241. Hotline Why Am I
There aren’t enough Sunset Noir games. It’s the aesthetic you can see in games like Hotline Miami and Drive and I really dig it. Consider if you like that flavour of vile neon and summer haze, see what you can do in that.
242. Encourage People, Seek Things That Encourage You
Being encouraged is, to me, super important. I would often float ideas to people, see people express disinterest or dislike, and bail. I’m lucky, I seem to have a kajillion bad ideas I can sift through and refine, but finding people who will try shit out is super important. So, be nice to the people who are helping you, just as a general rule. Playtesters, artists, other developers you share ideas with
243. Err On High Contrast
Bright colours, clear contrasts. Printed material doesn’t look the same as stuff on a screen, so go vibrant. Muddy is bad.
244. Take Notes!
WRITE DOWN EVERY IDEA.
I’ve noticed an explosion in my notebooks and I’m seriously considering starting Bullet Journaling just to get into good habits of tracking information and building up a library of notes I can reference later.
245. And Then Double-Check Those Notes
Revisit notebooks a few months later. You’ll find your old ideas were a bit bad but now you have new tools to approach them.
246. Freeing From The Marble
A big part of new game design is finding the Shit That Doesn’t Work and carving space away from it. Negative design space as it were. If you’re Mark Rosewater and you have a team and a company backing you, this stops being true. But I’m talking about respecting your limits.
247. Learning How To Make Structure
Daniel Solis provides a really excellent video on designing card faces here:
248. PULP IS GOOD
Right now you get a lot of mileage out of ‘GAME, but with CTHULHU. ‘ Do this, but with other pulp stuff.
PANDEMIC, but with TARZAN
RISK, but on BARSOOM
TICKET TO RIDE, but with LESBIAN BIKER GANGS
248.5. Pro Twitter Bonus Tip
Twitter will almost always get you at least a pity like for LESBIAN BIKER GANGS
249. Remember People Need To Carry Your Game!
Think of storage solutions. The LCG ‘one big box you can put expansions in’ is optimistic but kinda asshole to do up front.
250. Crowded Spaces
There are SO MANY 18XX games out right now that branding a new one has a serious problem of not duplicating another game’s year. Some clever dick went to UR 1830 BC, but that is a deep-sunk well and there’s a lot of Expectations. No 18XX game I know of, as yet, has a mechanic for clearing out the corpses of the Chinese slaves you used to build the railroads