Looking Back

Allow me to be among the last to wish you a happy new year. It has taken me a while to get back on the blogging horse, but here we are, all mounted up and ready to ride forth into the future...

If I was writing this a fortnight ago it would have been very much the done thing to look back on 2015 and see what I have learned and achieved over the last twelve months. I'm a bit late for all that, but I'll do it anyway.

Nice pic yoinked from Dr Wendy Longo on Flickr.

I discussed a couple of months or so back how I was doing with the game design resolutions I set myself for the year and concluded that, while I wasn't quite doing everything as planned, I was doing OK. The only thing I haven't really done is dug into my "game hooks" list and made something tangible out of some of them, but I think I have managed something better.

So to sum up things that I am pleased with (from a game design perspective) over the year...

• I have entered the BGG 24 hour game design contest six times through the year, each time resulting in a new game that I have shared for others to play, and I've even experimented with different styles of games as part of this.
• I have iterated over one of the games that came out of the 24 hour contest (Boogie Knights) and even brought it to a public playtest event. The game is still a long way from finished, but it has (mostly) improved at every revision, even though there have been some missteps here and there.
• I entered a bigger contest, the BGG Children's Print and Play Design contest with I Know An Old Woman, which has become my first entry in the BGG game database, so I'm now officially a "game designer"! I'm generally happy with the game, though I need to do a revised rulebook as I'm not at all happy with that.
• I've been getting into rulebook writing, spurred on even more by the fact that my one "released" game desperately needs that skill applied. I have proofread a couple of rulebooks, and helped rewrite a translated rulebook from the ground up for someone else. All great practice.
• I have the beginnings of a local playtest group who are willing to try out my prototypes and give some pleasingly frank feedback. Learning to work with playtesters is a whole area of skills to develop.
• I have managed to post on this blog on a reasonably regular basis. While I could be using this time for actually working on games, I think that having the blog is a useful tool to aid me in reflecting on my progress. I could probably do this in a private journal, but doing it publicly means that I need to make the posts in some semblance of proper English in case somebody actually wants to read it.
• Being more active in the Board Game Geek design forums is starting to yield contacts, mostly people in a similar boat to me, amateurs, maybe just getting started, but it is starting to feel like I am becoming a part of a community, which is really encouraging.

On the downside, all these new projects have meant that some of the games I started thinking about and working on a year or two back have languished a bit. So no progress on Space Station 7 and precious little on Scurvy Crew, for instance. But this is not all bad as I think that all the work I have been doing on other games has helped me develop my skills so that I might now have a better chance of dealing with the issues with the older games that slowed me down.

While making games has been the biggest help to learning, I've also found lots of podcasts to listen to and blogs to read which give a great deal of wonderful information on all aspects of game design. I'll post about my favourite ones some time, but for the moment I'll just say that if you just subscribe to one source, make it Cardboard Edison, who provide some of their own content, but also post links to many of the best boardgame design blogs and podcasts.

Next time I'll post on my plans for the future...