Keep on moving

 Burst of inspiration hasn't faded just yet - in between various non-game things today, I also spent a chunk of time making movement cards for Under a Violet Moon, and a little time on character tokens as well.  I think I have enough now to put together a proof-of-concept prototype; not the full game, but enough that I at least know it works more or less how I want it to.  One thing that does worry me is the risk of the game deteriorating into endless walking in circles around the board, and right now I'm not sure how well I'm going to be able to spot that, or to fix it if I do.  But I'll see how it works with the dozen cards I came up with so far, and then adjust once I have any idea how this thing looks on the table and not just in my head.

 

EDIT (because I don't feel like writing a separate post for this): proof of concept is successful, and to me messing with it by myself it does feel like there's interesting strategy here.  I'm also quickly spotting that I need a lot more variety in the movement cards, because with the dozen different ones so far it's still really hard to move anyone where you want them.  But at least I can be confident that once I do come up with a bunch more I will have a fun game at the end of t.

Slowing down, and maybe picking up again

After the push to finish Neon Knights I really haven't had the brainpower to do much designing in the last couple weeks.  I mean, I think I earned a break after that, but still.  Not that it's been entirely a break - I've started a playtest on RPOL (setting creation was fun, they're still getting their characters together before the action starts), and I've also gotten recruited onto a small team designing an action/horror game that's looking fun so far, but isn't going to get too much attention on this blog for now since it's someone else's game a lot more than it is mine.

I've also been playing around with some of my other game ideas to see which one might be my next serious focus*, and today I had some inspiration after work which I think answered that question.

Under a Violet Moon is a 1v1 game about fae trying to kidnap villagers during the (unspecified) big festival.  The board is a circular grid, where the villagers dance around the maypole or central bandstand or whatever gets illustrated into that spot someday.  At the start of the game, the fae player randomly determines four of the villagers to be fae in disguise.  Players then take turns moving any pieces they want around the board; cards determine how many pieces and which way they move this turn, but not which pieces, so both players are able to move humans and fae equally.  Fae capture villagers, and villagers eliminate fae, by maneuvering them into specific positions on the board.  Fae win if they capture more than half of the villagers, and villagers win if they eliminate three out of the four fae.

Today's work was sketching out the board and the basic rules.  Next step is to design the movement cards.  Then I can start prototyping and testing.  No idea about timeline; I'm anticipating that movement cards will be one of things I get stuck on and take months until I'm satisfied with even a first attempt, but let's see what happens.

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*No, I haven't forgotten about Explorers of Legend, I'm just not feeling that one currently.  I just finished a rough draft for an RPG, I need to work on lighter stuff for a while.

Neon Knights - ready for playtest

Here we are, end of the weekend and I have just uploaded the playtest draft for Neon Knights.  With as long as it took me to write about 25 pages of content, I have a whole new respect for authors who are putting out 2-300 page RPGs.  But I'm happy with what I have here.

Next steps - run test games, fix it up as needed, commission some art, spend way too much time learning Scribus, make this thing look like the kind of book a person would be willing to pay money for, and then post it to DriveThru.  Any bets on whether this will take more or less than one year from today?

Neon Knights - almost there...

 Had a really productive weekend as far as this draft goes.  Biggest single thing is that, after my previous second guessing about stats, I went ahead and changed it.  Instead of the default approaches from FAE, Neon Knights has these approaches:

• Courage - use this when you act in the face of danger, knowingly putting yourself at risk to achieve your goal
• Diligence - use this when you act with patience and steady focus rather than rapid action
• Wisdom - use this when you act according to your knowledge and understanding of the world
• Empathy - use this when you act according to your understanding and care for other people
• Prudence - use this when you act to minimize harm to yourself or others, even if it means giving up an opportunity
• Prowess - use this when you act by way of raw physical ability

 Not sure yet how that will actually work out in play, but I like the themed stats in general, and I feel like this fits better with a game about knights than if I had kept the original Flashy, Clever, and so on.  Honestly I was hoping I could just lift this from the list of virtues in Pendragon but those didn't feel like a good fit either, so I had to work out my own list and here it is.  I do still need to go back to Pendragon though and see what else it does to differentiate characters who are all essentially the same "class."

Besides that, I finished writing up the current rules for vehicles, including providing stats for a few generic examples, and I also wrote up some sample artifacts (I talked before about cartridges, which are the main loot in this game to fill the role of "magic items" in other games, but they're not the only cool treasure that exists).  At this point the draft is really close to where I want it in order to start playtesting.  I have a couple more rough spots that I want to clean up beforehand, and I need to stat out a couple of sample enemies in the unlikely event that someone else tries to run this game on their own while it's still in alpha, and then I think that's it.  With a little luck (and effort) it might be ready to go by the end of next weekend.

...and the other holiday weekend

 New Year's weekend was busier than I expected.  Nevertheless, I was able to finish what I wanted to do for the setting chapter and the equipment section for Neon Knights - I don't know if they're done necessarily, but it's at least enough for a playtest draft.  Now I just need to get the other chapters up to that same level and I can actually start running this game.

In the meantime, I'm back to questioning whether I want to stick with the standard approaches from Fate Accelerated, or a custom list based on knightly virtues (very likely to be stolen from inspired by Pendragon).  This had been my original idea for the game but then it went off in a direction that wound up feeling like I was trying too hard to be clever and losing game clarity as a result.  So for the moment I'm using the FAE terms, but maybe I'll change it up after all, if I can put together a list of 6-9 virtues that all sound like they would serve the same function as game stats.

Progress report from the long holiday weekend

 I swore that I would get some game writing done over the long weekend, and I actually did.  Nothing exciting, but I made some progress fleshing out a few sections of Neon Knights to get it closer to my minimum threshold to put out a playtest draft.  I think all that's left at this point is to beef up the chapter on setting description, clean up a few rule discrepancies, and stat up some sample bad guys.  There's still a lot more to go before the book is complete, but those three things would be enough for me to be satisfied that I can start running playtests and publicly sharing this draft.

There was one other design-related thing I did over the weekend.  For a while I've been pondering how to write a game around a certain IP, and this weekend I got an outline together for how it might be doable.  I don't want to say more until I contact the IP creator and get the green light to move forward with it, and I'm not going to do that until after New Year's at the very least.  But since part of the reason for this blog existing is to keep myself accountable, I have to at least acknowledge that this is where a chunk of my time went.

Dwarven Guild of Engineers: Lessons from PAX Unplugged

 I don't know how the pros do a whole convention - I spent one day at PAX Unplugged, only half of which was in "designer" mode and the other half as general audience, and felt completely wiped out after that.  Maybe I'm just old and out of shape (which is a stereotype that definitely does not apply to game industry professionals, right?).

But if you're here at all, it's presumably to read about games, not to read my personal kvetching.  So yeah, I did spend half the day in the Unpub room where I got to test out DGE with a bunch of different groups, 3-6 players at a time.  People were clearly enjoying it, and I got a request for a Spanish translation (publishers take note, that's international demand for this game!).  Some of the highlights for me were using a steam powered accordion to make you a better fighter (because it's a cardio workout), using a reverberating brick to convince humans that you can turn straw into old (because nothing does the job like brain damage), and many enjoyable arguments about an invention following the exact phrasing of the patron's request and any consequences outside of that being irrelevant.

In terms of game feedback, one suggestion that came up early on, and which I implemented for the rest of the day, was that whoever won the last round should go first to reveal and explain their invention in the current round.  I don't know how important it actually is, though an argument could be made for slight advantages based on whether you speak before or after everyone else, but in any case it worked well enough and no one objected to it.  Besides that, there were two things that people brought up most frequently and which I will definitely be working into the game.  One was to put colors or icons or something on the front of the cards to make it easier to remember which deck they are from (I quickly saw the value of this after multiple rounds of organizing the discard piles and then shuffling them back into the right deck for the next game), and to add some kind of rule to let players change out some or all of their cards if they don't like anything in their hand.  I gave it some thought over the course of the day and eventually came up with: before playing an invention, you may discard all of your Base and Mod cards.  Draw the first Base and Mod cards from their respective decks and automatically play that as your invention.  At the end of the round, draw three of each so you have a full hand like normal.  I didn't think of it in time to actually test it out, but I did mention the idea at the end of the last game that I ran, and one of the players described it as "when you forgot to work on the project and suddenly realize it's due tomorrow," which I love.  So that's definitely going into the next iteration of the game.

I also talked with a couple of publishers and got as far as "they acknowledge my existence," which is a step in the right direction for me.  No exciting news yet, but who knows what the next 2d12 months might bring?