Velocimancer Games

Hey it’s Monday would you look at that.  I’m sour because I just spent two hours in a pointless HOA meeting but let’s channel that into something productive, shall we? It’s Monday, so even though I barfed out some game ideas last night, let’s sound the horn for a Mechanic Monday. run horn.midi // Alright so let’s get into it.  I love cards, it’s one of my signature traits.  A known thing.  I also love relative positioning.  Put ‘em together and what do you got? Another way of looking at rectangles supporting rectangles.  Bon appetit. Grid-Based Modifiers In GREEM, players start out with a personal tableau of two Teal cards, one West and one North.  The West Teal card defines a row (Grey cards played to the East of that card), and the other a column (Grey cards played South of that card), with one slot for a Grey card that is in both the row and the column.  Each Teal card modifies its row or column, perhaps enhancing its effect, decreasing its cos...

Oh pickles it’s Sunday night and I haven’t written a post yet for the week. I was also two days late for my Accountability Club email so I think it’s safe to say that the muse just isn’t with me this week. But such is the nature of my mind’s workings, that I’m once again going to jam in something of indifferent quality at the last minute just to keep my streak alive. So I’ve got… nothing.  So today I’m going to give myself a low-chance-of-success design challenge: A Party Game. Oh, I don’t mean I have a mechanic in mind! Heavens no. No I’m just going to write until an idea comes to me! So let’s start big, with that old Experience-First approach. When I think of successful party game experiences, one of the key elements is limited time. A timer removes the potential for analysis paralysis, and does the neat trick of both raising and lowering the stakes. In the immediate term, the stakes are raised because of the limited decision space. In the longer term, the stakes are lower...

Hello hello hello.  Another week, another blog post.  This has been, I think, the most consistent part of the pandemic for me.  So much so that I don’t feel much of a sense of accomplishment for keeping the streak going, AND I’ve run pretty dry on ideas at times, so a real WIN-WIN there.  But I’ve got some ideas for how to fill the rest of the calendar anyway, so hopefully I can bank a good buffer of posts and ideally that would translate to a more regular and sensical posting schedule.  But how about we start with yet another clumpy outpouring this week and go from there? Been lots of Bakeoff in this household lately.  I remember when I took the job as Co-AD of my theatre, an ensemble member recorded a bit where she received a Hollywood Handshake.  I didn’t know what that was, or where it was from, but it was good content for a Giving Tuesday effort so I was over the moon over it.  Sometime after that, I watched the 2018 season of GBBO, although ...

Hello hello, and welcome back to an attempt to pull off a Mechanic Monday! Despite being terribly sleepy and having just written a post yesterday! WoooOOOoooOOOooo! Today I’m going to draw on where I left off; the cousin of ranked-choice voting (and the extrapolated mechanic, 2nd-place prizes), is second-place bids in auctions.  The second-place bid reveals even more of the narrative and the priorities of the bidders of a given lot.  And what the second-place prize is can affect those revelations. The second-place prize could be: The same as the first-place prize, but in a smaller proportion A generic (from lot to lot) consolation prize A unique (from lot to lot, or entirely unique each time) consolation prize What does the dance look like if you want the second-place prize even more than you want the first-place prize? What does it look like the further down the line you award (3rd-place, 4th-place, etc) But what I want to propose for THIS Monday’s Mechanic is: 2nd-place migh...

Well, it’s the last night of the week and therefore my last chance to get a post out.  It’s been impossible for me to get anything whatsoever done for the majority of this week; and it’s only now, once the race has been called, that I’m able to start back up the machinery of my daily/weekly/monthly life.  It’s just been a lot, y’all (I know there is no y’all).  So what do I have? Well, I think I have some Mechanic Monday ideas percolating, but nothing solid, and it’s notably not Monday, so how about the blogging equivalent of heating up a pizza: some loose rambling on a mechanic-adjacent concept. So how about ranked-choice voting, eh? In the real world, it can give us a much clearer picture of the will of the electorate; if ten voters all vote for different candidates, there’s no consensus whatsoever; but if they all give their second place vote for one candidate, that says a lot about their collective will and priorities.  Voting for only one candidate gives no indi...

Heyyyy it’s TTRPG Tuesday.  I should focus on knocking this out before I head out for a long weekend vacation, instead of the Twitter troll raising my blood pressure.  I wanted to do a short post today about the DOLLIE Extraction, as I got together a first draft of the scenario last week and got it submitted for review.  It had been kind of sitting on my To-Do list, and I wasn’t sure when I was going to get around to it.  That’s been the case with so much of my writing/game-making lately: A big slice of executive dysfunction, a paralysis wherein even broken-up tasks feel impossible, insurmountable.  Granted, I’ve felt like this at several points throughout my life, and I’ve developed various mechanisms at different times in order to adapt to and overcome that feeling.  Which is why this week, not only did I get the scenario draft together, I also got a full Fantasy GM Squared build onto Tabletop Simulator.  How’d I manage that? My productivity last wee...

Man, what to write this week? I missed Craft Wednesday, and TTRPG Tuesday, and Mechanic Monday.  Maybe I should just do a little checkin though, and plan for the rest of the month.  Sure! Let’s do that. “The rest of the month” is pretty much non-existent tbh.  Tomorrow is my five(!)-year(!) wedding(!) anniversary(?!), and this weekend doesn’t have a lot of room for design, considering our sexy sexy plans of [grocery shopping, getting COVID tests, and flu shots] and next week we’re driving out to a little airbnb to celebrate, and as a much needed break from work.  So it’s a good thing that I got the first draft of my scenario for The Company RPG in to Logan (forthcoming TTRPG Tuesday post on what got that tied together for a v1.0), but as for my other goal, an Alpha of Fantasy GM Squared, I got screenshots from my collaborators of the prototype components that I’d improvised on the spot, and I’ll need to block out a couple of hours to set those in digital stone (using...