Initial Release

Hey hey. Writing for the Swyvers Heistable Hovels Jam was a trip. I’ve never played Swyvers but the idea of filling a community filling a district one home at a time was such a neat idea that I had to get on board.

I ended up writing this grim tale that has a horror and Twilight Zone sort of bend to it. Hopefully it gives a nice boss-fight style encounter and stays true to the game.

One of the neat challenges in this jam was that it had a hard limit of two-pages. Trying to cram in enough detail to make this fill lived-in and still include game mechanics (stat blocks, loot values) and such was tough. A lot of editing and rewriting happened. Along the way it became obvious to me that I really wanted two versions of the output: the two-page jam version that is perfectly playable and works fine, and an expanded “full” version that has room for more lore, extra details, and additional GM options.

So, how do you write two layouts at once? I used Typst (which I had previously used on Merty MacFlew and the Crush Capacitor ) for layouts and variable content based on which version is being rendered. I quite like how the authoring experience turned out and I’ll write it up in more detail at some point if anyone is interested.