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More Attempts To Be A Designer During A Time That Is Trying

Well, it’s late on a Wednesday but I still want to try to get a game design post in for the week, so let’s do another un-categorizes update.  I’ve had some good chats with other designers since last I posted, and it has indeed been good for me to live less in this isolation and more amongst the people.  For so long during the pandemic, I struggled to think, to feel, to even stand my own company, and I only recently felt able to get my individual shit together, that now it’s alien and new again to look outside the tiny space I’ve carved.  But it has helped! I’m not sure when I’ll go back to work again, so isolation is my expectation for the foreseeable future, I’m very grateful to be regaining my bearings and rebuilding my engine under these circumstances.  My dumb ass has already started booking out every available hour with emails I owe or meetings to be in, because being broken that way is how I know I’m getting back to myself again.

Anyway, I’ve got some solid playtest commitments in place, and that’s necessarily causing me to plan a little further out.  I failed to get anything in place for #CraftWednesday, largely because last night I hit a wall of overdue sleep debt and started nodding off before 9, but I’ve already agreed to do a swap of prototypes this Saturday for a playtest on Wednesday, and some more specific goals will hopefully help me to have the focus and drive I need to get some physical, measurable work done.  I also shouldn’t beat myself up too, too hard about this; I did an incredibly fine-toothed-comb-over of The Company that took me two days and used up a lot of my game brain, and I feel good about having done that.  So - I hit my playwriting goal last week.  Let’s try and hit my game design goal this week.

My 3 goal scenarios for this week:

Ambitious - Half an hour each of actual component-making on FGM^2, BURN, and Amberlodge.
Realistic - Half an hour each on writing OR component-making of 2 out of those 3
Bare Minimum - Half an hour on one of those games, and my next blog post.

I think this is doable! And it helps that I have ideas for my next Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday blog posts: I’d be happy to dig into the fog-of-war decision-tree unfolding-dungeon cardboard-AI that came up on my game design call today, or keep whittling away at that Company scenario, esp now that I’ve dived so deep into the final version of the Manager’s Manual, and I’d love to dig into my new triple-axis of Personal Taste vs Popular Taste vs Institutional Taste.  Whichever one I go with, it would probably behoove me to get cracking on that THIS week rather than at the last minute, no?

Alright, that’s enough for now.  Wouldn’t hurt to get to bed at a decent hour again tonight… or I could waste more of my life trying to get through this stupid Kamen Rider movie even though I greatly dislike Den-O.  We’ll see.  Til next week!

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