151. Practice With Small Spaces
Explaining magic cards verbally to a podcast requires you to get good at shorthanding or being explicitly clear. Posting for Twitter asks you to cram a lot of information into a small space and not waste any. This is useful for learning tight wordings. If you can’t fit the core game loop of your game on a page, it’s probably too complicated. Pare it down and see if you can get that core game down.
152. Promoting Yourself Venues
Twitter doesn’t SEEM to be particularly good for promoting your work, to me, so far. Video reviews seem to do a lot of business. Print-on-Demand games are on some big reviewers’ blacklists. That’s not the core of it, though – I’m still investigating some sources (and indeed, research into this is part of what held me up here!).
153. Promoting Yourself Costs
My budget for promoting my games is limited to ‘attending conventions. ‘ I have paid for literally no advertising. This means that my experience is going to be different if you do have money to spend on things like packaging, artists, etc. On the other hand, I hear from people who pay for advertising it’s not really all that valuable – you’re usually better off using that money to get your product in front of reviewers and trusting their audience but I can’t guarantee that either.
154. Know Your Own Values
I keep my values as a designer foremost whenever I’m stuck at some point on the design of a game. I want to respect my players and their feelings. I want my games to be available for people who like to play them. I don’t want people to buy games of mine that are bad for them. I don’t want to impose my games in their home spaces, for example. I don’t want to make players pay more for product where some components are redundant and unnecessary
Kingdom Death,
155. Making Is Nice
Creating things is such a nice feeling. I probably will never be commercially successful at this but I love doing it so much. I realised that even as I work towards making this into a thing I do for money, the process of making is without doubt, fun.
156. Structural Simplicity
In terms of ease of design, Solo > Symmetrical PVP > Asymmetrical PVP > Symmetrical Co-Op > Asymmetrical Co-Op.
157. Room for Masterminds
In Asymmetrical Co-op, there’s room for a ‘mastermind’ role for players who aren’t confident yet, to learn the game: Someone who is not at risk but can provide information to the other players by peeking under cards, for example
158. Paul Booth’s Unstructure
Particularly ornate games want to create this thing called ‘Unstructure.’ Unstructure is from ‘Paratextuality in Board Games,’ the book. Worth a read, but lemme try and summarise here: Unstructure is the feeling the game doesn’t have rules you can divine, WITHOUT being random-seeming. Cause-and-effect of varying impact. The bigger and more elaborate your game, the more likely you have unstructure. But it’s a precarious balancing act to maintain. Consider Mass Effect Romances, where the mass of flags and variables collapses down into ‘be nice’ or ‘don’t be nice. ‘
159. Verisimillitude
Games are about our illusion of how things should happen, not about realism. ‘Realism’ is usually an excuse.
160. Don’t Make Fallible Votes
If your game has a vote system in it, you absolutely have to have a tie-breaker. Even ‘too many failed votes end the game’ works.