As we move toward the final 48 hours of the campaign, it's time to turn things over to designer Takuma Okada for a reflection on how Stewpot started, over six years ago:

On April 23rd, 2018, I wrote the first sketch of Stewpot for Ingenuity Alive, a Friends at the Table inspired game jam. If anyone wants to play the most lightweight version of Stewpot possible, you definitely can with this first version.

3. Stewpot: Tales from a Fantasy Tavern
You run a tavern that is a favorite of adventurers far and wide, famous for its spicy sausage stew. Running a tavern is hard work, especially when there are adventurers involved, but at the end of the day there’s nothing else you’d rather do. 

As you can see, the focus was initially just on running a tavern, and when I started fleshing it out I landed on two versions of the game: A one-shot version where you start with Adventurer Experiences and convert them to Town Experiences for a short game, and a longer game mode where you would pick any two jobs to start and one Experience in each. Stewpot used to include Coin, and you could use Coin to purchase new Experiences, Jobs, and Tavern Ratings. 

In late 2018, thanks to playtest feedback, I decided to center the transition from adventuring to town life and removed the Coin mechanic and long-form structure. I think that was the last really major change, and everything since then has mostly been about filling out the game with more mini-games and prompts and refining the mechanics. 

It was definitely a good call to focus on the shorter game idea, especially considering that was the first year I really started designing games. But I still have some fondness for the long-form game. Maybe I’ll have a game idea that will let me revisit it in the future! 

-Takuma Okada