Travel and 'Together Among the Stars'


This is a short devlog on how travel and discovery work in this game vs the game it's hacked from, Together Among the Stars by Takuma Okada (which is itself a 2-player version of the famous Alone Among the Stars), basically just written cause I'm doing a twitter play-through of Alone Among the Stars and I wanted to go over some comparisons afterwards, without taking up a bunch more tweets.

Both original games feel to me like they're meant to be a bit dreamlike. You string together a series of potent moments, but the rational connections between them are weak unless you impose that yourself when you write a journal entry. It kinda leans towards poetry. Pockets full of Stars is meant to be more story-book, so it had to have a clearer thread. That comes through most in two ways:

  1. in 'Pockets', you draw some cards as inspiration for each planet, give it a name, and give it and its inhabitants some basic features and a landmark, then start doing stuff down on the planet. 'Together' has you jump straight in after rolling for how many moments/finds the planet has—you go straight to the first moment.
  2. the order of events for discovering something is flipped. In 'Together', you roll to see how you discover something, then flip the card to see what you discover; in 'Pockets' you have some kind of idea what you're discovering, then you roll to see how the discovery goes.

So 'Pockets' tries to give you a little more structure (though you've still got a lot of freedom) to fit closer to the medium.

Get Pockets full of Stars

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