Kickstarting The Traveller and a quick reminder for Tower Backers!
17 days ago
– Wed, Jan 22, 2025 at 05:52:28 AM
Hi Everyone!
I hope you're all doing well as 2025 truly barrels ahead?
I wanted to share that I'll be taking part in Zine Month again!
This time with Universe At Your Door: The Traveller!
Universe At Your Door: The Traveller is a solo journalling game, powered by sentinel and inspired by To be Taught If Fortunate by Becky Chambers.
You play through the life of The Traveller: a person who is venturing into space on a mission to research extra solar planets.
On your journey you explore the choices made, what our connections mean to us, what we owe the world and each other, and the wonders we can find when we step out into the unknown with community behind us.
The Game has been updated with added group rules, which adapt the solo journaling game into a GMless collaborative storytelling one for up to 5 players. Where you explore the life of a crew and the journey they undertake together.
We're kickstarting to bring you physical copies with even more absolutely gorgeous art and layout from Nala J Wu, so if you're a fan of the art for The Tower and love all the illustrations then come on over!
We also want to invite you to be part of the community that builds these stories in the stars and celebrate some fantastic art from amazing artists, as we are also collaborating with Bri De Dannan and CarlyDraws.
A quick reminder for everyone that picked up The Traveller as an Add-On for this Campaign, please go back to your email and claim the game via Itch.io (if you can't find it, get in touch). This will ensure that when it gets updated in April you get the newest version - The new layout and expanded game with group rules as your links are set to Unlock All.
If The Traveller is interesting to you, please go check it out and follow the campaign, it goes live on the 1st of February! We're hoping to do things a bit differently for The Traveller Kickstarter.
The Game is completely finished, edited and it is just awaiting the Group rules layout to be complete which should be ready by Mid March. With that in mind we're hoping to fufill in April. We're also planning for Fulfilling from both the UK and US, to keep shipping costs low for you and hopefully minimise/ avoid any incidents with shipping or customs. If we get enough EU based backers, we'll also look at fulfilling from the EU as well.
I hope you'll join us over there!
Lola
Community Puzzle & Feedback!
about 2 months ago
– Mon, Dec 16, 2024 at 07:38:32 AM
Hi Everyone!
I hope you're all well and able to take some time off towards the end of this year? I wanted to provide my last proper update for The Tower Kickstarter. All outstanding copies (with shipping paid for) were shipped first week of November and should have been recieved during that month.
If you still haven't received your copy or had issues, please reach out and let me know, likewise if you have been unable to access your digital copy.
I would absolutely love to hear any feedback you have on The Tower, or if you have a favourite puzzle? Have you included any in your games or run The Tower as a mini campaign on its own? I'm considering doing a video or short video series on how to run The Tower, if that is something you would be interested in please let me know in the comments!
I wanted to say thank you again for your support with The Tower and wish you some very fun puzzling adventures.
Speaking of Puzzles....
The Community Puzzle has been posted in its entirety over on Itch.io, so there's no better time than now to have a go at deciphering it!
For Everyone That Missed Out
Digital & Physical Copies are available from Itch.io , though at the moment physical copies on Itch.Io are only set up for those in the UK, please get in touch if you are hoping to order them from outside of the UK.
If you happen to be in Cardiff and want to get a chance to see The Tower in person as well as purchase a copy. Check out The Tabletop Emporium by FumbleFolks
Finally If you would like to get a physical copy in the US: Third Kingdom Games are a stockist
Follow for More Projects
I'm always working on more games and holding playtests for them. You can stay up to date and get in on the action by signing up to the Newsletter, which will net you a free adventure, insight behind the scenes and more. Plus they're usually sent fortnightly at most, no spam!
Especially if you're interested in a Tower video series, because the Newsletter is where i'll share it. Also we've got a new project coming to Kickstarter in February 2025, so if you want to hear about it and even get a chance to influence it, come join us! Otherwise I'll post an Update about it here in February, which will likely be the last update on this project :)
Lola
Shipping & Puzzles
3 months ago
– Fri, Nov 01, 2024 at 05:26:23 AM
We have the remaining copies!
Hi Everyone,
I really appreciate your patience and I was really worried that I would be starting off this month's update with more apologies for what would be a longer delay but new path to resolution. Fortunately I can happily say that isn't the case. I received the remaining copies and as I write this, the remaining KS orders waiting to be fulfilled are packed and waiting to be collected by Royal Mail today. There are one or two people who still have yet to complete their survey, so please do complete it, your orders are packed, so once those are all sorted they will go straight in the post.
I hope that you love The Tower and some of the puzzles are featuring your games already.
This delay has definitely given me a lot to think about in terms of production cycles and I will definitely be adjusting how I approach them a bit. Thank you again for your patience through this.
I've been a little bit in my head about the delays with being able to get the rest of the copies to you. So I didn't start posting the missing pieces of the puzzle until last week. However there are now more puzzle pieces for you to try and decipher over on Itch.io here
The Puzzle Begins [https://itch.io/t/4084454/the-puzzle-begins]
A little hint for you all, is that you will need to look through your copy, digital or otherwise to help you decipher it!
Wishing you the best weekend!
Physical Fulfillment Update
4 months ago
– Sat, Oct 05, 2024 at 02:57:22 AM
Hi Everyone,
The majority of copies have been posted out. The last 20 or so copies have unfortunately been delayed by circumstances outside of our control. Though this is hopefully resolving and I'll be able to continue shipping those last few copies this month. This is only affecting a few people with the ' A Tower You Can Touch ' reward. Other reward tiers were shipped in the 1st week of September.
Please get in touch if you have a physical reward tier that includes more than just The Tower zine, and you have yet to recieve it.
Lola
The Tower in YOUR HANDS
5 months ago
– Thu, Sep 05, 2024 at 06:12:38 AM
Digital Towers
Last week I sent a Kickstarter message to all of you providing the link to be able to claim the Digital Copies of The Tower via itch.io. If you did not check that message, here is the link again.
https://johnson-ofair.itch.io/the-tower/backer-access
It will only work if your Kickstarter email is linked to your Itch.io account. If you do not have Itch.io, the PDFs have now been distributed via the pledge manager. However please note that from 2025 onwards any future updates will solely be made on Itch.io.
Speaking of updates, Many Thanks to two backers who let me know last week that the original PDFs had exported wrong and that there was a riddle missing! Some of the pink layers had gone walkabout, so I re-exported the pdfs and uploaded the fix to Itch.io along with a Devlog on the same day. So the available PDFs are all corrected, let me know if you spot an issue though!
Tower Tomes
Physical Fulfilment has been proceeding apace this week. Some copies may have already landed, some are on their way out of the UK as I write this. Some are by the door waiting to be collected and some more are still being packed. I'm hoping that by the end of next week all copies will have been shipped. I'm slightly limited by being at the whims of our postal depot, and how many they allow to be collected at one time (honestly changes daily sometimes).
This is a fun one...
The Itch.io page went live today so that the community discussion threads attached to the Tower could be opened.
https://johnson-ofair.itch.io/the-tower
As I've been packing the zines, I've added some of the extra funky prints of The Tower on different colour paper to random packages. They each have a part of the community puzzle on the back. I've sent duplicates of each part out, so if you really don't want to take part, fingers crossed you shouldn't have to.
If you get a part of the Puzzle and you want to take part, please head over to the Itch.io and post a picture of it here: https://itch.io/t/4084454/the-puzzle-begins
There will be another topic for theorising and solving open to everyone that wants to take part once the first part is posted.
and with that.... back to packing zines for me!
Edited to Add - Re. Shipping
Ooops! I got distracted by food, fortunately I remembered just in time to edit this.
There are a couple of people who haven't filled in their surveys, or if they have, the shipping charges haven't gone through. So please double check, you will have received an email letting you know that there was a problem. So if you can please get in touch or go through the process online.
A Completely Separate, but also Fun Thing...
I'm taking part in the Queer Game Jam on Itch.io this month. Working on a new game, If any of you are LGBTQIOA+ Game designers and would like to take part I look forward to seeing what you make!
I've got an idea, the bones of the game and a good amount of the month to make it all come together, though I really should be dyeing yarn for Yarndale....
If you'd like to keep up with what's happening with my games, get snippets of some of them (along with development rambles) and some GREAT Actual Play Podcast recommendations and more, Sign up to my TTRPG newsletter !
Tabletop Scotland
Just a quick note to say, I unfortunately wont be able to make it. I'm home packing orders! Also still recovering so can't manage the extra exertion. Though you can find my games with Lost Pages on G1-02. Hopefully next year!
