I've now maintained this blog for a full year with a minimum of two posts a week, with the exception of a two-week break during the Christmas season. That was pretty much my goal when I started, and I feel I've articulated most of what I wanted to in the written form during that year. As somebody who despises the "content farm" mode of production, I think this is as good a time as any to declare I won't be doing the usual Thursday updates anymore but instead just doing weekly progress reports. I'll still write an article on something when I feel it's important to get my thoughts down, but otherwise this is pretty much going to be a stream of updates and a development log from now on. A year is a long time to spend writing anything, so there was a lot of content produced. I don't think many people actually read this, if any, so it was mostly just an exercise that allowed me to organize my own thoughts. I've gone ahead and organized some of those thoughts further here, with a recap of some of the most important posts I made over the last year. Game Components And AssetsMaking Your Own GamesDesign Discussions and PhilosophyRecap last week: Dragon Game
This was a far more ambitious goal than I'd originally anticipated. On the plus side I aslos came up with a proper title, at least for now: Tailwinds. In addition to doing a lot of solo gaming, I also play a lot of cooperative games. This is because my wife doesn't really like competitive games anymore, but still likes playing games. We play a lot together, and enjoy all types of teamwork-oriented experiences. Stuff like Spirit Island, Aeon's End, Pandemic Whatever, and so on are all regulars in our roster of games. We also play pretty much any videogame that's co-op, though we're picky and don't play anything if it hasn't hooked us in the first hour. Unfortunately, playing this many co-op games also means you see a lot of issues with the genre. As co-op games tend to be highly abstract or automata-driven, they have a lot in common with solitaire games, but also have unique challenges I feel often go unmet. The two biggest ones are what I'll be discussing in this article. Last week's goals: Talon Singularity
It is done, and up on BoardGameGeek as well as here. I really like making game stuff. I'm a hobbyist: I love not only making my own games, but modifications and additions for existing games. I guess if I was smarter, I'd apply my interest in tweaking and modifying existing products to software or cars, but instead I work on boardgames and stuff like a loser. In any case, I find these very enjoyable exercises in design, and they're useful palette cleansers when I'd getting burned out while working on one of my own projects. Last year, I did Delve Magic while developing Afterglow. It was a fun distraction that required only a little work on my part, and gave me and my wife hours of entertainment using assets I already owned.
Well, I'm at it again. I was playing Talon 1000, which I really like, but I was kinda getting tired of a few things and some rust was starting to appear on it. So I figured I'd shake things up a bit and try making my own module for it. This is Talon Singularity (TS). This week was all Talon, all the time. Talon Singularity
I also did some more work on the miniatures for Proving Grounds and some other stuff, including starting preliminary work on my next original game. While it's justifiable to think having three games on the go at once isn't smart, what this actually translates to is me working on just one game and the other two likely laying undeveloped for a long time. But, hey, this is a hobby, not a full-time job. I played a lot of EDH a while back. This was a format of Magic: The Gathering made up by a few guys in the middle of nowhere to entertain themselves, where the card pool was very broad and decks were initially built with the intent to use cards that were typically worthless. While EDH eventually was transmogrified by the horrific tendrils of Magic's NWO into the abomination known as Commander, EDH was really interesting for a few reasons. A big one was that before corporate sunk their awful teeth into it, it was expected that players would locally negotiate with one another about what kind of game they wanted to play and collectively set boundaries on power levels and acceptable ways to play. This isn't a new convention in gaming. I think, prior to the internet, the vast majority of games are played in this manner: local environmental factors trump everything else. As a result, a lot of games have plenty of leeway for allowing abusive tactics with the sort of safety valve of social pressure. If a given strategy is boring or bullshit, you can be called out and maybe ostracized, and then the problem is kind of self-correcting. It does require very basic social skills, but without a commodified tournament structure that forces you to play with random weirdoes, most people are doing this already without knowing it. However, EDH was kind of interesting because it springs from a game that is expressly designed for that sort of transactional tournament structure and because of it, is (allegedly) designed with abuse in mind and has a department of professionals trying to curtail that. It's interesting to see how these design philosophies contrast: the "abuse in mind" school where the rules are meant to be water-tight, playable as though they are a computer program, and the opposite where rules are a bit looser and players are expected to negotiate some hurdles themselves. To some extent this is like the hobbyist vs consumer divide, but that's a discussion of game audiences; this is the game designers. Last week's goals:
Uncommon Valor
I can't lie: most of my gaming time was spent playing Pandemic Legacy Season 0. But now that's done and the kitchen table can be reclaimed by other activities. I also painted some more miniatures for Proving Grounds, which was nice as I'm working at a glacial pace on those. But I'm happy with the results. |
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