Hello my owl friends! Hard to believe it’s already been a month since our last newsletter; January has gone by much quicker than I thought! January is – to put it bluntly – my least favorite month of the year. All the cold and snow and darkness of December but without the fun of Christmas to look forward to. A good month to stay in and not do very much, and yet, I feel like I have done a fair amount!

Project Updates

Dollhouse Drama

Most excitingly, I released the core book of Dollhouse Drama this month! I’m so proud of this game and I’m so glad to have it out there in its final form, in people’s hands, and hopefully at their tables! This game draws on so many things that bring me nostalgic joy – the dolls and cartoons of my childhood – and I really hope it sparks joy for others too! It’s on itchio and DTRPG!

I’m still chipping away at the little playset packages that are going to be released each month for the next year, too. These have been so fun to write, which is why I’ve kept adding more and expanding the plan – when I started working on the game, I thought 3-6 playsets would be plenty. Uhh, well, how about 36? Anyway, I’ve got my sets finished through June, and I’m working on the July and August releases now. I hope these find their audience too; I’m really not sure how it’ll go, given I haven’t done this kind of supplementary material for a game before. An experiment!

My hope is that having a monthly new thing to talk about helps keep the game towards the front of people’s minds, giving me an easy thing to call attention to rather than repeating the same talking points forever. And I know others have told me that there’s benefit to the perception that a game is supported over time, rather than released and done, although I also know that it doesn’t actually… work for every game. But this is one where it does, and I’m hoping that there will be some kind of long-term sales bump, a boost to the long tail of a game. We’ll see!

Before the Season Ends

The other big thing I’ve been working on this month has been the playtest edition of Before the Season Ends, and I’m nearly done with it! I’m hoping to have that posted in the next week or two, just in time for me to playtest the game again at Running GAGG, one of my little local cons. The process of getting it out of my head and into something that could be usable by someone else is always interesting. 

The necessity of the tokens for this game make it interesting to set up for others to playtest – the game has a variety of custom tokens with different flowers on them that get traded between players and used to represent the game’s actions and narrative moments. When I made my own set, I printed out the token images I’d designed and glued them onto wooden discs to give them a little more substance. Unfortunately I think in the playtest kit, all I can really offer is the images and hope people aren’t too turned off by the extra step of getting those ready.

One idea that I would love to do for the future – once I’m fully settled on what I want the tokens to be and what the right quantities are – is to work with a friend who does 3D printing patterns and set up files to 3D print the tokens, which can be sold with the game files. I think that would be really neat; I know in the board game space people are doing super interesting stuff with 3D printed game components or box inserts, but I haven’t seen so much of that in RPGs outside of minis. 

A New Idea – Monaco

As happens from time to time, I got ambushed by a new idea that refuses to let me go until I at least get some work done on it. Some ideas can wait until they’ve baked a little bit more; other ones demand to be worked on right away. This is one that I am tentatively just calling “Monaco” for now, which should give you some kind of idea as to where the game is set! 

The loose pitch here is this: In 1956, actress Grace Kelly wed Prince Rainier III of Monaco, bringing the eyes of the world to this wealthy and beautiful little principality in the Mediterranean. Media and modernity come to the glamour of the old world. The year is now 1962, and you’ve come to get yours too. Whether it’s as an artist or a thief, a gambler or a socialite, a racecar driver or a countess, there’s fortunes to be made in Monaco. You’re ready to get your slice of the high life here – whatever it takes.

This idea comes from watching a few too many 50s and 60s movies set in glamorous European locales, starring big glitzy movie stars having easy breezy lighthearted antics that are nonetheless really luxe and sexy – think To Catch a Thief or Charade or How to Steal a Million. That’s the vibe I’m going for, anyway. Right now I’m thinking it’s Powered by the Apocalypse, but with a split playbook, as I’ve seen a few other games do I think. One half is what you DO – as in the pitch, are you a thief or a socialite or an artist or what have you – and one half is what brought you here, what are you REALLY looking for – money, fame, love, respect, a fresh start, etc., and you can mix-and-match at character creation.

In any case, this may not turn out to be anything – not all of my ideas do – but I’m optimistic about it and I’m enjoying this early brainstorming phase for it!

More Thoughts

Designing Character Sheets

If you follow me on social media, you may have seen me lamenting the struggles of laying out a decent character sheet for Before the Season Ends this month – at least something that can be playtested with that’s a LITTLE better than the absolute mess I made using tables in a google doc before. Specifically, I said things like “Designing character sheets sucks so bad. How does anyone do this?” and “I tweak it until it sucks 5% less and then I can’t look at it anymore” and “I’m in hell. They’re sending me to canva hell.” So, you can tell I’m not exactly a fan of the process.

But why is it so hard?

The character sheet (for games that have character sheets, not all of them do) is the main interface players have with information in the game. It needs to be a repository for a mix of information that is static and information that changes constantly. It needs to provide sufficient reminders of how to USE the information on it without just fully recapping the rules. It needs to fit on a page or two. It needs to be organized such that players find what they need to find quickly, every time. It’s a massive challenge of information design.

I’m actually not a total stranger to information design; one of my tasks in a former job role was making software guides for people who are decidedly not software savvy. But the character sheet has some obvious additional challenges. Both the brevity and the need to be easily changeable as character information changes during play are both quite tricky to account for. 

Add to this the fact that I just have no eye for graphic design whatsoever, and well, it can be a mess. I am somewhat comforted by the fact that these only need to be good enough to playtest with, and one of my top priorities when the game is done and I have a budget for it, will be to hire an actual graphic designer to make this… good. I think I did okay, all things considered! It doesn’t need to be better than okay! Good enough is good enough!

Physical Prototyping

I said last month that I’d talk about this a little bit more now, because I did a very goofy little prototype test last month, and I wanted to talk about some other ones I’ve done in the past and the approach I took to them and what I learned from them. To recap from before, sometimes I have to do a really early playtest involving just… simulating the physical components of a game and putting them on my table, manipulating them however I need to. Usually this comes before I even have rules really figured out, and I need some kind of visual or physical stimuli to even help me figure out what the rules should be.

I’ve got four different examples here, from four different projects.

Here’s one I did last year while I was working out the rules for Gryphons & Gargoyles, specifically how mapping the quests works. In the way that I have it worked out, each card correlates to a specific quest that needs to be completed, and when you complete a quest, a new one becomes available to you and gets plotted on the map. The simple way I chose to handle that was to lay a grid over the fantasy map with 20 different coordinates, and you roll a d20 to figure out which sector it ends up in.

The goal here was to try to visualize the development of the map over a whole campaign – an entire card deck’s worth of quests. I also wanted to get a feel for how many quests you could have active at a time, and how the quest rewards would add up for each player. As you can see, this was a simple one – I just had to sit down with a deck of cards, my notebook, and a d20.

This one is an older one, maybe the first time I did this kind of prototyping – this was for the first draft of Life of the Party back in 2021. You can see I already had the idea for the grid of songs and locations that ended up in the final game (you can also see I used some real songs I like because I hadn’t made up my fake ones yet). Originally instead of character-specific tokens, there was one general drama token resource that could be added and removed on scenes, and I didn’t end up liking that.

Part of the benefit here was just spatial – how does this fit on my table? You’d think with the understanding that “these index cards are 3×5 inches” and “my table is 3×4 feet”, I’d be able to just do math to see how many cards fit on the table, but for myself, I always need to see it on the table to make it stick in my brain.

This one is similarly about me checking out different index card structures, but it involved a lot more moving things around the table, rearranging things, adding and removing components of this structure, etc. This is for a project that I’ve poked at here and there for years, but still haven’t done much with, though who knows, maybe this year is the year! This is for Aboard the Rail Mercurial, a duo-game about train heists and train murders, where you’d use the same rules for each, but they’d be inverted. I won’t get into it too much, because, to be frank, I don’t HAVE much of this game yet. Someday it’ll click though, and each time I do a little exercise like this I think I get closer.

And finally, this one is actually for a game I’ve abandoned since I did this prototype test! This one was less about the rules and more about the scenario design, which would have involved hex grid style exploration, in a more OSR-ish style than I have typically done. Having never made a hex map before – it wasn’t my jam even when I was running that kind of game – I was trying to figure out the number of hexes involved, the scale of travel, how densely certain things would be populated in the hexes, etc. This is another thing I feel like I SHOULD have been able to solve just by doing math, but in this case it was just more fun to make myself a little fake map and doodle all over it.

(The game itself would have been heavily inspired by Pokemon Snap, and it’s been abandoned at least for now because I found someone else was much further along on something extremely similar. Oh well! I’ll let it sit in the idea-trunk for a few years and see if something different comes to me, or if I even feel like going back to it in 5 years or not.)

Developmental Editing

One really cool thing that’s happened in the past couple of years is that some of my online friends who were not previously game designers have started to design games, with – I like to think, if it’s not too egotistical – my encouragement. I love getting to look over their drafts and give notes based on my game design experience, or answer their questions, or give advice, basically helping them out with some developmental editing.

For one thing, it’s just super cool to know that your feedback is not only appreciated but is actively sought. It’s hard to feel down about my own work (as we all do from time to time) when someone else comes to me for help based on the strength of my work and my previous feedback to them. For another thing, I really enjoy doing it – I like going through the rules of a game and seeing where it can be improved or where things might cause unforeseen problems.

It’s also got me thinking a couple times over the last year or so that maybe I should consider developmental editing as a paid service I can offer? A different way to make a little more money from games maybe? A way to make the extremely niche skills I have cultivated useful to others in a slightly more formal way? But every time I think about it too much, I realize that that makes it all WORK again rather than just a fun thing I can do for my friends, and I don’t think I want that.

I’m not closing the door on the idea permanently – never say never, after all – but at this point in time, I don’t see myself picking up freelance consulting. I can still enjoy offering what I can to my friends without necessarily turning this whole show back into a business. (But hey, if you really want it, let me know – we’ll see!)

Closing Notes

One of the things I’ve liked to do the last few years is “movies I should have watched ages ago January” (someday I’ll come up with a pithier name for it). After all, in January, I don’t want to go anywhere, I just want to stay home, but I don’t have my usual capacity or focus for reading just because of the gray winter doldrums. So I make a big list of movies that either 1) are at least 10 years old, or 2) have been on my watchlist for at least 3 years. Movies that I always say “I’ve been meaning to watch that” or “I really ought to get around to that” about.

So anyway that’s how I watched 40 movies this January. One a day, two a day on the weekends. It was all over the place – older, newer, dramas, comedies, all kinds of stuff. I will NOT be maintaining that pace the rest of the year, but it was fun! I always like to think of it as refilling the creative well, giving myself a whole new pile of material to draw from (and it clearly worked this year, given that’s where the new Monaco idea came from!). I make no secret of the fact that I draw a lot of inspiration from books and movies, often moreso than I do from other games.

I also got lucky this year that there were no real duds on my list, nothing that made me go “oh I shouldn’t have bothered.” The big winner, the one that really lived up to all the hype (and there was a LOT of hype)… was Blade Runner. I’d never seen Blade Runner before! Don’t know how I managed to miss it for all those years. But man, that’s a great movie (as I will be apparently one of the last people to discover).

So, I think that’s all for this month! Don’t forget to check out Dollhouse Drama if you haven’t already! See you next month!