Projects

[zircher]

What are you working on or looking forward to starting?

Earlier, I posted my New Year's Resolutions. I don't put fitness and financial stuff there, for me that's part of adulting. I can't pay the bills if I don't take care of myself. What I always write down are creative projects for my lists. This is what gives me life.

First off is NaGaDeMon 2019. This main group for this is on Facebook, but you can find bits of it all over game creation space. National Game Developer/Design Month is essentially the NaNoWriMo of game design. I love taking Thanksgiving week off just so I can create or finish a new game project.

I've also got some more specific items on my list. I'm learning/re-learning VB.NET so I can take the old Fire on the Suns Battle Engine that I wrote for Greg Ellis in VB98 and make it run on newer machines. It's solely for Greg since FotS is his creation, but I'm enjoying the challenge of working around the limitations between the two versions.

I want to re-write HymenopTerra, my love letter to Chitin:I that is a solo hex hive crawl. Part of that re-write will be to create new artwork for it.

I wrote It's not my Fortune! for NaGaDeMon 2018 and I want to create some faux tarot cards and improve its layout before putting it up on DriveThruRPG. Future! and Fortune! are both Fate Accelerated quick start tools.

I also plan to create a domino deck and perhaps some more playsets for The Trouble with Rose.

If that's not enough, I want to lay the ground work for two 2020 projects. One of them will be a modular war game engine. I'm looking at Godot (https://godotengine.org/) as a possible dev tool for that. The other item is something of an internet dare, make a sci-fi game using d12 dice. It's nothing new, Broken Gears is a classic example. But, it is something that tickled my fancy.

Will I complete all of these? Maybe. I'm actually good about hitting the 80% mark on my creative projects from one year to the next. The journey and learning new things is part of the fun for me.

What is your Muse asking of you this year?

[Leoff]

Wisdom!
Wisdom is a card-trading game. Set thousands of years in the future, the civilizations of Earth have spread, broken down, disconnected and reconnected many times. Aboard the monastic ship Sophia, your order plies the galaxies seeking and re-assembling the wisdom of old from whatever loose papers you can, re-assembling them into manuscripts.
It combines aspects of Cranium, Pit, and assorted question games.
Collector cards are in sets of six, and contain segments of wise or less-wise writings, ranging from dictionaries, Elizabethan sonnets, prayer books, down to shopping lists. You get two a turn, and gain more by completing Task cards of varying difficulty.
The playing level is about 8 year old level, and child friendly, but the literature (aside from the shopping list) is more college or high school reading level.

[zircher]

Cool, how far in have you gotten on Wisdom! cards? I know there are a lot of options when it comes to tools. Kedamono here on the forums recently produced two card games. I need to pick his brain and see if I can get him to post his tools and processes.

[Leoff]

Content? Lots and lots. The mechanical aspects of producing cards I have no clue about. There are several Ontario companies which will print games (most expensive for a one-off, reasonable for doing production runs), and as for doing up the prototype, I can just get it printed on card stock at the local print shop and go over to the church to use the paper guillotine one afternoon. This is a cards-only game, though there are two or possibly three sizes of card (three types), so I don't have pieces to fuss with.

[zircher]

That's why I'd like to get Kedamono to post (nudge, nudge.) He's delivered two card games through DTRPG. So, he's got some practical expertise. He's a convention this weekend doing demos of those games. So, hopefully, we'll get some stories for the trenches as well.

[harborpirate]

I've been messing with a gamemaker prototype based loosely on the game mechanics of the Friday the 13th game for the NES. I want to prove out whether my theory is correct: namely that there are good design "bones" in that game, but that they are utterly ruined by a few terrible design decisions:
* Bad map design / navigability
* Items that are required to complete the game are dependent upon random drops
* Hidden game rules that are not easily discoverable

My goal this year is to get far enough along to have something playable.

[zircher]

Coolness. Just curious, GameMaker, GMS, or GMS2? My son used GM back in the day and I have GMS. But, I have not taken the plunge and bought GMS2 (and may never since GMS is still quite functional and I'm learning Godot.)

For those that are wondering, GMS = GameMaker Studio. GMS2 is essentially a complete redesign/rewrite and you have to make a pretty substantial financial investment to 'upgrade'.

[harborpirate]

Coolness. Just curious, GameMaker, GMS, or GMS2? My son used GM back in the day and I have GMS. But, I have not taken the plunge and bought GMS2 (and may never since GMS is still quite functional and I'm learning Godot.)

For those that are wondering, GMS = GameMaker Studio. GMS2 is essentially a complete redesign/rewrite and you have to make a pretty substantial financial investment to 'upgrade'.

GMS. I got it for practically nothing when they had a Humble Bundle just prior to the release of GMS2. That bundle came with some other tools like Spriter Pro as well.

[Leoff]

This week I ran off some prototype cards for Wisdom!. I thought of something too late. I didn't have page breaks between the groups of Task cards (Memory, Reason, and Skill). So when I went down to the copy shop to get them printed on different colours of card stock I couldn't divide them up right. About six Reason tasks are the right colour for Memory, and six or twelve Skill tasks will be coloured for Reason.
It won't actually matter in the first few play-throughs, but I don't have my ideal Fragment cards lined up either. I've got the twelve sets, but not all the ones I want, and if I want to properly produce the game for sale there are copyright things to not get wrong. That's a whole 'nother pile of stuff to sort out.

But if I get busy with the scissors or paper guillotine we can try it out at church this Sonday. I'll let you know how it goes.

[zircher]

Sounds like good times and making progress.