Our First Major Release

With Obscured being released into the wild more than a week ago, now is a good time to talk about its development and what’s next for us.

Creating Obscured was one of my more risky and likely stupid decisions. After finishing my degree, I wanted to do something for myself. Things had been pretty breakneck since I started high school, and there was never time to do stuff I was passionate about. Everything I was doing was setting up another safety net to catch me in case my dreams didn’t take off, but I wasn’t spending any time making those dreams happen. So I decided to be stupid for once and spend a year getting this project off the ground and released.

Development was a bit of a rollercoaster. In late 2021, my friends were getting into Phasmophobia and watching too many old episodes of Unsolved. Our group had also played D&D together for the last three years (five if you count downtime), so I started thinking that I wanted to play a tabletop game that let me hunt ghosts and ghouls with modern equipment like I was doing with my friends in Phasmophobia. I spent some time looking through existing systems and thought about how to try to homebrew 5e into a solution (a tale as old as time), but I need something else. So, if there wasn’t anything that fit the bill and I still wanted to tell that story, I would need to make it myself.

In the early days of development, Obscured was an entirely different game. We even ran a few playtests with the original system that didn’t have any combat. It was fun, but a lot of that came down to us improvising or glossing over things that weren’t working. It also only offered very little meat for players to get invested in. Game mechanics and systems do a lot of work behind the scenes to keep you engaged with a game and thinking about it long after your session is over, and this version of Obscured didn’t have that. So on a rainy night with severe trepidation, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and throw out about 80% of my work to make a more combat and mechanics-focused system.

Things progressed quite smoothly from there despite the looming deadline at the end of the year getting closer and closer. The combat, archetypes, and more detailed mechanics were definitely up my alley, so I was making progress much faster and feeling more passionate about the project. This was also around the time that I started trying to figure out what Obscured was going to look like. For those who don’t know, Obscured is an entirely solo-developed game, and there was no budget for us to use, so anything I wanted to do needed to be something I could do myself. I’m not an artist. It’s something I’m genuinely awful at. That’s a significant problem for a product that sells its ideas using visual design and art.

I had started looking into using public domain images like old illustrations and paintings or even the pulpy horror comics from the 1950s that never renewed their copyright, but I needed something better. Trying to repurpose existing material also locked me into a very inconsistent style because I would need to source things so broadly to try to make it work. That’s why the book is styled as a cobbled-together stack of conspiracy theories and old polaroids of monsters. It was the best solution to meld different art styles while making it feel cohesive. The aesthetic just stuck.

This is also when the AI art revolution burst practically out of nowhere. With tools like Stable Diffusion, I could sit on my laptop and create the exact beautiful pieces of art I needed to make Obscured something special. This breakthrough made it possible for a solo developer with no budget to make something that looked like it had come from a small but far more professional studio. That’s something I’m proud of.

With the last pieces tied together and everything about as ready as it would be, on Friday, the 11th of November 2022, I finally got to show the world the product I had been so passionate about. The reception has been, let’s call it, a bit muted. That’s not too unexpected, though, considering no one knew who I was before now. I was never too into posting the stuff I was working on until I was genuinely happy with it, so realistically no one was waiting for Obscured to release with bated breath. That said, I’m slowly but surely adding more content and getting the word out there for people to try out the game and see what they think. Honestly, I nearly burst into tears the first time I sold a copy, so it’s already as successful as I ever needed it to be.

So, where are we going from here? Well, I’m working hard on getting the first month of supporting content released and making some little articles and free things to bring attention to the game. Next month I’m going to start writing our “case book” so people have some stories to play and try out, and I’m also going to begin the process of moving Obscured onto Roll20. With all my friends in different parts of South Africa, virtual tabletops are how I play most of my games, and after 2020 that’s probably not as weird as it used to be. There’s a lot to come from us, and I’m genuinely hopeful for the future. As long as I keep making great products and getting people to see them, everything should be okay.