Skip to main content

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!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

TTRPG Tuesday: Three Means Of Resolving

Hi it’s another TTRPG Tuesday! First of the year.  Let’s get right into it. Saw a challenge on Twitter to make some resolution mechanics.  I can do those! Here we go: Hand to Hand The player performing the action and the person running the game or otherwise opposing the action both put their dominant fists toward one another, bounce them three times to get a rhythm, and reveal a number with their fingers, 0-5.  Sum the two numbers, and if the number is greater than 5, subtract six, so that the final number is always between 0 and 5.  On a 0, the action fails catastrophically, on a 1-2 it fails, 3-4 it succeeds, on a 5 it succeeds spectacularly.  The player taking the action starts the game with all five fingers up on their non-dominant hand; after an attempt, they may lower fingers on that hand to add to the sum of the attempt. Ex. Alice attempts to seduce Cat’s character over to the coup conspirators.  They put their dominant hands together (right for ...
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Minimum Viable Product for WWDW?

Hello and welcome back to TTRPG Tuesday! I’ve put together a barebones introductory document for We Won, Didn’t We? and, well, I think it speaks for itself.  Check it out HERE ! This introduces the skeleton of the game, as well as walking through the steps; I’d say next up is a rudimentary character sheet, and maybe I can bring this to a Playtest Zero session and see what folks think of character creation within one of the starting Bulbs.  I’ve opened the doc up for comments, so if you have thoughts dear reader, fire away.  Brain fried, go read the doc, til next time!
Post a Comment
Read more

TTRPG Tuesday: Beliefs as Roles

  Hello from high above the Rockies, as I make my way back to Chicago from Big Bad Con 2023.     This was my first con in five years, and only my second ever.     I had a better time at it than I did at GenCon, which I understand derives largely from this being an industry con vs a consumer show.     I made a modest number of purchases but it was easy to stick to the constraints of my limited luggage space, which was fine; shopping and new releases were not the attraction here.     Gaming, panels, and (as I soon learned) networking were. This con was certainly less overwhelming and I think my expectations were clearer and my FOMO much lighter, but I’ll readily admit that I had a lot to learn.    I misunderstood or made mistakes regarding almost every event I signed up for, including happy accidents like sitting in on the wrong panel only to learn a ton, or expecting a mending workshop to be about fixing one’s writing when the app...
Post a Comment
Read more