Making Faces in nanDECK

The other day I was working on a game in Screentop, and decided that I wanted the dice I had in it to be spotty dice rather than the digit dice that are the default. All this requires is uploading an image which shows the required faces (this works for any custom faces). If my image has a transparent background, then you can set the fill colour for the die to be whatever you want and then use the same image for a range of different coloured dice.

I figured that nanDECK would be an effective way of constructing the image, and it didn't take long to make the script. I thought I would share my script here as a kinda worked example. I'll break the sections of the script down with discussion about what each section does.

So, here goes...

BORDER=RECTANGLE,#000000,0,MARKDOT

PAGE=21,29.7,PORTRAIT,HV

These lines are just boilerplate stuff that I put at the top of all my scripts, formatting a page for printing or creating a PDF at A4 size, with crop lines added. It's not necessary for what I am doing here, but I left them in anyway.

DPI=200

CARDSIZE=5,5

The next bit of the boilerplate, but a bit that I modify as necessary. My usual card size is 6.3 x 8.9 cm for poker-sized cards, but I want squares this time. As I am just making an image, the size doesn't really matter, so 5 cm square was just a convenient number.

[DotColour]=#000000

[CircleColour]=#999999

[TransparencyColour]=#ffbbff

It can be useful to define variables rather than using numbers in the guts of the code. Specifically the [DotColour] one meant that I could run the script once to generate an image with black dots, and then change the value (to #ffffff) in order to run again and output white dots.

The [TransparencyColour] is helpful because in nanDECK you can define a specific colour to be replaced by transparency in an output PNG file. As long as you select a colour you don't want to use in the actual image (I'm using a pink here), all is good.

RECTANGLE=,0,0,100%,100%,[TransparencyColour],[TransparencyColour]

So this is just filling the "card" with a solid background field of the colour I selected for the transparency.

ELLIPSE="1,3,5",2,2,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="4,5,6",0.5,0.5,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="4,5,6",3.5,3.5,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="2,3,4,5,6",3.5,0.5,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="2,3,4,5,6",0.5,3.5,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="6",0.5,2,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

ELLIPSE="6",3.5,2,1,1,[CircleColour],[DotColour],0.02

That's the guts of it. You can look at a standard spotted die face as having seven locations where spots can exist, and each spot is present on some faces, so this sort of arrangement does the job.

It's worth noting that this is just outputting images for faces, without any thought about where on the die those faces are placed. For instance, the standard die arrangement of opposite faces adding up to seven is not covered here, but at present, Screentop appears to simply treat a die as a randomiser, with no physical analogue, so this point is irrelevant for my current use case.

DISPLAY="dottydice.png",1,6,3,,[TransparencyColour]

And that last line outputs the six faces to a single PNG image, three "cards" wide, converting the colour we specified earlier to transparency.

And here's the output:

Black on transparency. Feel free to take and use if it is of any use to you. CC0 v1.0

And, as an alternative, re-running the script with the white version of [CircleColour] gives:

White on transparency. Feel free to take and use if it is of any use to you. CC0 v1.0

I don't know if this sort of thing is helpful or interesting, but here it is anyway. 

From Spreadsheet to Screentop via nanDECK

 I have an old card game project that has been languishing without attention for a few years with the working title Monster Invasion, which was a solitaire game (which I could probably make into a cooperative multiplayer game) that I used to enjoy playing back in the day. I recently decided to give it a look again and see what I can do with it, which gives me a perfect opportunity for me to demonstrate my current workflow for building a virtual prototype on Screentop.gg, a 2D virtual tabletop that I am learning to love, with the wonderful nanDECK for creating the card graphics.

I'm not going to go into every detail of how this all works, but hopefully will give you a few pointers if you want to work in this way.

The state of the game as I got back to it was a nanDECK script taking data from a CSV file. This was last worked on in 2017, and I've developed my way of working quite a lot since then (even ignoring the shift to virtual prototypes), so my first task was to update the data source. nanDECK is capable of drawing data directly from a Google spreadsheet, as long as the spreadsheet has been shared appropriately (there are details of how to do this in the nanDECK documentation), so I imported the dats, made a couple of tweaks, and shared as appropriate.

My card data in a Google spreadsheet, all ready to go.

If you can see the image of the spreadsheet above, there are probably a couple of things to draw your attention to or at least explain. At the top right is the number 55; this is calculated as the sum of the values in the "Quantity" column, and I find it helpful to have something like that for my reference as I make changes. At the bottom is a line for a card back and a set of nine "blank" cards; this is to help me later build a card image for import to Screentop.gg later on. When I am working with physical cards it is convenient to work in multiples of nine, which is a good number to print on a single A4 page, and coincides nicely with a standard deck size for manufacturing purposes if we get that far. On Screentop I find it convenient to have sets of 55 cards in a five-by-eleven grid, which allows me that same number of cards plus a slot to use as a card back which, if I pad appropriately with blanks, I can make always appear in the last slot of the image.

As an aside, a similar strategy works well for Tabletop Simulator, though typically you use the final slot for a "blanked out" card face. Tabletopia required individual images, which are also easy to set up using the same tool chain, but I'm not doing that today.

As you may know, nanDECK is a system for building cards (and other game components) using a scripting language that allows you to have huge amounts of control if you want it. There is a "visual" mode to the system that I have never spent any real time trying to use, and I gather that works well for some people, but I can't offer advice on this. 

OK, so the nanDECK script. I'm not going to show you the whole thing here, but can show you some of the bits that are relevant...

The first part of my nanDECK script.

A few comments on this first part of the script, assuming you can see the image above...

The first few lines are there primarily for when I want to output a printable PDF document, but an important point here is line 3, which defines 'DPI=140'. This defines the resolution, and thus the file size of the output. Normally for printing purposes you might want to work with about 300 DPI (dots per inch) to get a high quality output, but for virtual prototypes you may have file size limitations, and so may need to reduce the resolution. In the case of Screentop, the limit is an image size of 4096x4096 pixels, and to fit within that constraint I need to either reduce the resolution to about 140 DPI as I have done here, or go for a slightly higher resolution and make the output image a more square shape than I have done.

Line 9 is the link to my spreadsheet. nanDECK is smart enough to recognise that this jumble of characters is a Google spreadsheet ID and acts accordingly.

Lines 11 to 20 define icon images to associate with the letters I am using in the "icons" columns of my spreadsheet. 

Lines 22 and 23 (and the earlier line 6) are a habit I got into long ago of printing a version number onto prototype cards so I can tell that I am using the set of cards that I mean to use -- and this can be important with a game that I am iterating over and revising rapidly.

Then at the bottom I start off the definitions of the actual cards, using an IF structure to select options according to the "CardType" column in the spreadsheet.

After skipping a few lines, here's the end of the nanDECK script.

Towards the end you can see the card back being made by drawing a coloured rectangle at line 55. I have got into the habit of using two-colour radial gradients like this (with various colour mixes) for place-holder card backs, sometimes with text over the top if that seems appropriate. I find them sufficiently pleasing for minimal effort.

Finally, line 60 is where the magic happens, outputting a single image file for cards 1 to 55 (i.e. all of them), arranged in a grid 11 cards wide. 

So, if I validate and build this script, I end up with a nice image of all my cards...

And here we have the output of my script: a big image ready for upload.

So, on to the next tool in the chain: Screentop.gg...

Screentop is a bit of a work-in-progress at the moment, but it is very useful as it stands and is being actively developed and supported. I like it because it does enough for most of the projects I am working on, and is far less demanding on computer resources than its 3D cousins, and just about anyone can join a game from their web browser if I send them a link. On the other hand, there are a few odd quirks to get past. One of these scares off a lot of people: rather than having intricate GUI elements, several of the tasks you may want to do will require using the "bulk editing" system, which uses a programming language and you need to type code into a window to make your changes. Back on the positives though, there is very useful documentation, which provides bits of code that you can just copy and paste as appropriate for most situations, and this makes it potentially rather less scary than the likes of nanDECK.

The Beginner's Tutorial for Screentop takes you through the steps of creating a deck of playing cards, and you can simply follow that, substituting your personal deck image (as I have just created) instead of the sample one they provide.  The tutorial only uses the necessary cards from the image, but I usually make cards for everything, including the blank cards, which allows for more flexibility and cleverness later, which I will go into shortly.

So, just a few minutes of work and I have a pile of cards, some of which are blank...

Cards now up on Screentop.gg - ready to go!

So the game is more or less playable now in it's present state, though I need some way of tracking two scores: power and threat. I can do that by adding some tokens, adding a little score board and a couple of tokens, or using one of the built-in component types, a counter. Or doing the tracking offline with physical components too, I suppose. I can leave that as an exercise to the reader, as I wanted to just show one little extra thing.

The way Screentop handles graphical assets is that you can upload an image and then divide it into a certain number of rows and columns, which are then indexable sub-assets. This is useful for handling entire decks of cards together or potentially other components like custom dice. (Tabletop Simulator is similar in this respect.) In this case, what this means is that once you have set up a deck of cards (or similar set of components), you can, with just a few clicks, upload a replacement for the graphical asset and it will instantly update the cards.

So, if I want to change the background colour of the boss cards, that's one line in the nanDECK script, and replace the blank cards with a pointless message, that's a quick edit of the spreadsheet. A couple of clicks in nanDECK regenerates the graphic, which I can then upload.

Uploading a fresh asset in Screentop is really quick and easy

And, ta-da!...

An updated version of the game in just a couple of minutes.

This updated version is actually the same session as the one in the previous screenshot, having refreshed the page a few times -- this behaviour is brilliant, but doesn't seem to always work first time. A fresh session would (and did) update the cards straight away.

Anyway, now we're all in place, I can start looking at the game and decide what I want to do with it. Card updates will be absolutely trivial with the basics now in place, so we'll see what inspiration comes. 

I'm not sure how interesting or useful this sort of post is, but I guess if you found it really boring you won't have got to this point anyway. Thanks for reading!

Possible Future Games of History Past?

One of the things I like doing other than designing and playing board games is reading about history -- albeit slowly; I am not a quick reader and I don't have the attention span to keep going for long periods. Over the last couple of years or so I've been mostly reading books about earlyish medieval England, mostly around the years roughly 900 to 1200 CE, but looking into some other periods as well.  Many of the stories and personalities I read about suggest subject matter for games, and I have a couple of ongoing projects based on these (see The Castle War and Ætheling Business), but I am slowly building up a list of historical things I would like to make games about and I thought I would mention a few of them here.

These are mostly thematic hooks that I would like to work with, and don't yet have more than the vaguest idea of how to implement them, but as I generally have more difficulty attaching a theme or setting to a mechanism than vice versa, so this seems a reasonable starting place, and a list I can go back to if I feel the need to work on something new.

So, some of these ideas, in no particular order... 

The coronation of Henry the Young King
Image taken from Wikimedia Commons, where they 
assert that it is public domain.

Henry, the Young King, son of Henry II of England, crowned as co-king during his father's lifetime, died before he was able to take over the kingdom in his own right. He was part of a failed rebellion against his father, and then ended up touring Europe, racking up eyewatering debt but being a superstar of the tournament scene. This tournament tour thing -- which were more about ritualised, "play" wars rather than the arena-based jousts of movies -- sounds like it could be something interesting to explore as a game, particularly centred around a glamorous young man and his exploits. Maybe players are in Henry's traveling retinue and trying to excel on the tournament field and stay in favour by not outshining their leader.

The town where I live, Wantage, is probably best known as the birthplace of the Saxon king Alfred the Great, but there was a period leading up to the mid-19th century when it was a notorious and wretched hive of scum and villainy. This period came to an end when the town was cleaned up by a priest, the Reverend W J Butler, who encouraged and oversaw a period of building and regeneration, and many of the finer buildings in the town are directly linked to him. I would love to make a game about this period of Wantage's history, but make it so that it is reasonably accessible to non-gamers -- it would be great if it could be sold at the local museum. I kind of feel that I want this to be a tile laying game of some sort.

Much further back in time, the Second Punic War was the one with Hannibal and his elephants rampaging around what is now Italy and causing problems for Rome. There were three major pitched battles fought on Italian soil, all historically won by Hannibal's forces, but he never quite managed to finish Rome off. In each of these battles, Rome fielded a fresh, full-strength army, while Hannibal had a dwindling portion of his original army, bolstered by whatever allies he had been able to rally to his cause. My plan is to make a game (probably a card game) where players compete over these three battles; the Rome player always starts at full strength, but the Hannibal player loses resources each time. If Rome wins any of the three battles, that player wins the game, so the aim is largely to make each of the earlier battles more costly for Hannibal than necessary.

Back to Saxon times, Æthelflæd was a daughter of Alfred the Great, who was married to the lord of Mercia, after whose death she continued to fight to reclaim her kingdom's lands from the occupying Danes, and alongside her brother, King Edward the Elder, made great progress in returning chunks of England to Anglo-Saxon control. One of the sources I have read tells of how Æthelflæd launched raids into the Danelaw to liberate relics of saints from the occupied areas in order to return them to safety, and that aspect of her story is one which appeals to me for making into a game. This could actually work as a solo challenge game, or maybe an asymmetric 2-player thing.

A few decades later, in the reign of Edgar the Peaceable, there was a period of monastic reform in England, where the various abbeys and monasteries were... strongly encouraged, shall we say?... to adopt the Rule of Benedict for their practices. One book I read on this period paints this as a case of the king promoting this in order to ensure that all the monks were praying in the "correct" way as part of a national defence policy. After all, what is the point of having swords and armour if you don't also have the favour of The Almighty? There has to be a game in that reform process, which sounds again like it might be a solo game, but I don't have any clear ideas yet here.

Finally, back to the mother of the aforementioned Young King, Eleanor of Aquitaine. This was a woman who was a Duchess in her own right for most of her life, married to the King of France, and then the King of England, went to the Holy Land on Crusade, had three of her sons crowned as kings (two reigned in their own right), spent 16 years imprisoned by her husband, who she survived, living on into her eighties, influencing European politics through her own actions and her offspring pretty much to the end. I don't have a clear idea of what part of her story to build a game around yet, but I'm thinking about it...

I have no idea what, if anything, I will do with these thoughts, but I am sure the list will grow longer. I am up for collaborating on some of them, if anyone I gel with fancies a try; and if someone beats me to making some of them, that is cool too. Ideas are just ideas, and useless until they are acted upon -- and these are only half ideas.

Who delivered all the pies?

Following on from the "IDLEcon" game jam at the end of last year, Bez (of Yogi and Wibbell++ fame) organised another game jam, this time spread over a week, with more participants and a load of "live jamming" with various designers appearing on her Twitch stream to take part during that time.

If you are not familiar with game jams, they are events where game designers have a limited amount of time to create some sort of a game, typically with a set of constraints or requirements announced at the start of the period. I gather these are semi-regular occurrences in the videogame world, but seem to be becoming more popular in the tabletop sphere as well, especially with recent online collaboration capabilities getting so much more advanced and a lot of game designers being isolated due to Covid-19 measures.

The requirements this time were essentially for a game that could be played on a Twitch stream and include players interacting through the stream's chat channel, with regular players needing nothing more customised than a printed sheet (though it was OK for the stream host to need custom components) and games had to, at least, be suitable for 3 to 7 players. There was also a list of optional challenges that could be used to inspire designs, including pies, something nautical, dinosaurs, miming, and so on. 

The first board image Rory shared with me for discussion.
If we were working in the same room, this would probably
have been scribbled on a bit of paper, but this is so much nicer.

Collaboration in this game jam was entirely optional, but it is a major attraction for me, and I was able to team up with Rory Muldoon, probably best known at the moment as the designer, artist and graphic designer of Skora, a recent release from Inside The Box. I had been getting to know Rory a little bit through Twitch stream chats, Twitter, and IDLEcon, and we were both keen to do something together, so had a chat over Discord to see what we could come up with.

We quickly realised that neither of us would be able to put in a vast amount of work on creating a game over the week due to other life commitments, so we would work on something with modest scope. From the prompts, we fixated on pies and nautical elements, and were soon talking about having a ship delivering pies to a chain of islands. This then developed into the idea of players voting for the course of a shared ship, and then making pies and selling them according to the demands of islanders along the way, recording decisions on a piece of paper while the voyage of the ship is tracked on a central board that everyone can see.

Over the next week we put bits of work in on the project as we were able, and had a couple of chats over Discord to play the work-in-progress. I put together a project on Screentop.gg to provide a board and a boat token which could then either be screen shared, or players could visit Screentop to watch the game directly. Rory designed the board using his magical skills and software, while I used a Google document to create the playsheet and written rules. 

Over the week the main change that was brought in was to introduce special abilities that you could buy when the result of the vote went against your choice, meaning that there are some additional choices to be made, and planning your preferred route and voting strategy started getting a little more interestiing.

Eventually, on the Saturday, we were able to play our newly minted game live on Bez's stream, with me joining on camera and Rory taking part from the chat. It went well, I think, but it turns out that managing voting in this sort of situation can be tricky. Still, we were very happy with how things went.

Playing the Nautical Pie Delivery Co. Ltd. game on
Bez's stream with Rory playing from the chat.

As a little bonus, I took part in an online board game session with some old friends that evening, and they agreed to play. The game didn't fall apart and seemed to provide a reasonable experience for seven of us on a Zoom call, though again the voting was a bit awkward. We could set up an online tool to allow for votes to be tallied, but I think that is a minor issue. 

I'm not sure what we will do with this game next. It works well for something that was quickly thrown together and not yet extensively tested, but obviously there are issues, largely related to numbers, to be looked at. I think the game could work well around a table, collecting and exchanging tokens rather than writing things down, or just sticking with the something-and-write system could go well too. I think we will be discussing this again and seeing what we fancy doing before too much longer. It was certainly fun to work on so far.

I Want To Play With My Ætheling*

So, that game idea I talked about a few weeks back with the hunting accidents and the like, well it has developed a bit and I have built a playable prototype on Tabletopia. Then I decided to get some practice on other technology and now I have an upgraded prototype on Screentop as well.

The idea has filled out a bit. We have three "locations" -- I need a better name for these, but essentially they are places with things that are going on that nobles might go to: a hunting party, a feast or banquet, and a war. As a player you have four (currently -- it could easily be a different number) members of your "family", and play cards that send members of your, or your opponents', families to and from these three functions, or cause unfortunate incidents to occur at the functions (often killing off attendees). In various situations (like surviving attendance of a function) your family may get prestige, which counts towards victory at the end of the game, as does the "rank" of any family members who survive.

This is on Screentop.gg - solo playtesting a multiplayer card game
is a bit fiddly, but a heck of a lot easier than with a physical prototype.

If all of your family members are killed, that's you out of the game... sort of. Well, actually it isn't. The idea is that if you are knocked out, you get a bonus character, the papal legate, and you get to (secretly) predict who will win the game. If you are correct in your prediction, then you share victory with that player. The game then ends when the next family has their last scion dispatched.

I am pretty sure this arrangement will work best with four or more players, but we will see.

I'm enjoying how this already drifting away from its original mechanical and structural inspiration, Family Business. Most of the cards in the game are analogues of those in the older game, but are now taking into account the multiple sources of peril for the characters. Initial testing suggests that it works at least a bit, but I am concerned that this diffusion of the game might make it more unwieldy. We will see how it works over a few playtests.  

One thing I have already discovered is that my current card mix doesn't give the right dynamic in the game, and play tends to result in almost all of the nobles being moved to locations before anything much else happens.  This may not actually be a bad thing, but it did feel a little dull as it stands. 

In Family Business, there is the concept of a "mob war", which is triggered in a number of ways, including there being a sufficiently large number of mobsters on the "hit list", and when this happens, at least one mobster will die on every player's turn until the war is over. This is a really effective way of driving the game forward, but I feel I don't want to do that in this game, partly because, while I am OK with creating a game that borrows/steals a lot from another game, I don't want it to be a rip-off, but also very much because that doesn't really fit thematically. 

I don't yet have a solid idea for how to address the pacing and arc of the game, but I'm sure something will come that will make the game feel more of a thing in its own right.

* If you didn't know, Ætheling is the Anglo-Saxon name for a member of a royal family who was considered a valid choice to become king, back in times before formal lines of succession were established and monarchs were effectively elected by a council of nobles.

Twenty-one Today (and Beyond)

Frankly, I have no idea what 2021 has in store for us. The Covid-19 situation has an end in sight now that vaccination programmes are in progress, but it's going to be months -- maybe the rest of the year -- before life can begin to return to normal and even then, it's going to take a long time for a lot of people's lives to recover. Add to that the fact that Brexit is beginning to affect us and who know how that will pan out in the longer term; already it is difficult to send post in and out of the UK and some peoples' livelihoods are coming under threat from international trade and travel problems. Basically, it feels like we are in a holding pattern, waiting until we find out what is going to happen.

On the positive side, so far our little family has stayed healthy and our main incomes have not been threatened, so we are in a very privileged position on the balance of it.

Early work on a game with squirrels, co-designed with Dave Mortimer.

In a discussion on plans for this year a week or two back, I said that for my part I wasn't intending to make any specific plans or objectives, but will be thinking more in terms of a direction of travel. One friend suggested that I should probably nevertheless come up with some SMART* objectives. He was probably right, but right now I'm sticking with my looser thinking.

So what is this direction of travel then?

Well, I have been talking about getting involved in collaborations for years, and 2020 was the year that this actually started to happen, with Grab Bag Zoo and Snails and Grails getting going early in the year, and Squirreled Away and The Village on the River at the end. I'm now in the early, brainstorming stages of another collaboration too, which looks promising. So, one of the major strands is to lean into that, work with those co-designers to make the best games we can, but also learn more about the process and figure out what I contribute to a collaboration. I know I can and do add to these endeavours, but I've not got to the point where I can really describe my strengths and weaknesses.

Other than that, I have signed up as a mentor for the Tabletop Mentorship Program (at the time of writing, applications for both mentor and mentee positions are open -- check it out), having talked to a few people about their experience in it. I'm not sure if I will even be allocated a mentee, or how things will go, but I will give it my best shot and hopefully be of some help. If all goes well, it seems like something that would be good for me to keep doing after the initial 3-month run.

Pitching games... I'm not worrying about it too much at the moment. I have a feeling that a game or two should get to a solid, pitchable state over the coming months, and if so, we'll give it a go. As a result of the lack of conventions last year, it seems that a lot of publishers are receiving pitches via some sort of online meetup, with game demonstrations via the likes of Tabletop Simulator or Tabletopia, which means there are potentially more opportunities which may in some ways actually be better than a physical pitch (for a start, nobody is trying to keep awake and hydrated in a noisy and crowded hall), so maybe we can roll with that if am appropriate game gets to the right point.

And while I am thinking of conventions, I'm not at all confidant that there will be any this year, and if there are any, they are likely to be shades of their normal selves. I have a room booked for UK Games Expo, which would normally be the highlight of my year from a gaming point of view, and where I would catch up with a lot of friends who I don't often see elsewhere. I have, however, made sure I have a room booking that can be cancelled, so while part of me really hopes to go, the greater part of me recognises that, even if the event takes place, it may not be appropriate or possible to go. The same goes for other events I might otherwise be going to. I really miss catching up with friends, doing face-to-face playtesting, chatting with publishers, designers, and gamers, and all of that. All of this stuff will just have to be a "wait and see".

In other, adjacent areas... I have been enjoying reading history books over the last couple of years (mostly early medieval Britain/Europe) and these books have been generating occasional game ideas, which is cool, and I'll continue this reading. I'm currently reading about Eleanor of Aquitaine (wife first of Louis VII of France, then Henry II of England), who was clearly a formidable character in her own right, and have a book lined up about Isabella of France, wife of Edward II of England, and who also had a rather colourful life. 

Also, maybe I'll do a bit more proofreading training. We'll see... I've continued to do the occasional proofread or rule review, and will keep doing this as and when.

So, that's as much of a plan as I have for 2021 other than I'll try to blog a little more often. Let's say I'll aim to do at least two per month. See, that's pretty SMART!

* SMART is a way that management consultants and trainers tell you to organise your objectives and has been expanded in a load of different ways, usually something along the lines of Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

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.