Show Notes – 12/7/2011

• Business: Ghost Pirates boardgame on Kickstarter! Only 38 hours to go!
• Chat: Jason and I discuss the convergence of analog and digital in the tabletop/hobby gaming space. Example: FiascoMobile, an app I developed for accessing Fiasco playsets from anywhere.

Show Notes – 11/3/2011

• Kickstarter rewards, origami dinosaurs, and a story about discovering girls
• Shoutout to Martha!
• There’s a technique to watercolor!?
• Fiasco Mobile (is actually done: check it out at http://fiascomobile.ogreteeth.com)
• The creative process can take many forms – and what GS discovered while writing his thesis on the topic.
• Better Angels
• When is it done?
• Chad Underkoffler is responsible for how awesomely well Unknown Armies 2E is organized.
• Finish things…and don’t let GS operate on your brain.

I’m not sure quite when this happened, but my in-progress superheroes game “Project Planet Bugle” has been renamed to “Yellow Press” for the time being. It went through a great round of playtesting the weekend before last and a lot of interesting things got ironed out.

I have consistently found it more useful to bounce ideas off of a group of people who are actively trying to play the game, than to review things on my own. This game currently aims for 5 players, and during the last playtest I actually got to watch 5 players try to make sense of the game (awesome).

For anyone that has seen it before, you’ll recall that headlines were essentially minor bonuses that individual papers could get on actions. Well, they’ve just gotten a lot more important/interesting.

These are now cards that you can score for any hero, but also score better for your own hero/heel. This does a lot to address the apparent need for more of a narrative in the game. Supervillains will be actually plotting and whether or not the heros foil them will make a difference; papers can make and break reputations; and hopefully the game comes together like an issue or story arc.

I’m also working on improving the design of the cards, which has consistently done well in terms of improving the showing of the game, no matter what. Even my mediocre ability to do visual design scores points in terms of communicating the intent and information that is supposed to be there. See the headline cards above as an example: Start with the tabloid-esque block print words along the left sides. Boom. Newspaper headlines. The “Extra Extra” across the top functions more as a aggregation than anything else, loosely styled after a fancier newspaper like NYT or WAPO (that’s gonna catch some weird spam, I bet). The body font is set in Palatino, a relatively formal serif font that is a little rounder than (and specifically isn’t) Times New Roman. All of this is underlaid on a 10% grey background and faint newspaper column text, clearly identifying the card type.

They’re not even close to “done” and they still kind of embarrass me, but they came out more solidly than I expected.

There are other cards (which I’m not going to show yet) where I am very unhappy with the current state. And part of that trouble is the fact that I’m much more capable with pens/pencils/markers than I am with Illustrator. Using higher-end tools than you’re comfortable with creates a very problematic space to work in, because all of the little issues that you might gloss over in a pencil drawing are now high-resolution vector graphics that clearly show you every minor drawing issue. And sure, clip-art is great but it can only take you so far (unless that’s your goal: See Time & Temp). So for these other cards, I’ve decided that I’m going to literally go back to the drawing board and see if I can’t figure out some attractive and informative way to put them together outside of these tools that highlight my inexperience rather than showcase the good parts of my work.