[Game Chef 2011] Daughters of the Canon
Kadrin:
Having hacked mercilessly at my dear brainchild with the Machete of Editing, I've managed to get her down to 2998 words. Success, as it were. Of course, now it's all so much less charming, and part of me is convinced that ripping out all the flavour text has cost me any chance of winning.
The rest of me, however, isn't so much concerned with winning as with enjoying the competition. And that's a lot more of me.
At any rate, it's a bunch of playtesting tomorrow to see how the mechanics work in practice, final editing as necessary, and then - submission! Here's hoping all goes well. I'm definitely proud enough of my result to do a Ganakagok or Dance and the Dawn - polish up the prose, work on some layout and design, add a lot more hints and possible adventures, throw in some art, make it all pretty, and then put it online for $5 or so. I have long thought that I should be pursuing some sort of career in game design; this could be a wonderful beginning, or at least look good on a resume.
The mechanics are still flummoxing me a little; putting the target numbers where they seemed to give good numbers in pure theory seemed to end up way too tough in practice. For the moment, I've lowered them to what looks "way too easy" on the probability factor. Playtesting will see it out. I'm probably of the opinion that players should succeed more often than they fail, anyway. With the Rhyme system of the sonnet dice, criticals on both sides will be much more common, and an encounter full of critical failures is only fun in retrospect.
There are things I'll definitely have to resolve. While I love the concept of "inspiration heat" as "hit points", I don't think I've got the system for that working quite perfectly. There's also a lot of encouragement towards heavily stacking one's character to a single stat, and there's just enough competitive game over co-operative story that that's a problem - especially since it might end with everyone's character looking the same, a faceless horde of all-Blood tragedies and all-Rhetoric histories. The current Scene Progression advancement - which, again, I love in theory - rewards a whole party equally for foes beaten individually; so a party of two Dreams taking on four Ideas is rewarded just the same way as fourteen Dreams taking on four Ideas. This makes things too easy for large parties.
I don't think I'll have time to resolve these issues before submission, though; that's for polishing afterwards. On the whole, I think what I've got down is what there's going to be. I'm mostly pretty happy with that. I think it came out well, and I'm proud enough to put it forward. If nothing else, I learned a lot.
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