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.

Show Notes – 5/8/2011

Business
- Adventure Week, 2nd Annual
- Camp Nerdly – 5/20-22
- Do Kickstarter
- Entering the Ennies, hit up the Facebook page and “Like” DFL, or leave a review on iTunes!

Games
- Playtesting Ghost Pirates
- Playtesting Feed the Birds
- Planning their future

Travel
- Chantilly, VA
- Packing for Productivity

Creativity
- Outline Plans: turn elements into actions
- Timeline activities and set deadlines
- Plan your tools to optimize doing what you want to be doing.

Download MP3

Lately, I’ve been browsing the interweb to see what else is up in this media niche that I’m here being a part of. Lots of great people are doing great things, a lot of which overlap with things that I do, or want to be doing. An easy first reaction is to toss up my hands and despair that I don’t have any original ideas – which is frankly, a load of crap. All the same, if you then go and make the same exact kind of product, you flood the “market” and reduce the value of everyone’s productions – particularly your own. It’s basic market theory, and one that independent hobbyist media producers can learn a lot from.

One, there is no competing on price (for most of us). A small handful of podcasts charge for premium content, but most are available for free. This means that in as much as we “compete,” we have to differentiate ourselves to grab the ears of potential listeners.

Two, realize that bringing your own ideas, goals, prejudices, and personality to the content you produce is in itself a method of differentiation. I’ve won listeners based on the simple fact that my show generally runs 20 minutes long. This makes it easy to digest during many more people’s commutes; so even if my show is completely elastic with another, longer show – I can still win the air time.

Three, the rate of podcast turnover, aka podfading, continues to be pretty high. Making content and keeping on making it is also a way to gain airtime; long-running shows are frequently given more implicit trust in terms of quality than a show that is still only in the single digits. I wouldn’t call it a deal breaker, but I feel that my first dozen shows kinda suck – and personally tend not to listen to anything less than #10 from a podcast I’m sampling.

All of this analysis leads to my inquiry: what do you (dear listener) want from the show? Interviews, video, travelogues? I’m thinking about trying out some voice work and maybe recording some audio stories. I’m wondering if you would be interested in classes about cooking skills – techniques and science, more than recipes. More photos? More creativity chatter? Shout out, here or on Twitter!