| [Reign: Enchiridion] Quick Edit |
[16 Nov 2009|08:35am] |
From the second pass, I could either go less abstract or more abstract. More abstract was easier. :P
Removed the mouth and scaled up the eyes/crown to fill up the space a little more.
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| [Reign: Enchiridion] Second Pass at the Cover |
[15 Nov 2009|02:50pm] |
Second pass at the Enchiridion cover.
General response to the "Seal" direction from the first pass was negative. Greg suggested something with a crown, so I dusted off an early sketch for the cover of First Year of Our Reign. Closer to traditional REIGN branding with the gold title + calligraphic illustration. Still breaks from the usual pattern by focusing on a portrait rather than full figure.
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| [Reign: Enchiridion] First Pass at the Cover |
[14 Nov 2009|05:16pm] |
First pass at the cover for the next Reign supplement: Enchiridion.
Product Description: It is the complete Reign rules, plus a couple of chapters from the First and Second Year books, but none of the setting material. It's meant to be useful for players who want to use Reign in their own settings without having to flip through the setting chapters.
Initial direction was to follow the usual line-drawn portrait theme I'd established on the cover of the core book, the First Year of Our Reign and the Second Year of Our Reign. But this is a lightly different product. It's smaller, for one thing, but also has the feeling of an encyclopedic tome. A manual for your ORE-based fantasy game. That being the case, my references were more based on things like the Silmarillion, the ornate covers of medieval holy books, and even a little bit of the Necronomicon. The title is difficult to read, but only because it is meant to be more than the word itself. It's a seal, warding the contents from prying eyes of those who aren't ready to plumb the depths of knowledge.
This is just a first pass though. It probably needs "Reign" somewhere on the cover, but since this is going to be marketed and sold online, I don't know if that is absolutely necessary. Greg Stolze should get a by-line though.
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| [Do] I broke Google Docs! |
[11 Nov 2009|06:35pm] |
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In my quest to write around 40,000 words of examples of play as a part of NaNoWriMo, I have inadvertently discovered a limit in Google Docs. Apparently docs can't be more than 512k!
So I've split up the current draft into two google docs here and here.
It'll be a little trickier adding up my word count each day, but no big deal otherwise. Just surprised that Google Docs has any kind of size limit in the first place.
Currently, the draft is around 71,300 words. About 20,000 of which are examples of play. With luck, I might actually break 100,000 words, which is pretty much ridonkulous.
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| Boutique Board Games |
[10 Nov 2009|09:11am] |
Those who have known me for a few years will recall the Luchacabra experiment I was doing for about a year or so. The goal of that experiment was to make a new game each week, usually two-player abstracts. These games would use as ubiquitous materials as possible so I can just post the rules and you can play at home with stuff around the house.
Now Megan's craftiness has given me some thoughts. See, she makes these vegetable trophies...
 
Every time we go to a craft or hardware store, I come across little wooden blocks and doo-dads.
   
Just BEGGING to be stained and arranged into a game-like configuration. Particularly if they can be mounted onto a cool-looking plaque.
So that idea's been in my head since the Girlie Show. Then I stumble upon this post on Purple Pawn describing a new two-player abstract called Push Fight, with rules similar to Oshii but in an oddly shaped board with barriers at the top and bottom.
 Each player gets five pieces on an oddly-shaped board with 26 spaces. Each turn, you move up to two pieces as many spaces horizontally or vertically as you like, so long as the piece does not leave the board or jump another piece. You must then push one of your square pieces one space in any direction, pushing all other pieces along the same line. The piece with which you just pushed cannot, itself, be pushed on your opponent’s next turn. The object is to knock one of your opponent’s pieces off of the board.
So what the heck, maybe once Do is in Ryan's hands, I'll go to the opposite extreme of Luchacabra. Maybe I'll handmake boutique, one-of-a-kind two-player abstracts and sell them on Etsy, with stained wood pieces and stuff. Little items that would fit steampunk decor, but also be well-designed games.
Hmm... Embargo would be a good option for this treatment, certainly.
Hmmm.... Yes... Also, perhaps a game that uses those recessed toy wheels and spheres. You can move the wheels around as flat pawns, but they can also carry the spheres around in their recessed cavities. The game might involve shepherding the spheres around the board or something. Yess...
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| [Belle of the Ball] Example Game |
[10 Nov 2009|08:30am] |
If you recall a few months ago, I was tinkering with a card game called Belle of the Ball that I really envisioned being illustrated with a menagerie of Kate Beaton's frou-frou Victorian characters. When the cards are all put together, they form a crowded ballroom of party-goers.
I put the game aside while working on Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple until the end of the year, but it's still been knocking around my skull here and there.
Well, lo and behold, Kate won't let us forget how awesome she is. She just posted this illustration which just convinces me even more how much I need to finish designing that game so I can pitch it to her.
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| Girlie Show: Day 2 |
[09 Nov 2009|09:33pm] |
Much quieter on Saturday than it was on Friday, but still a very nice day. A lot more kids running around staring at my hair.
Or was it the dancing?
Here are some of the hot selling items:
Fruit and vegetable Earrings!
 
A matching set of bread slice earrings and a toaster necklace!
But the most popular items were definitely the double-pom hats:
  
Overall it was a pretty successful first time at the show. It's definitely given me some experience for when I demo or sell games on the floor at GenCon. Megan's got a lot of interest in those hats and she's even got me thinking about my own board game-related craft projects. (More on that later.)
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| Girlie Show: Day 1 |
[07 Nov 2009|07:10am] |
Megan is an accomplished crafter and maker of cool things™. She recently had her first big showing of her work at the Girlie Show, a kind of alt-hip female artist showcase. These are pics from the first night. There was a live DJ, lots of drinking, all the free food you could want from the local gourmet taco stands, sushi restaurants, cupcake bakeries, and so on.
Pics!
It reminded me a LOT of the chaos on the GenCon exhibition floor. Much better food, though. Fewer costumes, but there were still some!
We're told the atmo today will be much more serious. Less drinky, more shoppy, which is fine by us!
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| [Do] 1 in 100. |
[03 Nov 2009|12:26pm] |
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In a further attempt to make Ryan's job as hard as possible, I'm spending this month adding the long-delayed examples of play throughout the live doc of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. I'm following a vaguely NaNoWriMo daily schedule of 1500 words a day. Without the examples, the doc is about 55,000 words. I plan to add about 40,000 to that, entirely focused on examples of play.
In all likelihood, with some final fleshing out in December, the doc could be around the 100k mark by the time it falls in Ryan's lap. Yeah, it's a lot, probably too much, but I'm following a 50 pounds of clay philosophy here: Quality emerges from quantity. Or, in other terms, if the final book has one good word, there's probably 100 words that got edited out in an earlier draft.
You can keep up to date with the word factory here.
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| [Do] 道.com? |
[30 Oct 2009|04:53pm] |
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With international domain names being fast tracked for 2010, should I register 道.com if possible? :P
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| Penny Arcade Lookouts: Peaks and Valleys |
[30 Oct 2009|09:30am] |
Had one of those moments where mechanic bubbled up in my brain without a theme or metaphor in it. I imagined players rolling a dice pool and calling the highest die result a Peak and the lowest die result a Valley. If several dice matched the Peak, that was a Plateau. If several matched the Valley, that was a Canyon.
I didn't know what any of those dice results actually meant, though. Talked it over with Megan and we thought it would be an interesting random patrol generator for a game adaptation of Penny Arcade's Lookouts.
A session of play follows a full patrol through the forest. Each leg of the patrol goes from a literal peak to a valley, to another peak, to another valley. The peaks and valleys in the dice roll represent the actual peaks and valleys of the patrol.
At the beginning of each leg, a different player rolls their dice pool to generate the terrain and encounters they will find along the journey. This way, you also have to note the dice results between the Peak and the Valley as well.
Furthermore, it would almost require some kind of table like this Wondermark diagram:
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| [Do] New Sketch from Liz! |
[28 Oct 2009|08:58am] |
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Another sketch for one of the double-page chapter openers that will go in the book.
I love the surreal perspective she's been working into the last couple illustrations. Also, I am now realizing one of the principle characteristics of pilgrim character design:
Hats and scarves are to Do what belts and swords are to Kingdom Hearts. :D
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| [Do] On matters gonzo. |
[19 Oct 2009|08:45am] |
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There's been a fair amount of discussion lately about how prone collaborative games are to going off the rails into silly gonzo territory. Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple is a collaborative game, so I need some way for players to be able to discuss these issues without spending a bunch of time on the eye-glazing RPG theory stuff. Just telling players "Agree on a 1-10 rating for your gonzoness" wouldn't work.
So I'm actually creating a formalized Gonzometer for Do. Actually, it just packages up some old ideas in the game and gives them a catchy name. It'll be a tool for helping players decide how big or small they want the story's scope to be and how heavy or light they want the mood to be.
You can see a rough introduction to the concept on the live draft here and its actual implementation here. By using a common vocabulary for scope and mood, players can at least the beginning of creating a mutual agreement about how gonzo the story can be.
Big
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Opera | Gonzo
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Heavy ------------------------|------------------------- Light
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Melodrama | Sitcom
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Small
I'd like to discuss more about this "gonzo" stuff though.
What does gonzo mean to you?
What is good about gonzo?
Why does gonzo get a bad rap?
When is gonzo appropriate and fun?
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| [Do] Decoupling "I want to see more of this" from "I want to be good at this" |
[15 Oct 2009|10:59am] |
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So Rob Donoghue posted this thought:
When a player buys a power or skill at a high level (like a fighting skill), he is communicating one of two contradictory messages. The first is “I am really interested in this thing, and I want to really get pushed hard within it” and the second is “I want to be good enough at this that I don’t have to worry about it.” The contradiction means that this is a potential landmine unless the GM takes the time to communicate with the player to figure out which is which.
To which Josh Roby offered a solution:
Which makes me ponder: what if you design a game with two ratings for each stat: the number that determines your effectiveness as we’re used to, and the rating that determines some sort of incentive-reward when you use it (similar to octaNe). The idea being, you are displaying both what you’re good at and what you want to see in play, avoiding the two-contradictory-messages thing.
This idea is really great for games where the fun comes from players willfully getting their characters into trouble. Sound familiar? As always, I look at things through the thick lens of my current projects, so bear with me.
Do has these eight symbols:
Each symbol represents a different kind of trouble.
I could see a character sheet where each of these blank spaces were lined up in a row, each waiting for you to choose which trouble-symbol to put there. The symbols on the far left get increasing rewards every time you get into that kind of trouble. The symbols on the far right represent how good you are at getting out of those kinds of trouble.
MORE REWARD----------
( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( )
---------------MORE SKILL
Of course, that would introduce some kind of target number mechanic and a point-based economy not present in the current draft, but it's still something to think about for another project or a future add-on. Thanks for the thoughts, Josh and Rob!
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| [Do] Kids today. |
[12 Oct 2009|09:39am] |
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I'm turning this sidebar into something different.
"Sigh... today young visitor Arik the Tripping Eagle knocked over the Precariously Balanced Collection of Ancient Statuary."
"That's nothing! Young visitor Miva the Hungry Wing came to class covered in what remains of the Garden of Unbelievably Ripe Tomatoes."
"All I have to say is that Young visitor Torlo the Honey Jar must be kept away from bears at all times."
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| Mad Libs/Generator as Actual Play |
[09 Oct 2009|03:09pm] |
I've been noodling various game concepts in which syntax or sentence structure is the central material of influencing the story in a game. My current obsession is this thing:
This reminded me so much of White Wolf-style Attribute+Skill game mechanics that I got to thinking about a game played entirely with randomly generated statements of action. Let's use a basic combat statement as a template here.
"I [Attack] the [Target] with my [Weapon]."
So a player would have a character sheet that is just a list of possible Attacks and Weapons:
Attack
Influence
Maim
Insult
Weapon
Magic Missile
Sword
Scathing Wit
A GM might have a ready list of possible targets as well:
Target
the Lamp
the Boar
the Wizard
And... Now I forget where I was going with this. Maybe add numbers to each item in the list? Bleh. Nevermind!
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| Annie Rush Sighting! |
[07 Oct 2009|10:28am] |
The mysterious and reclusive Annie Rush dropped by last night for a pit stop on her way across the country. Check out the blurry fun!
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| [Neutrino] It's like Portal, but you walk through walls instead of teleporting. |
[04 Oct 2009|10:22am] |
I had this idea for some kind of game, be it video or board, inspired by Portal. I liked that the basic premise of portal was that you had one tool (portals) with which to solve all the puzzles set before you. It was nice, simple and had a lot of emergent complexity.
So along the same lines, I thought you could take another odd ability and make a Portalish game out of that. At first, I was playing around with time travel, but found that it had been done already in several flash games and mini-games.
Then I got to thinking about the ability to walk through walls. The whole idea of Portal is that you're stuck in a room that you can't leave except through solving a puzzle, right? So how do you trap a person who can simply pass through any solid object they like?
I had a loose vision in my mind of a floating pixie-like ball of light that can pass through walls. Like a neutrino, for lack of a better term.
Anyway, I tossed this idea on Twitter and got some rough ideas (thanks to Rob Donoghue and Justin D Jacobson:
• The Ghost Problem: Imagine the neutrino being required to interact with solid matter. Because it just passes through stuff, it can't affect anything in its natural state.
• The Ghost Blessing: However, because it is unaffected by solid matter in its natural state, it also experiences no danger from whatever hazards we might place in these puzzles.
• The T-1000 Gimmick: Remember in Terminator 2 when the T-1000 passes through the jail bars, but gets momentarily stuck when the pistol he's holding gets caught? Perhaps that is one of the central puzzle elements of this game: You can pass through walls, but you are trying to get something out of the room that cannot pass through walls.
* Dragging: We had this idea that if the neutrino passed through matter, it would retain the attributes of that matter. So if it passes through something purple, it would turn purple. If it passed through concrete, it would turn sluggish and solid. Walls-as-filters, essentially. If you pass through multiple walls, those attributes overlap one another. So if you pass through a purple wall, then a concrete wall, the neutrino becomes a purple concrete particle.
• Timing: However, the neutrino would only retain these attributes for a short period of time. So if there were an object you needed to manipulate as a purple, concrete particle, then you would only have a limited window of opportunity in which both of those attributes would still be in effect.
Anyhoo, that's the very loose idea. I'm no good at coming up with puzzles though, so I'll probably figure out some way to make this an abstract board game.
Perhaps a two-player game in which each player has one neutrino pawn and an array of other pieces, each with their own attribute. If the Neutrino passes through any of these attribute-pieces, it retains those attributes?
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