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Mechanic Monday: Progress Report

Hello and welcome back to the blog for another Mechanic Monday!
This one's kind of a catchupdate as well - for starters, this blog is likely moving soon.  That's because I'm finally getting my act together and building out a proper site for Velocimancer Press - a central internet place for all my creations, game design, playwright, and beyond.  Of course, I'm not going to throw out existing work, so a lot of stuff will still link out to itch, NewPlayExchange, this blog - but it's time I did this properly.  Past time, really.  And so what if this breaks all my old tweets linking to this blog in the velocimancer.com domain? Hopefully I can set it up so that all error pages eventually lead any visitors to their target content anyway.
But back to the Mechanic Monday - I don't actually have some new thing kicking around my head (well, besides the idea of adding solar panels to Armberlodge; and revisiting the possibility of moving the Legacies off the FGM-Squared cards and into separate decks, and when a Hero retires, you draw from your choice of their class' two corresponding decks) but that’s because I’ve actually been prototyping.  Working on the site got me fired up to actually make a presentable version of Guild Manager (that’s the new working title for Fantasy GM Squared), so in the last few weeks I did the following:
  • Reacquainted myself with nanDeck to make changes to the build on there
  • Converted it from poker cards back the square cards I originally envisioned
  • Drew or re-drew enough placeholder art that I had 40 character portraits, so two cards per portrait currently
  • Designed the geometry of a Hero card template, then gave it a little illustrative touch-up, then made that the card background
  • Reorganized the spreadsheet that fed nanDeck the values to have a clearer more readable presentation
  • Set the margins to fit to the 3”x3” label sheets I got
  • Ran a print test, and - it looks pretty good!
Next steps:
  • Sell Sheet, including mockup examples of a couple different themes/reskins to suit the game to different genres: aka Guild Manager: The Amethyst Age (more Overwatch-looking art) and Guild Manager: The Viridium Age (more cyberpunky)
  • Properly design the player components: aka each GM board, Draft Tokens, VP, those +/- tokens, oh, and redesign the category/scoring cards in nanDeck
  • Give the rulebook a once-over, settle on the current Real Version and move the Possibility stuff into a separate parking lot
  • Maybe give the rulebook a quick and dirty dress up in Canva?
Man the digital tools available now are so wild - there are times when I feel dejected because I’m so slow to build the skills that result in actual tangible products.  Like I’m so proud of making a basic card, when my Twitter feed is full of brilliant people (who are increasingly my age or younger) designing beautiful things - but I have to remind myself to measure my progress over my success, and to run my own damn race.  If I can get the list above knocked out and a digital place I can point people to and a physical version I can hold in my hands by the end of the month, I’ll be well pleased.  We’ll see.
Lots more swirling around my head - I started building my site so that I could maybe get in the groove of Amberlodge again, and it’d be good to get back in that headspace; and I could probably write a couple theorycrafty posts about how my recent time investments in Vintage Story and Overwatch 2 have percolated.  But for now, let’s call it there, add in a pic, and get back to work.  Til next time!



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