I'm really happy with how this design came together. In just three months this went from a vague concept to a playable game. So many designers say "This will just be a quick little project" and are still working on it years later, but not this time!

Using AI generated art really made this possible. I could concentrate on the writing without switching to my art brain to get the pictures. Besides, the art is wild and an inspiration on its own. I already started using AI generation for a starting point for art on future projects.

Hypercast isn't a complex interweave of mechanics and it never was supposed to be. Its got one or two mechanisms that I'd consider "clever" and only just barely that. What I think is interesting is the attempt at an explicit shift from hit points to "Attention". If you pay attention to the D&D version of hit points, it was supposed to be a representation of energy, not a measure of physical trauma. I'm curious to know if players will be able to adopt the idea of Attention, not as damage, but as a gestalt of awareness. So far the answer has been yes. That's interesting to me and it makes me want to explore the implications for a game that might use a similar concept in a more general setting. In previous systems, I've used "Energy" explicitly as an overall measure of health, and some players seem to come unmoored, which I was disheartened by.

I'm usually driven to nail down every definition with mechanical effect and to define every effect in turn. I'm fighting that impulse. Hypercast is a success in that way. I'm amused that some readers will champion one page games that leave nearly everything up to the players and then as soon as I would leave something up to the GM in this project, their heads would explode. At the same time, old school GMs just got it and rolled with it. I recognize it's a skill to fill in the blanks. Yes, I'm intentionally offloading work onto the GM by not working out every scenario. Sorry, the book would be 300 pages long if I didn't, and that's the design I was going for.

Now I've got to see if I can print a physical copy of this book. That's a lot of black ink, I'm pretty sure it will be rejected at the printer. All I really want is one for my bookshelf… Maybe I can sneak one past them?