I closed last month's progress report indicating that I was going to take a bit of a break because I'd just finished Dragonborne and needed a bit of a breather, so for once I actually did that. I didn't spend the whole month frantically banging out games. Instead I just played a bunch of Super Robot Wars V and painted miniatures. This isn't to say I did nothing, of course.
Outside of working on Placeholder Productions games, I had a terribly slow time working on my latest model kit, a 1/100 Gundam Virtue, because my new airbrush has been having all kinds of issues while has been maddening. Anyway, here's what I worked on: Well, I got quite a bit done last month including the biggest thing: publishing Dragonborne (go buy it). It even sold a few copies and I have real evidence of other people playing it somewhere on Earth! I've also gotten feedback from a few people, including some stuff that needed edits which I did up ASAP. There's now an errata sheet and everything but on the whole I'm very pleased with this launch. It also means one more project down, so now to move on to other things...
Well, I didn't succeed at everything I'd set out to do, but only because I'm doing such a bang-up job at everything. That's a pretty decent excuse. I've also been spending a lot of time working on scale modelling with my dad of WWII aircraft. He kind of got me interested in the aircraft and I'm showing him how to do the modelling. So some of the work on games has been stalled a little bit, but I'm still working to finish what I've got. DragonborneNot a bad showing for Dragonborne at the Game Jam. I was glad that my plans coincided with it's run, since I don't know if I would have been focused enough it push it over the finish line otherwise. It ended up consuming quite a bit of work to finalize it, but the project is actually finished now. The words and graphics are all in place. I haven't published it yet because I want to make a final editing pass at all the text, but this is no small endeavour, with over 100 pages of total text content. But I expect it to be finished within the next month, easily. I also played three more campaigns, travelling along each of the story branches, and it more or less checks out. I'll have some more thoughts in a wrap-up post once I publish it, but that will come very soon hopefully. Also, I commissioned a cover. I've never done this before and it wasn't cheap, but my own art skills are atrocious and I'm curious about how it will impact sales. Even if it makes no difference, I'm happy with it. Since I last checked in I've made a lot of progress on a small number of projects. I decided to focus on these so I could bang them into either a playable state, or in the case of Tailwinds, power through to completion. I did tons of work on asset development for Tailwinds in particular. It's now very much in the finalizing grind phase, where I'm fine-tuning it through tons of testing and putting together the rulebook in a digestable way. So, although I did lots of work, it's very focused and not very interesting. But it's worth providing an update on regardless to help me stay focused. I've also been in a funny situation where my own neurosis has put my in a weird situation. I want to finish my own games but I also want to play some other stuff. Every now and then, though, I feel like if I'm going to spend time playing a game, I should probably devote it to playing one of my own. This is probably not relatable for most people. But I really like to finish things I start and I only have so much time to play games. Spending that time on development is valuable. On the other hand, playing a game somebody else has just given to me instead of needing me to take noes and tweak things constantly is such a different experience. I've been playing some Table Air Combat recently, which is interesting and I should probably write a review of separately. I'm still painting Warmachine stuff very slowly. And my wife is crocheting Narwhals and taking photos of them cruising in space. It's all good. But here's the game development stuff:
When I said I was going to spend less time working on my blog and more working on my games, I meant it. Since my last post there's been a lot going on, which includes a wild diversion into uncharted territory. In this post I'll be detailing progress on all the projects I'm currently developing. This will have the appearance of somebody spiraling wildly out of control with no plan, but rest assured, it's exactly what it looks like. But a lot of these games are fairly far along in development now, and they need lots of testing and fiddling with as opposed to broad-strokes work. The issue, then, becomes playing games, which is still kind of limited for me. And conveniently, none of these playtesters overlap with each other. It's kind of perfect. Part of what inspired this post was also to take stock of what I`ve actually gotten done in terms of game development recently. For some reason I've felt like I`m spinning my wheels not getting much done, but it's just not true! It's been a while since I said I was going tof ocus less on writing the blog and more on working on games. How well has that worked out? Well... pretty good. I don't know if I'd say I'm more productive, but I have gotten quite a bit done, and taking time off from weekly writing has also given me many more topics I'd like to explore at some point. I've mostly been working on Tailwinds. There's two reasons why: first, it's a solitaire game I can test on my own, and has a pretty small footprint. I can pack and unpack the game in less than five minutes with everything needed and records kept. That's a huge consideration, since miniatures wargames I design need me to set up my table extender, get out the terrain kits, etc. So it's perfect for that. The other isue is people have been exiting their bunkers and are playing games again, so I've been largely occupied playing stuff like Infinity, Warmachine, and also taking care of dogs in bulk. However, the dog sitting does allow for work on Tailwinds, so that's what they call "synergizisticization" in business I believe. I've been testing Proving Grounds, my combined-arms mercenary skirmish wargame, a lot more lately. And the experience remains true that the more you p[lay a game, the more the cracks in it's facade start to show. While developing a new game this is normal: the closest I've ever come to getting things right on the first pass was Afterglow, and it still took almost a year of development to get it where I wanted. PG is at once a more traditional land-based wargame, and also harder to test because those games come with baggage and PG has a lot of unique systems. It originally started as "what if Titanfall but in miniature" and has gradually turned into much more of an all-around army game, but Pilots are still important units with special rules. The issue isn't thematic, but rather that the game has a lot of fairly unique mechanics. Unlike Afterglow, which is presenting a less popular form of conflict (super advanced hyperlight ship combat), PG is working on well-treaded territory. How many systems can you add to one game and keep it from feeling too alien or making it too slow? But more importantly, how many of these overlapping systems can you really test at once? Since the post that functioned as the blog recap I'd decided I don't want to discontinue work here entirey but instead I don't want to keep working on the blog at nearly the pace I had previously. This has predictably led me to have more time to work on games, which is good, but without the weekly deadlines I've assigned myself, I don't know if I'm actually bring more productive. It's kind of hard to tell. That said, I've made a lot of work on Proving Grounds. This includes having all the mercenary models painted, magnetized and based, which was obviously a pretty big step! I also have all the units cards finished and the player reference. So then I actually played it. I've discussed previously about the importance of just slamming out a playable prototype of a game as early as possible to avoid wasting time on something that isn't very much fun, or leading you into a dead end of design with mechanics that are kind of crappy. Well, I ignored my own experience and advice on this with Proving Grounds for sure and went in on many hours of painting and building, plus making statblocks and cards.
I'm happy to report it was extremely informative and productive, and the game is quite fun, but obviously still rough around the edges. Few things are as revealing as a first playthrough of a game in development. 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 Philosophy |
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