Sunday, March 22, 2026

GLOGllow Knight: The Whole-Ass Game, kinda

Do you remember when I said that I'm gonna elaborate more on the advancement and gameplay loop of my Hollow Knight GLOGhack? Unfortunately, I DID disappear into the Silksong mines.

Then I ran a couple of playtests for my hack, got it to version 0.3, whatever that means, and ultimately ended up not being as satisfied as I'd like to be with it, so I decided to let it rest for a couple of months.

...until Hilander decided to host the Micro Manual Jam.

This seemed like a fun enough challenge, and I did happen to have a WiP hack and some layout experience under my belt, so I figured why not?

After roughly three weeks of work, I present:

Click on the image to open the itch.io page

However, this is very much NOT the system I wanted to make originally, as many things ended up being cut from my drafts to fit the jam format (which was a good and enlightening exercise that I can wholeheartedly recommend to anyone). 

For example:

  • Paths, aka Class/Template equivalents? Gone.
  • Traits (as well as Spells and Weapon Arts)? Simplified to only take a couple of lines each.
  • Combat? Drastically streamlined, no more dedicated lists of minor and major actions to perform.
  • Exploration procedures? Camp actions? Death rules? Massively simplified or removed outright.
  • GM resources? Mostly added, actually, cobbled together from the tools I actively use to prep my games, although I did have to streamline some of them still. 

Even after all of those manipulations, the resulting game ended up being similar to something like Mausritter in complexity. I might return to the game later and re-add some things for an experience that's closer to what I originally imagined, or I might not, we'll see.

Is the game good? Go check it out for yourself, it's free, god forbid I begin contributing to the commodification of the hobby.

Also, the whole thing was made in Google Docs because I'm a freak. As a word of caution, please be more reasonable when making your pretty PDFs and actually learn some proper software, don't do what I did.

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