I saw Lon Chaney Jr in a game cafe with the Queen, they were playing...

 First draft prototype is done:

https://screentop.gg/@DrMindermast/werewolves

Carry on.

Werewolves of London: enjoying some beef chow mein

I've been pushing hard on a couple of games recently and feeling like I need a break from all of them.  And also it hit me that PAX Unplugged is less than 6 months away, and I specifically want Werewolves of London to be the game that I am demoing there (and hopefully shopping around, if it's in good enough shape by then).  So I pulled that one off the back burner today and spent way too much time tracing over the city map to get images that I can use on cards.  That doesn't sound like a ton of progress, but I can't start testing the game if I don't have cards to use, so this is a good step in that direction.

Other assets I still need to create before I can set up the prototype and start testing for real: separate card decks for bidding and for when you own a territory; money tokens, in different colors for each player; game board with investigation track along one side and score track going around the other three sides.

And I guess at some point I might as well turn my pile of random notes into an actual rulebook...

Dolomball: 20 yard line? Is that a thing that sounds exciting to sports people?

Got all excited with the new revisions, got everything together quickly, got a test with other players this afternoon (one of whom also played last time, so he was able to recognize the changes).  General agreement that it's better now than it was, still not totally solid but much closer.  Both of the other players liked all of the new actions I introduced, and the system of having two options on a card and needing to choose which one.  Need to streamline some of the rules or leave things for players to decide in the moment, rather than having lots of specific rules about uncommon situations.  Also need to streamline the simultaneous resolution - it's not entirely off the table, but in its current form it still leaves things kind of unclear and hard to keep track of at times.  But the testers did give me some good ideas for further refinements.  And it is at the point now where I can start shifting from messing with the core mechanic to refining what's there.  Although after the push the last couple of weeks I think I need to take a break from this one for a bit.  Maybe for the next couple weeks I can resume focusing on Neon Knights revisions...

Dolomball: so about those developments...

Following up from the previous post - moving at what for me counts as "lightning speed," I put together the new cards and ran a solo test, and it worked really well.  Running through it once highlighted a bunch of annoying interactions and ambiguities that I will need to fix, but the core idea was good.  A side benefit that I noticed was that the game felt faster when playing just one card at a time than when it was sets of cards locked into a certain order and having to pause every three turns to think through the next set.  On the other hand, I noticed that, even with the overall mechanics feeling more lively and exciting now, the game still started to feel like it was dragging by the time I was about 2/3 through the deck.  Maybe it's just because it was me and two dummy players rather than three actual people interacting around the table, but for now I'm thinking that the win condition will need to be adjusted so the game ends while it's still exciting.  I'll see what happens with the next live test.

Oh, and I need to change the font again so the cards look cool but also are easy to read correctly.  It still astonishes me how much getting into game design has made me care about typefaces.

Dolomball - exciting developments

Well, exciting for me at least.  The new thing I'm trying after the last playtest is to put two different effects on each card, and you choose which one to use when you play the card (rotating it to indicate your choice - you have to commit before everyone reveals their actions for that turn).  Some of the cards just have a couple different basic options on them, others will have a basic option on one half, and the other half is stuff like being able to maneuver multiple pieces toward a target area, or reaching extra far to block an opponent's throw, or whatever other stuff I can think of.  I don't know how soon I'll have the new version ready, but hopefully it's not too long of a wait before the next test game...

Dolomball - moving again, but need to ricochet to a different direction

Finally got a chance today to test the new version of Dolomball with a couple other players.  There were specific elements they liked, as well as the triangle grid movement, but they found it difficult to strategize effectively due to the programmed movement and the cards often moving them too far, making it too easy to overshoot a target.  The challenge for me here is how to reduce this while still making it a game about the Dolomé specifically, and not just generic meeples that I declared to be some kind of aliens.  In Bulldogs, the Dolomé have a trait called Heavy Momentum.  In the RPG this is beneficial, as it gives them a bonus to plow through obstacles once they've built up some speed; for my board game, I'm seeing it as meaning that they have difficulty stopping or changing course while running around the arena.  That's why I went with programmed movement, and why you have to move in a straight line, with ricocheting being the only way to change direction in the middle of a move.  So the next big challenge for me is to figure out how to keep this element without it being overpowering and making the game worse instead of better.  The playtesters today gave me some good ideas to start with; hopefully it doesn't take quite so long this time for me to find the right way to implement them.

The nice thing about having too many projects at once is bouncing between them

Violet Moon has started going out to publishers, I need a break from revising Neon Knights, so today's work was focused on Dolomball.  I came up with some revisions a while ago, did the one solo test, and then forgot about it while I focused on pushing the other two.  So it took some time today for me to reread my notes from before and actually remember what I was doing, but once I was refreshed I was able to rewrite the rulebook to cover all the changes.  Got through the text today, still need to redo the gameboard, then the diagrams in the rulebook, and also finish updating the Screentop prototype.  It'll happen soon enough.  Probably.