Battle Gnomes is submitted!

March 19th

Listening to Billy Joel’s Piano Man as I submit my Battle Gnomes prototype. Of course I think “this is a blogging moment.” I’m so excited and relieved to finally submit it after all the delays. There are several parties tonight, but I’m not feeling like going out. I know I need to go and actually socialize with people soon. Social media is great for providing that social window so I can feel like I’m in touch with what’s happening from my office, but it’s not the same as face to face human contact. Everything I do has taken so much longer than the time I give myself to do it, but I think it keeps me working faster. Things would take longer if I let them. The motivation to write more is lost now, since I now just want to go rest a bit.

The good luck holiday

March 17th

It’s St. Patrick’s Day and that’s cool. It doesn’t really feel like a holiday and I’m definitely more interested on what I’m doing. I haven’t submitted Battle Gnomes for a prototype yet, so that’s my main focus today. I have everything done but now it’s time to do another read through on all the rules and cards. I always find something that could be worded just a little bit cleaner or funnier. I know I could just submit it and play around with any changes later, but I want to get it as strong as I can before submission. I want the prototype to be solid so the feedback I get from people is not cluttered with tiny errors. I want to reduce the number of those occurrences so people can just focus on game play.

The result of being particular is that I’m working on this today, almost a week after my first anticipated submission date. I was upset about it at first, but now I’m resigned to submitting a better product to show people and garner support for it. I’m still excited for post submission. At that point, I wait for it to arrive and begin promotion of the game online. The game promotion will be something different. I’ve worked on several different pieces these last six months: game construction, artwork, editing, and graphic design. I look forward to doing something new and changing it up a bit. I’m intimidated by the marketing angle a bit, but I think once I get going it’ll feel comfortable.

Prototype submission

March 13^th

This will be the fourth time I’ve submitted a game for a prototype and I’m noticing that each time I get nauseated from anxiety. Once the submission is in I feel good, but the hours leading up to submission, when I’m combing through the details, I feel major anxiety. I go back through several times and decide what last minute improvements to make, while determining what decisions to wait on.

Right now, I’m finalizing my submission for Battle Gnomes, the game I consider to be the most important to me at this time. I’m glad I did the other submissions first so that I’m familiar with the process, and the anxiety has gone down since previous submissions. After I submit for the prototype, I plan on making people aware of the game in every way possible. I think people will love it, and I think it has the most widespread appeal.

Nocturnes and Battle Gnomes

March 12^th

I played a few games of Nocturnes with friends the other day. There was a lot of laughing and it was fun. For such a dark game, it had surprisingly funny moments throughout. It’s great seeing people’s reaction to the description of the game and to the game itself.

This week, since getting the Nocturnes prototype back, I’ve been trying to finish up the graphics for a Battle Gnomes prototype submission. That’s the one I’m going to Kickstart first. Someone asked me yesterday how the games were going and commented they hadn’t heard much in a while. It’s true, until I get the prototypes back I’m not being as vocal about the games as I could be. I just want to be prepared, and I want to have answers to questions and the ability to fully commit to social media about the games. Once I submit for Battle Gnomes, that’s four submitted prototypes and I’ll feel better about being more vocal and making others aware of the details of these games.

Time is flying intimidatingly fast. I spend a lot of time focused on details. I’ll show someone two different looks and they may not actually notice any difference at all, but I do. I hope that it’s just a perfectionist thing that leads to positive results rather than an obsessive compulsion to have an exact look that is just unnecessarily time-consuming. Time will tell the value of being so scrutinizing.

Starting a blog and the Nocturnes prototype has arrived

March 5, 2016

Day 196. Sort of, not really. That’s how long ago I quit my job to make games. I’ve been wanting to make them for years and had put together different ideas. In the last year, I got  serious about it. Initially it was considered more as a cute idea by people who knew me rather than a legitimate business goal. No one was surprised that I wanted to make games. But people who knew me were eventually surprised when I made the jump from comfortably employed at my long-time job to frantically and uncertainly unemployed/self-employed.

I’ve kept friends appraised of the process along the way. One suggested a blog about the process because of thoughts and experiences I’ve had along the way. The biggest change is that now work 7 days a week instead of 5. Even though I can sleep in if I choose, I often spend more hours a day working than at my 8-5 job. I’ve gone through some interesting experiences working with others, some good and some as learning experiences. Game creation is complex, and the most fun part. The cards have to be balanced so no player wants to throw the table over in frustration. The artwork should be there. That’s been one of the most challenging parts of this process, the artwork. I am getting ahead of myself but the idea is that you can’t just be a good gamer or have a good idea. You can expect to learn a lot of new skills or at least improve your current ones.

Alright, so, I plan to talk about things as I go moving forward, and today I should mention that I got a game in the mail just a few hours ago, the prototype for Nocturnes. It’s the second game prototype from the Game Crafter I have received so far. Of course I’m excited about it, really excited, and nervous. That can be overshadowed by being determined and always thinking about the next step. I pulled out the box and…. It looks good! Really good. I’m looking over it for everything that I can improve on visually and fortunately, at this time, there doesn’t seem to be a whole that needs work. I play tested this particular game A LOT with pieces of printed paper, mostly with black and white images; this is definitely an improvement. I know people order prototypes with just the basic information but I wanted mine to be game-ready with little to no changes necessary. I know it will change over time, but I want to like it in its original form. That’s me though.

It’s interesting because this particular game is about nightmares, and I actually don’t like scary things. I tend to avoid anything horror related, so having it be the first game I threw myself into was unexpected. I think because it needed a lot more technical work than the others so I really delved into it. Once I got going, I wanted to see it done. I’m happy with the results. I think it rides a line between being dark and being interesting. The tiles are, ideally, a conversation piece for players. What scares them and what doesn’t, how a dream could unfold like it does in the game, and so on. Certainly those are meta-game thoughts I’d like to see from other players, but we’ll see how that goes.

I feel like I’ve already said a lot for one blog and don’t want to overdo it. That said, I know things will pick up and start moving quickly over the next few months for me and my games. I’ll post again in a few days about other updates and steps in the process.