Hi there,
May ended with UK Games Expo, so June’s newsletter is mostly about Birmingham, plus a couple of things that happened right after (and yes, we are a bit late sending it out).
UK Games Expo recap
This year the team (Yehuda, Jono and Aviv) went in wearing the Game Burning Podcast hat as well as our own. The press side of the trip – interviews, other studios, the full convention story – is over on the Game Burning blog. Here's the studio side.
Yehuda ran Trashonauts at the show's official playtest tables and lost his voice doing it: five sessions back to back in a single three-hour slot the organisers warned him might be quiet. It wasn't.
The real shift this year was on the professional side: We went in with a clearer sense of who we wanted to talk to, which turned into actual conversations about marketing, promotion, and collaboration – a different experience from last year, when we turned up with no real plan at all. We handed out flyers and partnered with the UK Tabletop Industry Network to have some on their table. Beside the flyers, we also designed and printed Godflesh shirts, and walking the floor them did more for us than anything else we brought.
Aviv, alongside our talented friend Eran, fell into the same habit at every booth: pick up a book, check whether the production looks solid, then flip straight to the credits. Eran's specifically hunting for an editor – he caught more than one full rulebook with nobody listed as one. Aviv is checking for a letterer and a graphic designer. It's a fast way to tell how a small studio is run.
Get the Godflesh shirt
The shirt is now available to everyone. Aviv designed it for the team to wear at the show, and enough friends asked for one afterward that we decided to make it public.
RPG Trader
A new marketplace for tabletop RPG creators and players launched this month, and we jumped on it early. You can find all our legacy games plus the Godflesh public playtest in one place. If you’re also an RPG creative, RPG Trader has a very clean and easy onboarding process, with good tools to import your products from itch.io or DrivethruRPG. The creator and product pages also have excellent social media preview design.
Monday Inspo
Those are the last sources we are posting for MondayInspo for now, both with an unmistakable through-line to Godflesh. There are some new ideas for more content coming in July.
Jujutsu Kaisen’s premise alone is Godflesh-coded: the protagonist eats the finger of the "King of Curses" and gets enormous power at a terrible price. Cursed spirits that draw power from humanity's own fears. Domain expansions. Veils. Cursed tools. This series reads like a checklist for what I'm trying to build with Godflesh. It’s surprising it took this long to get to it.
Remnant: From the Ashes’s creature designs stuck with us long before Godflesh existed; and Aviv was already borrowing from them to describe monsters in earlier games. There's something properly unsettling about building creature design around insects instead of the usual vertebrate monster template.
The Dresden Files series is a favourite of ours. Aviv has been catching up with the newer books, remembering why this series stuck with him in the first place. What it does very well and keeps pulling us back is how grounded the magic feels. Spells require physical preparation. Locations matter. Thresholds and Wards aren't just flavour, but rules the world enforces. That kind of tangible, place-anchored magic is precisely what we’re building toward in Godflesh.
That's Birmingham, plus everything after it. Thanks for reading, and see you next month.
– The Zero Prep Games Team