Terraforming Venus is a centuries-long epic endeavor of the Earth Engineering Enterprise. Tackle monumental planet-altering tasks, and while away the many many many hours between missions. This journaling game is part of Zine Month 2025.
Vapid Venus Ventures is a solo journaling game where you take on an epic project of planet terraforming, while also dealing with the massive tedium of downtime between missions.
Your character is an astronaut with the Earth Engineering Enterprise, a company founded to colonize other planets in our solar system. Your contract is to deploy various terra forming machines in the planet Venus. Your employment is a mere year of a centuries-long mission.
There is a lot of downtime between jobs. A LOT of downtime. Try to also keep a minimum amount of boredom with a minimum amount of entertainment. I hear trashcan basketball is the most popular sport on Venus.
At the end of your engagement, you'll be debriefed, and have a series of personal and professional logs that shape both your character and the future of humanity in the solar system.
The rules for this are easy peasy lemon squeezy. All you need is a way to take notes for a journal, and a way to randomize a number from 1 to 16. Meldar16 Games is made up exclusively of old farts, so we like pen, paper, and dice. You could also take notes in your favorite writing app, record notes with a voice recorder, use online dice rollers, and number randomizers.
This zine will give you writing prompts to help push ideas on your characters' actions and thoughts during their space missions. You'll have chances to be motivated by the legendary undertaking you're part of, and be annoyed by that noise in the station's air ducts. By the time you finish a playthrough, you should have a diary of their hopes and dreams, and a formal report to hand to corporate.
Oooooooo, spacey
I'm going to go ahead and pat myself on the back here, and brag that Meldar16 Games has fulfilled all 3 of our past Zine Month projects within days of the campaign ending. The longest we took was 4 days to ship after fulfilling PDF orders right away. We are on track to do that again.
Right now, we are past the first written draft from Sean, and the concept art you see on this page from Mel. We're both hard at work to get finalized versions of everything, and are on task to have zines in your hands. Our current schedule has the final print versions ready to go a week before the campaign ends, with that last week for wiggle room and/or printing.
PDFs are easy enough to upload and send out. For printing, Meldar16 Games owns our means of production Printing is all done in-house, so no need to wait for time-consuming overseas shipments to our warehouse. The second things print, we plan on making daily trips to the post office until every last order is fulfilled.
This is what it might look like on your game table. Clean yer darn game table!
We're located in the wonderful Philadelphia, PA in the USA. (Go Birds!) We'll be shipping everything USPS from here, and each pledge has our estimated costs.
We realize that costs of international shipping can be preventative, so we hope you overseas folks will consider the PDF. Most countries don't collect taxes on books, but we will adhere to your local laws, and collect any necessary the same time you pay shipping.
All shipping costs are collected after the campaign is over, and with Backerkit's Pledge Manager.
Meldar16 Games is the brainchild of Melanie C. Green. She does all our art and layout, created the Atera Redux campaign world, and does most of the writing as well. All bow down to Mel! Her partner Sean Moran (me! typing this stuff now!) sometimes helps write things like this zine, edits, and embarrasses Mel by writing glowing write-ups for her and talking too much at events.
If you have any questions about this campaign, we can be reached at [email protected]
Look at us dorks
This campaign is not only a Zine Month 2025 project, but we're also doing a Cross-Collab with the fine folks of Colourful Name fame!
What that means is if you back both of our projects, and both our projects meet our goals, you'll get some fun extra goodies from both of us!
The gameplan is both of us will have an extra tri-fold pamphlet that cross-reference our in-game worlds! Both of these add-ons will give extra flavor and gameplay options to each of our games!
So check out the Colourful Name's crew Zine Month Project below!
