Something Small

Hey, its been a while. After Kai left I didn't have a lot of desire to write much and so didn't make much progress on putting anything up here. After that I spent about a week going down to SLO to hang with some friends and then drove back up just in time to continue driving North to Olympia, Washington to celebrate my brother's graduation with him. During this time I started writing something about my personal aesthetics in the games I design, but it got swallowed by the internet. I just got back yesterday, so I wanted to put down a couple of things to not loose my streak of writing.

First I've started working and thinking more seriously about the drafting to populate a town game that I mentioned before. Since the basic "mechanic" is choosing cards and then putting them down and constructing a story based off of the meaning which they provide I've been thinking a lot about all the different interesting ways you can put meaning into cards which require almost no objective game information/rules. A game which does something kind of similar well is the picture/other weirder cards in monikers. The second part of the thinking I've done with the game is the idea of letting people change and add to the game as time goes on ala a legacy game. By providing some arts and crafts supplies to people I hope to have everyone who plays the game (literally) leave a mark on the game. This could be done by adding an image/symbol to a card, decorating the box, making a new card, or even destroying an old card. Giving the game a DIY crafty aesthetic will hopefully encourage the players to do this since it doesn't seem like something precious and more something I threw together. In addition, the idea of a game which uniquely evolves and changes with the group who play it is a pretty enticing one, and expanding the changes to not only be the result of design but to also be design I personally find pretty dope.

Second I just wanted to mention some of the cool stuff I've thought about from continuing to listen to Soren Johnson's podcast Designer Notes, specifically his interview with Amy Hennig. (specifically part 2) One thing which she talks about is how when making a cinematic and narrative game many times things are all very wishy washy until the last moment when they end up being nailed down due to the process, and that it is important to accept and work with that chaos instead of fighting against it. Though there are of course many differences, it reminds me greatly of many of the D&D games I enjoyed the most. If you try to exactly plan things out too far in advanced you end up just stifling the creativity and fun of the players. Instead, keeping things flexible in session and between sessions when planning what comes next leaves the most room for everyone to enjoy the experience no matter what happens. Also, she sounds like a really dope person and its cool to hear what she says.

I'm planning on trying to finish up the town drafting thing in the next couple weeks, so I'm probably going to do a post on its design and also showing off if I do some stuff to make WIZARD SQUABBLE look cool. I may also write my post about my aesthetic preferences in the next couple of weeks, but no promises.