I’ve finished putting my Metatopia (November 4-6, Morristown NJ) Designer Schedule together, and am now posting what I submitted here in case you’re going and want some idea of what’s going on with my games. This schedule isn’t final, but I don’t think it will change.

Friday:  8pm – 10pm
Board Game: Yellow Press
Take on the role of a newspaper to manipulate the reputations of your local superheroes. Be an editor like J. Jonah Jameson, or a plucky reporter like Clark Kent. Or both! Decide who is a hero, and who is a menace.

Prefer 4-5 experienced play-testers or board game designers who are interested in “light” narrative board games with euro-inspired elements.

Saturday:  9AM – 11AM
Party Games: Feral Survivors, Rap Battles
Feral Survivors is a journaling party game — think: Lord of the Flies, Lost, and Robinson Crusoe in an Exquisite Corpse format.

Rap Battles is a party game where Wannabe MCs compete to showcase their lyrical prowess using the same verbal ingredients.
Grandmaster Flash Fiction wants to know: are you ready to throw down?

Anyone welcome at any time, party game format means quick rounds of play.

Saturday: 2PM – 4PM
Open Board Game Rules Testing
Help identify confusing rules, unclear language, and where diagrams would be most useful. Various board games available for review.

No limit on number of participants, anyone welcome, including designers interested in rules-testing their own games (bring paper docs)

Saturday: 8PM – 12AM
RPG: Hyperreality
HYPERREALITY is the best and worst of the new wave of reality TV. Chaos, controversy, adrenaline, sex, violence, and even death are just par for the course. It’s time to win big, so put on your game face and take this chance to get anything and everything you ever wanted. In HYPERREALITY, you put your life on the line—on-line. The internet age is over, it’s time for HYPERREALITY.

Prefer 4-6 RPG/StoryGame-Savvy players/designers, 18+

Sunday: 10AM – 12PM
Board Game: Yellow Press
Take on the role of a newspaper to manipulate the reputations of your local superheroes. Be an editor like J. Jonah Jameson, or a plucky reporter like Clark Kent. Or both! Decide who is a hero, and who is a menace.

Prefer 4-5 experienced play-testers or board game designers who are interested in “light” narrative board games with euro-inspired elements.

Sunday: 3PM – 7PM
RPG: Hyperreality
HYPERREALITY is the best and worst of the new wave of reality TV. Chaos, controversy, adrenaline, sex, violence, and even death are just par for the course. It’s time to win big, so put on your game face and take this chance to get anything and everything you ever wanted. In HYPERREALITY, you put your life on the line—on-line. The internet age is over, it’s time for HYPERREALITY.

Prefer 4-6 RPG/StoryGame-Savvy players/designers, 18+

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.

Two weeks after the first post about the new space freighter game, I’ve had a lot of great preliminary response and put in quite a few hours on getting the first samples together for an open playtest. If you haven’t had a chance to see it yet, download the demo from here.

Going from a pre-alpha that is scrawled cards as pictured in the first design diary post to the playtest cards on the starscape website is an awful lot of work. I did a lot of playing around with demo card design – nearly everything I’ve heard from other game designers suggests that some reasonable level of visual appeal contributes significantly to potential response to a game (even by seasoned playtesters). In other words, the asteroid I took 30 seconds to draw is good enough for me, but not for you. So I went out and spent a few bucks on some cheap clip-art and did a few of my own vector drawings to drop into a quick and dirty card template (OmniGraffle and Photoshop, for those interested), and came up with cards that basically look like this:

Simple enough. Clean, to-the-point visual design that will print quickly and does something/anything to give playtesters a little bit of the feel of the game. I didn’t spend a ton of time on the final block of cards – maybe three or four hours total, but if that little bit of style draws even one person into the game, I’ll count it a huge success.

Finally, I’ve nearly finished the first draft of the “upgrade” package. Next design diary post, I’ll talk about the process of writing the upgrade packages and generally dealing with this weird form of storytelling.

In the meantime, I hope you’ll try the game out and I’d love to hear any thoughts you might have to share.