Hey Man, well this is Babylon

This past Gamestorm, Jake Richmond and I won second place in a design contest. The contest was a “Junk Drawer Design War” – the organizer brought six identical bins filled with identical parts, most of which were salvaged from other board games. Each team of contestants had an hour (or two? i don’t remember) to create a game based on some or all of the included parts. Teams could trade with other teams for more parts.

Our game was called Laser Mummies.

The following rules are those we came up with on the fly during the design contest. So, without Further ado… Read more

I’ve found lately that I have been listening to two specific albums more than anything else while working on my design projects. They are:

1. Forbidden Forest: Impressions of George Winston by Taliesin Orchestra. There’s something about this album which deeply inspires me in the way no other music does. I’ve listened to all the original piano pieces upon which these tracks are based, but the originals just don’t compare to the orchestrated renditions. Starting with the very first track on the album, “Tamarack Pines,” I am swept away into a different realm of my creativity. Thanks immensely, Chris, for introducing me to this one.
2. Silent Hill Shattered Memories – original soundtrack by Akira Yamaoka. This is so far my favorite of the consistently amazing Silent Hill soundtracks, narrowly edging above the previous favorite, Silent Hill 4: The Room. Mary Elizabeth McGlynn’s vocal performances are stellar, as always, and in my opinion this album showcases the best work she’s done so far on the series. Something about the haunting ethereal underscores mixed with stellar (and sometimes totally rocking) vocal tracks keeps this one consistently repeating in the background while I work. I actually attempted to make a mix of nothing but McGlynn’s vocal tracks, but the project was only partially successful: the playlist was pretty damn awesome, but I found I couldn’t stop rocking along with the music long enough to get any actual work done.

There are a few others in rotation, including Danse Macabre by The Faint, Vegas by The Crystal Method, Nothing Lasts… But Nothing Is Lost by Shpongle, and the musical score to the movie Master and Commander. These play pretty frequently on my background mixes, but it is the two albums detailed above which always start it off, and which I always kick back into play when I hit a lull in the process.

What are yours?

After hitting some major design hurdles in Forevergotten, I decided to take a break from that project last night and return to my prior one: Billions and Billions of Bullets. I’m glad I did, too, because the issues that had previously halted my progress on that one a few months ago were easily overcome with time and a new perspective. Now I’m happily trucking along that creative track again, with some fresh new ideas and some fitting updates to old ones.

Probably the biggest update this time is that I’ve made a major breakthrough in redefining the four main Gun Characteristics, and how they tie into the core challenge mechanic. I’m pretty excited about this, because after a good couple of hours of work I had revamped the conflict rules and tooled them into something truly rewarding in all the ways they’ve been lacking until now. Faster-flowing, and with a speed-based strategy that I just love.

This weekend I’ll be running my very first Dogs in the Vineyard game. Judd gave me some initial pointers and it was a purely downhill ride from there to create a town that I hope will really hook the players. I’ll post the details after I run it. I’m hoping this can lead to a good three-to-five-session mini-campaign before we move to the next game in our new rotating group configuration.

This coming Monday – memorial Day! – sees the second annual May of the Dead celebration around the corner at Guardian Games. Last year’s event was stellar fun, and this year’s plans are promising to at least equal that level of awesome, if not exceed it.

My play-through of Alan Wake continues slowly, primarily because I’m playing it with at least two other very interested people watching along. We finished Chapter 3 on Wednesday night, and all were in agreement: that chapter took too damn long in comparison to the two that preceded it. On the other hand, if the following chapters are going to be that long as well, then maybe this game will have a satisfactory play length. That right now is a concern we all at my place share: that this game will be disappointingly short when played out-of-the box. My worry is that with two chapters of DLC already announced at launch time, this sixty-dollar new game might not actually be complete. If I finish the game without a feeling of satisfaction, I’m not certain how I will respond to that. The reviews have been pretty positive, however, so I’m not allowing myself to dwell too heavily on the possibility of disappointment just yet.

At this very moment, I’m glad to see that my XBox Live Gamertag here shows four of my favorite games on it, and one really awesome one that I mentioned just one paragraph above.

Here are some links:

1. Yet Another Fantasy Gaming Comic – I devoured the entire 1300+ strip series of this over the past weekend, and want all of you to enjoy it as well. It made me laugh something fierce, but actually brought a couple of tears to my eyes at various points. A damn fine epic comic.
2. Agree-a-Date – Got problems matching up your gaming schedules, or heck, your social calendars? This is the best free web tool I’ve found to organizing gatherings when the free time of the intended participants is hard to sync. I’ve used it several times, with smashing results.

I’m curious to get your input on this subject. When you have a creative project that steadily gains steam and then suddenly screeches to an inspirational halt, how do you handle (and hopefully overcome) it? Do you step away for a bit and work on other projects? Do you immerse yourself in entertaining distractions, hoping to feel out some new streams of thought fodder from the strata? What methods have you found to effectively jump-start your faltering creative processes?

After re-reading my last post, I started thinking a lot more heavily on the idea of lighting mechanics, and how they both are and can be implemented in games both video and tabletop.

Video Games

I find that lighting is most often used in video games for purely atmospheric and aesthetic purposes. That’s all fine and good, but let’s get down and talk about actual mechanical uses of lighting in games. In these cases, we’re looking for games in which the lighting has direct effects not just on the mood and sensory input of the player, but on the game’s tangible play. What I’m not talking about are games which use light to limit your intake of the game (Google the infamous “duct tape mod” for Doom III to see what players think about that kind of thing). What I am talking about are implementations of lighting which enhance the actual playing of the game.

While Dragon Warrior was already discussed as having a nicely-implemented lighting system, it doesn’t fit my criteria as defined above: DW’s lighting limits your perception, and doesn’t actually enhance the mechanics. I am hard-pressed to think of a single video RPG that I’ve ever seen to make use of lighting mechanically, in fact. Read more

This morning I hit what I think might be a minor breakthrough in the design blocks I’ve had lately on this project. A lot of my process as of late has been held up with a lot of inner conflict on what kind of play template I want this game to support. I have a few previous posts on this subject. This morning, a new idea came to me, involving splitting the meta-game functions among all the involved players.

I’m calling them Roles of Authority, and every player gets one – maybe more – at the beginning of the game. These roles assign various functions and authority domains to each player that extend above and beyond their standard character-focused realm of game control. For example:

The Mistress of the Rules: Her Role gives her the authority to make rules calls mid-game. She is responsible for reading the book, keeping tabs on the rules, and cutting short any rules arguments or look-ups that happen in a session. When she makes a call, the players must accept it and then return to the story.

The Master of the Many: This guy’s Role gives him the final call on any involvement of “The Many.” In this game, “The Many” is a term applied to any multitudinous force in the game’s setting and story: Noble Houses, riotous mobs, wild tribes, the Unwashed Masses, and more. Any player can involve The Many at any time during their narration, but the master of the many has the final say on such things, if he chooses to execute it.

The Master of the Action: His authority is over the framing and establishment of new scenes. While everyone has the ability to introduce new scenes and add elements to their framing, the Master has the final say, and is responsible to taking all the input and assembling it into something initially cohesive.

Mistress of the Fates: This player is responsible both for calling all ties and for inserting an element of the unexpected into scenes and challenges. Whenever the variables of a challenge are declared, the Master of the Fates can choose to insert one unexpected element into the middle of things, if so inclined.

I have a handful of others as well. The Roles are intended to be broad (mostly) in spectrum. I want there to be gray areas of contested authority. In those cases, anyone with a legitimate claim should speak up, and the authorities should work together to design an outcome.

I’ve read a handful of gaming blogs and campaign-mastery essays online which recommend doing things like this in most every game you play, but my intention here is to incorporate these roles into the very rules of the game, and have them directly affect the atmosphere of the mechanics themselves.

This is good. This breaks my current stalemate with myself. I like this, as it allows me to more freely distribute “central meta-game authority” to everyone at the table, and move back to the subject of actual in-game mechanics and flow.

Following up on the ideas from my last post on this project, I’ve been musing a lot more on both Play Focus and Player Roles. Until now, I’ve been operating under the idea of the players filling the roles of adventurers or wanderers of some sort, going out into the world under the guidance of a GM. I don’t really feel comfortable with that one, though.

So to get myself focused on the proper design mindset, I took some time out to write a first-draft of the back-of-the-book blurb this morning:

“You live in Shroud, a world completely forgotten by its own inhabitants, your pasts lost to the great Unknowing. Every year there are three months of Night, during which you stay inside, because that’s when the Horrible Things come out. But this year, their coming will be the worst ever, and you must push them back, or all is lost. The only way you can overcome them is to tell your stories and, by doing so, remember the Forevergotten.”

This is a game about uncovering the secrets of the forgotten past to defeat a great approaching darkness that can destroy everything you know – which isn’t much to begin with.

Read more

In a previous post I introduced my idea for the Lifetimer, which slowly counts to 12, signaling the end of your character’s journey, be it successful or failure. This morning on the bus, I had an epiphany. I now know what the Lifetimer will be: Read more

In my last post, I spilled out an extremely short-form bit of musings on a new game and setting that has been the most current subject of my creative attention. I am currently calling this project “Forevergotten,” and I’d like to now take a few moments to spill out some more ideas. This time, Let’s focus on what the players of this game actually do.

I have always been an ardent believer in at least one tenet which sets down in words something that I believe all game designers should be able to tell anyone about their games: “In this game, you do ___.” With very rare exception, I will not put money down on a game which can’t fill in that blank for me within the first five minutes of perusing its pages. Preferably, I want that information to be found right smack on the back cover, and if not, within the first three pages of the game’s text. I want to know what a game is about, and I want to know what player actions and ideas the mechanics and setting primarily emphasize. As such, I want to be able to define this on my own game before I spend any more time working out more mechanics. Read more

Lately I’ve been directing nothing short of a Furious Hellstorm of creative energy into a (relatively) new design project which I’m code-naming (and likely sticking with) “Forevergotten.” I’ve jammed out a whole slew of ideas, and now that I have gained enough of comfortable creative foundation, I want to share some of my notes. Some of this will likely be a bit rambly. Read more