Heimarmene: Closing Night is an engine-building tabletop game about taking control of your own fate. Based on research on Gnostic ideas of destiny, the players compete to take control of the narrative in a theatre show, where each loop of the performance is different and the actors must improvise to influence the story towards their unique hidden objectives. The design is emergent-storytelling-first, aiming to build unique and player-authored narratives through play.
This was the final major project for my degree, and was a very open-ended brief, though it required an extensive research background into a topic of my choosing - I chose Gnosticism. This game was the strongest option out of a variety of different possible outcomes from that research. My collaborator joined the project after the research was complete, and I handled project management, all gameplay design, content design and graphic design.
The release trailer, showing the game components.
The short development process documentary.
The physical prototype exhibited to the public during development.
An early Tabletop Simulator prototype.
The game is based upon the Gnostic idea of 'Heimarmene', that one is enslaved to their own destiny. I wanted to explore that philosophy in a game, and portray the process of escaping your destiny according to Gnosticism. This is explored through a theatre play, where the game's components represent the script for that play and therefore the players' destiny. The earliest design for the game was presented in a Game Project Proposal. Initially, the game was a deckbuilder where any player could modify a communal deck, which tried to create emergent narratives.
My design for this game heavily followed a set of central pillars, and decisions were generally made by exploring different lines of questioning as widely as possible, then following the answers that best fulfilled the pillars as deeply as possible. I used spreadsheets for content and mapped out the flow of resources and the gameloop in flowcharts, and did almost all my thinking on Miro.
Once we began playtesting and iterating, it became clear that the initial shape of the game needed to change - the players had to make too many long-term decisions while having very little ability to predict the future, and few of those decisions were interesting. The game moved very slowly due to the sheer analysis paralysis. We ended up entirely replacing the game's central system, while salvaging as much content as possible.
When developing the new system, we focused on early and rapid playtesting of partial prototypes with as wide an audience as possible, gathering feedback from playtesters and the public via surveys, interviews and discord forums, and teaching the game to a variety of people as quickly as possible.
This game wasn't perfect - it was dense at times and often too slow, and the simplicity and readability of the cards and components should have been a larger focus from the beginning. More time should have been spent playtesting the Teach of the game and the rulebook, and letting testers teach eachother. Also, the final game wasn't the best design for exhibition, or quick play, and had to be presented in a modified form for our degree shows.
However, I'm really glad we took so many risks to really refine this design, even if it meant going back over and over and trying alternative approaches - the final product is focused and exciting. I couldn't have been happier with my partnership for this project, and my collaborator's art direction and production quality shines throughout.
More information available at the website and in our development podcast.
Available on Steam Workshop for Tabletop Simulator and as a Print & Play.
Rulebook available here.
