Game Design Diary – January 2019

January quietly leaves the room with one last stern glance but not without receiving a snowball to the face from February. Yes, it’s that time again! To see whether the aspirations of the new year have held up against the onslaught of the real world. I’d love to hear how your month has gone too!

Aims for January

• Playtest UK – I made it to one out of two. A start at least
• Daily Game Design – this was an ambitious goal! I’ve done well at points, and less well at others.
• Develop Catch the Rainbow (and update the rulebook) – I made a LOT of progress here. It’s had many tests and a few tweaks as we went along. The rule book needs a fresh visit given recent changes and feedback.
• Cardboard Edison Award – I made a lot of progress thanks to the motivation this deadline created, but in the end I decided the game wasn’t quite ready. I had too many ideas still to explore.
• Skyscrapers prototyping – sadly nothing achieved here 🙁
• Wren’s Churches rulebook – Lol, no

Daily Game Design

Trying to build a new habit into your routine can be tough. One of the best ways is to attach it to something you already do. So when I decided to learn a language last quarter, I attached my daily practice session to first getting on the train for my commute. For game design, I thought over lunch time might be a good idea. Sadly, I’ve not been able to make that work – it’s hard to design and eat at the same time and since I’m at my desk I tend to get straight back to actual work after eating. So a new plan is needed.

That said, I did do remarkably well at doing some at various other points in the day, often motivated by some strict deadlines. For the first two weeks and the last week, good progress has occurred. Sadly the middle quarter to a third of the month was a complete flop, with nothing done. Annoyingly this preceded the 2nd Playtest meet up of the month so I didn’t have anything ready in time for that. Disappointing, but I’m glad to have come out of that into a strong final week.

I’m not giving up on this goal. What I need to do is find a good time to focus on it and I think my journey home from work might be the best time. There’s a 15-20 min train at the end of my journey that could be a natural point to get on with some design.

Catch the Rainbow

Catch the Rainbow had 7 playtests this month, including a blind playtest, which has got to be a record for me! Last month I spoke about the upgrade, or thematically, change weather track system I had added that allowed players to change their draw, play and hand capacities, in particular how there seemed to be one ‘right’ way to play. To remedy this I added points to the extreme ends of the track so that if a player ended the game with their markers in those spaces, they would earn extra points. Importantly, these were at both ends of the tracks, offering the potential for ‘maximum efficiency’ in the middle of the tracks, pushing cubes high, or pivoting late game to try and collapse the players engine to grab the low points. Overall I’ve had really good feedback on this, and I’ll continue to tweak the points values on the tracks going forward.

The other main thing I’m going back and forth on is the game end card. I’ve been using a sudden death end game rule this month, that is, the game ends immediately when the card appears from the deck. Which creates a lovely tension but also encourages players to reign back their actions in the last few turns. Playtesters have seemed fairly split on it so far, and I’m currently leaning back towards giving players an extra turn after the card appears. Ideally there could be some player driven end game that was independent of this but I’ve struggled to figure out what this could be. A continuing challenge.

A new, and very interesting idea coming from playtesters is how one could create curved rainbows which initially seemed impossible but there may actually be a solution involving angles and careful drawing. I’ve not worked out the details but it would be very interesting to see if this could work!

Cardboard Edison Award

I would have loved to enter this but as you can tell from the section above, there are still a few too many open questions and imperfections to work out in Catch the Rainbow. To have gotten everything ready for submission would have simply required too much time and effort, and caused far too much stress! Something I am actively trying to avoid at present. Plus I would have had to basically stop development on the game while the judging occurred which, honestly, I didn’t want to do at this stage. So I was happy to make the conscious decision to not submit.

Having that possibility, though, made a huge difference to me at the start of the month. I got so much more done than I expect I otherwise would have. So I will absolutely keep my eye out for other contests over the coming month to inspire me! Although I hope I’ll still be productive without that.

New Designs

I discussed Skyscrapers last month as one design I was excited to make progress on. Sadly this didn’t transpire. My focus was taken up by Catch the Rainbow and video work.

As is the way of my brain, I had a new idea for a game that I now also want to explore. A game I am temporarily calling Pancake Stacker. Because it is about pancakes. Annoyingly/hilariously I came across this a couple of days after sketching out some initial ideas. Which almost made me drop it entirely but, no. The mechanics I have since been thinking about are considerably different (no god-awful take that for one thing) So, even if it only ends up being as a design exercise, I want to pursue this further. I like the real world nature of the theme, I’m coming up with some great tactile-thematic connections (I think), and it sits comfortably between Catch the Rainbow and Skyscrapers in terms of complexity and design challenge. If I make some good progress with Pancake Stackers or Skyscrapers this month, I will definitely go into more details in the next design diary!

Aims for February

February always feels like a tight month! But if a little bit of progress can be made each day, hopefully that will still add up!

• Update Catch the Rainbow rulebook – I got a good amount of feedback from the blind playtest that I haven’t implemented yet, and made some tweaks to the game that need to be added in.
• Pancake Stack prototype – now that I’m a good way into the basic design, I would  love to get this prototyped in time for the next Playtest UK meet up (the 11th)
• Skyscrapers – I at least want to make progress on this. I can’t leave a reasonably fleshed out idea vegetating again! (Sorry Bismark…)
• Curved Rainbows – I know this will be tough to implement so it’s my hail-Mary goal for the month. This is more graphic design than game design so will be quite the challenge!

How are your designs progressing? Drop me a note below!