It damn near killed me...
Paul Czege:
...but between January 8th and today I completed an indie entry to Jared Sorensen's Indie Game Company Game Design Challenge. System design, playtesting, fixing the broken stuff, art direction for the cover, writing, graphic design and layout. It's called Thy Vernal Chieftains. It's 21 pages long, plus the cover, at a trim size of 3.5" x 8". And if the effort of my experience is at all representative, I'm betting it'll be the only solo project to come in under the gun.
It's now available for purchase for just $1, as mandated by the challenge, through this coming Saturday, January 31st only. At which point we'll all be waiting on Jared's resolution of the challenge winners.
Paul
Adam Dray:
OMG awesome.
When did you start designing/writing?
Adam Dray:
Oh, January 8th. Three weeks from start to finish. Impressive! Consider yourself dollared (twice, cuz I want to send my brother a copy).
Thor Olavsrud:
I'm still digging into it myself, but there's some interesting stuff going on in this game!
Paul, while you were working on this, you mentioned to me that part of your goal was to explore narration in GM-less games, specifically the nature of group collaboration in deciding outcomes.
If you don't mind, could you talk a little bit about your thoughts on the subject and how you addressed it in Thy Vernal Chieftain?
Paul Czege:
Hey Adam,
So here's what happened. I was hooked on the idea of the Challenge when Jared announced it in December, and started forming a Company. But my idea was for Danielle to be the Developer, and for our friend George to be the Writer, and hopefully for me to be the Artist. Because I've done Game Chef and so I already know I can do system design under a tight time constraint, and because Artist would actually be a stretch opportunity for me, and because I know Danielle would be a great project manager and George would be a great writer. And my plan was for the Company to brainstorm a game concept as a group the way Kevin, John, and Thor came up with The Five.
(I was actually rather surprised to see all the groups forming up by folks who had game ideas they'd never managed to put energy into who wanted to be the Developer. It just seemed obvious to me the right recipe for going the distance was shared enthusiasm for the game itself.)
But it turned out that George was on a very tight deadline for a couple of large grant proposals at work and couldn't do it.
So when Thor Hansen pitched me on his desire for a game about Roman Britain, which he described as a "post apocalyptic" game, because the departure of the Roman legions represented a fundamental collapse of the social structure, I agreed to be the Designer. He assembled Graham Walmsley to be the Writer, and Remi Treuer to be the Artist, and I designed the system in two or three days.
But Graham flaked on the writing.
So then when Jared rolled out the wrinkles on January 8th, I decided to give it a go. Roman Britain was Thor's white whale game, not mine, so I'd had to work to find a personally meaningful concept for a system; but having done that, and developed enthusiasm for it, I was irritated a glorious game hadn't been birthed by the Company.
So Danielle and I playtested the December system. But to my great dudgeon it was broken and not fun. And so I wracked my brain over the problems for the better part of a week. This was not my Game Chef experience at all, in which Bacchanal fairly sprang from me fully formed. This was painful. I'd already promised Ed my firstborn child for a cover illustration and he'd devoted a whole weekend and finished it. But I took a knife to the mechanics and somehow I found a fix. Danielle and I tried it, and it was fun.
But that thrill was fleeting. Because the long dark night of the effort was the writing. (I really need to get to England to kill Graham for putting me through it.) I'm not sure I'd have finished it at all if not for several IM conversations with Thor Olavsrud in which he expressed enthusiasm for my design goals.
And I'm not sure why the writing phase was so hard on me. Maybe it was that I didn't have a powerful inherent affinity for the setting, that I'd already had to work to make the concept meaningful to me (note how it's rather strayed from "post apocalyptic").
Or was it the idea of charging money? If you charge money for something, you're asserting it's worth money. You don't charge money for a Game Chef entry.
I've been reading Alfie Kohn's Punished By Rewards. Is it that working for an extrinsic reward of money, or winner status is inherently dismotivating? I'm still not sure. But it was definitely a harrowing effort for some reason.
Anyway, that's the long story. The short story is that I had the outline of a system from December that I'd designed in two or three days, but between January 8th and yesterday I playtested it, gutted it, redesigned it, playtested it again, did art direction, researched the setting, wrote the text, did graphic design and layout, saw that it was good, and put it up for sale.
Paul
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