You know how I write these things ahead of time?
I’m writing this like twelve hours ago. Or twenty four? I’m not sure, I am tired.
At the start of this month in my brainstorming post, I set myself a list of goals:
- A twitter thread showing when I worked on the game and generally what I did
- A Gamecrafter entry for the game that includes
- The Game Material (cards and any tokens necessary)
- Packaging (box and storage option)
- The Rule Book (both the rules text and how it’s presented)
- A standardised template for the game language that can be easily used
- A receipt for an order for a physical prototype or two of Camp Osum
- A Print-and-Play file for the game to give to my Patreon Patrons
How’d that work out?
Twitter thread? Check. In this thread there are some ideas I never put a name to, with the big one being homogenous play form. This is when a game presents you with a bunch of pieces that are all, more or less, the same thing, and to start playing you just configure them fungibly. Great examples of this are Poker, Bridge, and from my own games, Chin Music. Games with this design are fast to set up and it conveys a different feeling that ‘the pieces’ are the same. It has me thinking about some of my games that can be translated to change the play form just to make set up faster.
Gamecrafter entry? Yep. I knew I wasn’t going to put the game up for sale yet, the turnaround on that site is slow. But I have placed an order for a physical prototype of the game. What I am missing is a proper box cover, which is going to require art composition I don’t have the energy for right now, and which isn’t vitally important until I’ve seen the prototype tin label. We’ll have to see, becaussssseee…
It wound up being a tin game! In a mint tin! I have no idea how to do graphic design for a tin cover that looks good, so we’re going to have to learn this as part of the prototyping process.
I don’t have a standardised template for the game language that can be easily used… OH WAIT! No I know what this is. It’s this:
Often when making games in GIMP, I’ll do text editing in GIMP which means that sometimes wording gets changed in ways that makes it inconsistent from card to card. This time around, the wording was done here in an excel file. The eagle eyed will notice that I also failed here – I wasn’t consistently capitalising ‘DOOM’.
Still, it’s part of the making practice! Get the tools and get familiar with them.
Finally, is there a print and play file for my patrons? No! The audience feedback pulled me towards a format – mint tin shapes – that I didn’t have a template for, so if I wanted to spend another day building new templates, I could get that. But the intention is there.
… and yeah. That’s that. That’s a month’s work, out in public. I hope it was interesting to you.