll reserve the spot. Absolutely. Yeah. No, I like it. I understand the the difference and the the roles that both can play in sort of supporting a game going forward. And now I think you've helped kind of it click for me the meaningful difference between a game jam and one of these collaboration months. So that's really cool. I guess one question I I I would like to get to, just because I'm sensitive of time as well, is just what is your relationship to the other like collaborators on the people running the individual projects as Soul Muppet and as one of the designers. How do you speak with those collaborators and what goes into sort of planning this event?

Zach/Jellymuppet 34:15

All of these people that I'm working with are my peers and colleagues in the industry that I knew before. We didn't do an open application, it was quite closed. We reached out to about 20 people. About 12 said maybe, then about eight of those 12, they said, Yeah, let's do it. And now we're at seven projects, happy at a drop. Um, you know, there's a mixture of you know, different experiences in creatives, you know, uh stations and plus one EXP are like really big outfits that have a lot of experience in running crowdfunding projects. They do stuff like finish ships, down we go. My god, there's so many plus one EXP Kickstarter projects, I literally can't remember any of them and and then from there there was a bunch of people who were like first-time creators as well, who came from a background where they were already making all of the boost stuff. You know, Lone Archivist was our original graphic designer, so he was excited to come on and make some stuff. Learn's done a lot of stuff for mothership previously as well. Yeah, and um then you know, uh Josh Domansky and um Josh Domansky and Graham Turner had both made their own Orbit the Blues zines themselves, but not run a crowdfunding project. And then Super Dylan, who is running set capsules and done a lot of actual play with us. So those four haven't really, well no, some of them haven't really ran up many crowdfunding projects before. So a lot of it was not just like, hey, we know you know how to make a book, but do you want some help running a crowdfunding project? So it's been a lot of like making sure that people have everything they need and a lot of meetings, a lot of enthusiasm. There's a shared Discord channel in the SoulMoc at Discord, which is like where most things are communicated. Mole and myself and Eric, our operations manager, have been making sure that people have all the assets they need, all the understanding. We're doing lots of consultation, we've been doing uh, you know, writing documents about how to build a crowdfunding page or you know, how to write copies for orbital blues, or you know, what assets and designs you should be using, helping people out with that sort of thing, helping with you know, marketing pacing, marketing copy. You know, there's lots of like I think it's very easy just to like if you're like a bigger game, to be serious, mother shit, or mouse writer or morphorg, there's enough people making stuff in your ecosystem where like you can run a collaboration month full of really experienced people and not be that you can go hands off. Whereas for us, it was really important that like I do everything I can to make sure the people I'm working with are successful because it's my job to look after them and talk about their stuff and be really excited because like actually I feel like a lot of the time with the collaboration month, it's like creating the space, and then that then uplifts the game. I am dragging these creators behind us as well as we all move forward together, you know. So really making sure that like the team at Soul Muppet is doing everything they can to help. And I'm really happy that most of the creative work on Outlaws and Corporations has been done by Sam and Josh. I say 99% of it, and because it means I've been able to like really step up on the crowdfunding side and make sure that like we give every chance and every aid and every possibility for the people we're working with to have all the success in the world that makes something really, really cool.

Alex 37:52

And I think it's a valuable step for lots of creators who want to turn their ideas into real physical things. You've talked a lot in this episode about the value of that physical thing to invite someone into the world. Now all these collaborators of yours get that opportunity too, which I think is really cool.

Zach/Jellymuppet 38:09

We didn't talk about music at all. The so each Orb of the Blues is about music, right? There's like cassettes and albums made by some of our amazing collaborators, Chris Bassett and Behold. Uh for Orb of the Blues Month, uh, Behold has done an entire cassette album with a single track focusing on and celebrating the vibes of each of the projects. So there is a you can you'll be able to hear some of those songs now on the project pages, but there is like music that unites this all and brings it all together. And if you back enough projects, I think it's four of the seven you get, and you back Outlaws and Corporations will ship you a copy of that EP. So that's like the thing that is most exciting, you know, the thing we've done to like really push people to back all the other projects, you know.

Alex 39:01

That's super cool.

Zach/Jellymuppet 39:02

To pledge and make sure that I've done something cool and exciting. Yeah. Yeah, but it's so fun working with Beehold and Chris as well on the original Orbital Blues stuff and on Afterbirth. But uh yeah, it was so exciting to be able to be like. We talked about originally like um Colin running his own projects that was just about music. We were like, oh, would enough people back that? No, that's what this is. It's not carriage sheets or stickers or something. It's like the tissue of Orbital Blues' music, that's what should be that buys it all together. So that's the the most exciting thing that we're working on that you can get. So something more than a book this time is a you know, a testament to that. Hopefully, it's a tradition we can make in the future, and in a couple years, there'll be hours of collaborative crowdfunding product music, maybe.

Alex 39:45

Wow, that would be nice, wouldn't it? That would, yeah. Thank you so much for listening to Wait to Roll It Again. This is a podcast all about game design, how we do it, and sort of the stories behind the games we love. If you've enjoyed this podcast, go ahead and share it with a game design friend or someone who's interested in Orbital Blues. Check out Orbital Blues Month on Packer Kit right now. And if you want to support me or the show, you can, yeah, like I said, recommend the show to someone else, or pick up my game, Fight or Fright, over at Plus1EXP. It's a cool Halloween game. It's never too early to think about candy and costumes. So, yeah, thank you so much. I'm looking forward to figuring out what the next episode of the show will be. Talk to you next time.