🪟 Notes on "Gossamer Dawn"

Dear friends,

Welcome back to Saturn Peach! Today, for the third installment in our Attention theme, I’d like to tell you about Gossamer Dawn, one of the first games I wrote.

I think I’ve been a little hesitant to write this post because I haven’t revisited this game in quite a while, but I have enjoyed revisiting it. I think it’s a sweet little game, and I’m proud of having made it!

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A Lyric Game

Game genres can be a little nebulous, both because role-playing games are a fairly recent art form, and because the nature of this art form often involves playing with and subverting expectations. If you ask ten different game designers what a “lyric game” is, you might get ten different responses.

If you ask me, I’d say that lyric games are games that are not primarily concerned with being played. I call Gossamer Dawn a lyric game; it can be played, but it’s really more about creating an atmosphere.

A Skylight

The inspiration for this game came from the Reliquary Street Station, a radical trans art collective that I’m a part of. Last summer, stargazersasha hosted a series of themed weekly game jams, and and one of those themes was SKYLIGHT: window to another world. Sasha made a color palette for each theme, and I fell in love with this one.

I built the game around this color palette—as the time in the game’s narrative moves from midnight to dawn, the colors move from dark blue to pale yellow. I set up a page in my document using each color as a background, and started writing from there.

A Text

This game began my love affair with two typefaces: Kingred Modern, which I used for the headers, and Fraunces, which I used for the body text. I just love the shapes of these letters—Kingred Modern has that amazing lowercase g that I tried to use as much as possible, and Fraunces is equal parts classic and funky.

I’ve used this same typeface combination for As the World Falls Down, my Labyrinth-inspired game, and we’re using Fraunces over at Sword & Kettle Press for our upcoming New Cosmologies series!

A Narrative

Gossamer Dawn has a simple narrative structure. You play as a person who is procrastinating working on something, and as you stare out your window, you have a brief but mystical encounter with another world.

Each page of the game is similar: in addition to its unique color, it has a title, a short paragraph about what you’re doing, and a worldbuilding question for you to answer. You can roll a six-sided die to choose the answer to each question; if you roll a six, you must come up with your own.

An Ending

The game ends like this:

To complete Gossamer Dawn, put it away for a bit.

Come back sometime later and create a representation of the other world you briefly experienced.

It can take the form of the project you decided to put off in the first question, or take any other form you choose.

Many solo games ask you to keep a journal while you play so you have a record of your gameplay, both for utilitarian and emotional purposes. Since this solo game is pretty simple, I didn’t want to ask players to journal, but I liked the idea of inviting players to remember their experience in a different way. If you ever play Gossamer Dawn, I’d love to hear about what you make!

Thanks for joining me today! As I’m revisiting this game, I’m working on a slightly updated standard version, and hoping to create more accessible versions as well. I’ll let you know when those are available!

I’ve gotten a bit off-schedule due to summer travels (plus my sheer inability to keep track of summer time), so I’ll return to our regular programming next week with a new essay & more news.