That Was The Year That Was

I toyed with doing a "2020 hindsight" joke, but this way I can maintain the moral high-ground by telling you how restrained I have been, right?

So, 2020, yeah, that was an interesting experience. I started off the year by kicking off with one collaboration on Grab Bag Zoo, a game that absolutely needed face-to-face, physical prototyping, but which we managed to make a little progress on at various times during the year, including getting some really helpful feedback from a publisher. 

A Grab Bag Zoo player board in March

Another project started earlier in the year was Snails and Grails, with Dave Mortimer and Alan Paull, which started up at the last convention I went to, HandyCon. We managed to get a bit of face-to-face work done on this before the lockdown, and then shifted development online, mostly using Tabletopia. This actually allowed us to do maybe a bit more testing together than we might have managed otherwise, but we found some weirdness in the system, largely due to the fact that the game uses slightly weird shaped tiles, which never quite worked right in Tabletopia. I've been meaning to try setting it up in Tabletop Simulator to see if we get similar problems or different ones, but never quite got around to it.

The start of the Covid-19 lockdown in March put an end to playtesting as we knew it, as I rely heavily on people outside of my family for even initial tests. I leaned into this a little by taking part in the BGG 24 Hour Design Contest  for the first time in ages, and making a game designed to be a roll-and-write game with a 2-player, head-to-head aspect to it, which could be played over a voice or video call, and while this had many flaws it worked OK and gave me some practice at a style of game I hadn't worked on before. 

I also had an experiment with a "multiplayer solitaire" game that was literally that: a patience/solitaire card game that folk could play simultaneously, but which allowed cooperation between players to clear their tableaux by matching cards by other players. I didn't get far with this one, but initial tests suggested it was plausible. I might go back and have another look at that some time, as it could be interesting.

Early on there was a UK-centred group who had an online playtesting session on Fridays, which I attended a couple of times, but this ended up stopping after a while, and I never got around to joining with any of the other online playtest groups, and over the summer months my motivation and drive steadily declined, particularly when it came to getting people to playtest my games -- or even in playing other people's games. 

That said, I did build up a decent amount of experience in Tabletopia, and with the help of nanDECK, I can now implement a playable prototype on that platform pretty quickly. In fact, I have also done some work with Tabletop Simulator, and am building some more confidence on that as well, and have the necessary incantations coded into nanDECK so that I can output card images suitable for importing to either system now.

"Role World" in June. Using Tabletopia (or similar)
is a boon for getting nice pictures of prototypes.

Through all this time, I did continue to work with Braincrack Games on Scurvy Crew (which is now almost certainly getting a new name). There is still a lot in flux on this at the moment, but Lewis at Braincrack is now leading the development on this and the game is undergoing some pretty major changes, though most of them are actually not cutting as deep as they look at first. One of the most exciting parts of this is now pretty much set: crew cards have personal objectives, and during play you may exchange them for more experienced versions of the character, so you will see the available crew in the game growing and developing over the course of a number of plays.

On the subject of continuing projects, I also made some progress on The Castle War with some guidance from Alan Paull, making the game somewhat more complex and, we think, deeper, but leaving a few rough edges that now need further attention.

Continuing the random wander through the year, obviously physical conventions were off the menu after March, but most organisers came up with some form of online alternative, and I went to a few of them for at least part of the time. UK Games Expo, moved to August and then virtualised, was the one I spent most of my time with. Most of what I did was just watching streams of talks and panel discussions, something that I rarely get to see at real conventions, and this was fun, even though I didn't get much out of the event. It did introduce me to Twitch streams though, and since then I have watched a few streams by various people and have enjoyed the way some of them are a sort of interactive, punk rock TV show, with communities emerging in the chat channels. When it came to Essen Spiel time in October, I even made my Twitch debut as a guest on a stream with Alan Paull of Surprised Stare Games, discussing the Snails and Grails game we are working on.

There were other games, too, including two that involve squirrels: one a new collaboration with Dave Mortimer on a game aimed at families with kids, and another being a reworking of my long-standing white whale game, Invaded. Also a couple of attempts at a game with puffins in, a weird, world building game, a take-that game about a medieval throne war and the roll-and-write game that appeared from nowhere last week at IDLEcon.

Another thing that happened is that my game, Giftmas with the Grimms, which had a very limited (30 copy) print run back in autumn 2017 under the name Giftmas at Dungeon Abbey, has returned to my hands after the publisher decided to not move on with it. I could have reclaimed the rights rather sooner (there was a time-out clause in the contract, as is always a good idea), but decided not to worry about it and see how things went. We decided to call it a day though and the rights are back with me. I've been tinkering with a few revisions (and playing with fresh art, just for fun), and we'll see if anything happens with it.

Updated Giftmas character cards.

I'll also just add a note that in the last couple of months or so of the year I made a bunch of new friends and contacts largely through the streams hosted by Bez Shahriari, Michael Fox, and Matthew Dunstan, all of whom are lovely people who are really supportive and encouraging, and I very much recommend you check out their Twitch streams if that sort of thing appeals to you.

So how did I do against what I was planning back in January?

Well, I did say that I wasn't expecting to do much pitching, if any, and that turned out to be the case. In the absence of physical conventions, a lot of publishers did become more amenable to online pitching (particularly using Tabletop Simulator or Tabletopia to demonstrate the games) but I wasn't in a position where I felt comfortable doing this. I wouldn't be surprised if this became more normal for pitch meetings going forward though.

The collaboration side of things definitely moved forward pretty well, with a few more on the go now, and I'm really enjoying this and am totally open to discuss more team-ups for the future.

Playtesting was pretty terrible for the year: a few online sessions here and there, but only a few face-to-face over the first couple of months (and one in the late summer). That's the way of things though.

And finally, I said I would make a puffin game. Well, I did build something over a couple of iterations, and got some playtesting done with others, but didn't get anywhere I was even slightly happy with.

So, that was most of 2020 from my game design point of view: very much a curate's egg of a year. It sucked in a whole bunch of ways, but there were some definite positives, and I'm trying to focus on them for the year to come.