Just as it sounds. The DSRPG is ready for playtest; comment or email me [eshoemaker AT gmail] and let’s see if we can get it going, either for your friends at home, or if you’d like me to run it for you on IRC.
So, a big part of the challenge was that I have one year to make the game: I’ve got to do everything I said I’m going to do by October 31st, 2010. This is going to be a bit of a challenge, but as I’ve already got part of the game written and the rest tentatively mapped out in my head, hopefully it will not be impossible. But, like with the budget, the most important thing in budgeting time is figuring out major landmarks in your timeline and in your production schedule. It’d be nice if some of the landmarks in production intersected with landmarks in the timeline. So here’s my shot:
Polished playtest document: Dreamation (February 18th, 2010) – The game itself may still have some minor bugs to work out, but all the parts will be there, even if they’re not moving completely smoothly. At this point I plan on having the game thoroughly playtested online, and need to introduce it further to face-to-face tabletop groups, especially testing its one-shot capabilities and how easy it is to explain to new groups.
Written “finished” draft: PAX East (March 26th, 2010) – this includes the entirety of the text. I’m not calling it a playtest document, because the playtest document is constantly written and revised as people play it. I’ll talk more about how I like to playtest once I’ve spat out this whole timeline. This is the first draft of the final rules.
Edited draft: May 30th, 2010 – I want to get this combed over a few times for clarity and consistancy, by my editor, by playtesters, and by one person who’s never seen the game before.
Book back from the printers: DexCon (Sometime in July, 2010) – I want to get some copies of the book into people’s hands before GenCon.
Get married (July 24th, 2010) – This part makes me a bit nervous that I might miss some of the spring/summer deadlines. Hopefully I can get ahead of schedule!
Book goes into wide release: GenCon (August 5th, 2010) – I know, it’s trite but it works. I think honestly I’ll want to go to GenCon more to hang out with people and celebrate getting this sucker done than to shill.
Online support finished: October 31st, 2010 – This is the stuff that makes the most sense to do last, since it requires the game to be completely done first.
This is pretty ambitious, and so it requires a little shift in my plans. I’d originally been planning to give a PDF of the game to everyone who posts an Actual Play report on Story-Games, The Forge, or RPG.net. That is no longer the case. For now on, every playtester who posts an AP report will get an actual physical copy of the book. Hopefully this will lead to more feedback, which will lead to more quickly addressing any problems.
First deadline: 121 days
So, my “real job” for the last eight years has been running my own photography business. It’s meant good things for me when it comes to designing games: I’m already really familiar with sticking to a budget, how to make that budget, and dealing with vendors. The approach I take to budgeting for a game is very similar, but not identical, to the approach I take when budgeting for a photo shoot.
There’s the total amount of money you have, and the total number of priorities you have. In this case, the total money on hand is $1000. So what are my priorities?
My first question is always the same: what here can I do for free or cheap? I’m doing the writing and layout myself, so that’s not going to cost me. Wait: there are two things I’m having trouble with, design-wise: I want to do something more with the cover I have, and I want the tables to look better than they look. I’ll have to allot some money for those two things. There are always minor playtesting costs; I can take any overly-large playtesting costs from my budget, I guess, but that stuff might be best coming from additional sources (more on those later). The good thing about Two Scooters is that we work as a collective, so I’m going to go ahead and assign Shreyas the editing, since he assigned a lot of the writing in Radiant to me. Finally, I’ve been in talks with someone to help me with the online support in exchange for the use of a SDK for iPhone, so the cost there is reduced. Let’s look at that list now:
Now I’ve got to look at what’s left and rank them, considering both what’s most important to me and what I know is going to cost the most money. Print costs are probably the first thing, both in importance and cost. Art next, then promotion, then online/electronic support. I’m putting the tables and cover last, not because they’re the least important, but because they’re what I think I can do for the least amount of money. The next step would be to assign them percentages of my budget, but I don’t have a quote I like from a printer yet. I’ve got three printers who still need to email me quotes, so that will be its own post in the future.
So far, this has been pretty much identical to how I budget for a photo shoot. Here’s where it changes: I mention additional funds. Since the thousand bucks is coming from the first DivNull Lark, I’m in a position where I feel it’d be okay to supplement my budget if necessary, or if there are small things that I don’t think should come from the main funding. Examples: I like to throw playtesting dinner parties, but I don’t see the need to pay for the food with my budget. Likewise my admission to JiffyCon next month, where I plan to playtest the game. PAX East? Possibly. Depends on how done the game is in March, and whether I think reaching a new market that large might be worth 5% of my budget (it might). Irregardless, it’s important to identify these possible additional sources of funds, so that I have a good idea of when these funds may become available, what from my personal life they may cut into, that kind of thing.
So, preorder cash isn’t going to come until the end of the development cycle. Tax return won’t come until February or March at the earliest. Personal money always sort of exists, but in low amounts. That means lots of low-cost, semi-regular stuff is best paid for with personal money: that sounds like playtest costs to me. Since the other two sources have specific timeframes attached to them, I probably shouldn’t direct any of my costs to those financial resources until I have a development timeline worked out.
Which will be in my next post.
So Les Ward of DivNull.com ran a very generous contest over on Story Games:
This post started with the following hypothetical:
Posted By: Valamir Imagine said benefactor announced “Pitch me your game ideas and the designer whose idea I like best will get $1000 to bring it to fruition”
Other popular game design forums maintain, however, that debate about hypothetical situations are useless and only “actual play” matters. So, let’s play…
As of now, there actually is a benefactor (i.e. me) saying “Pitch me your ideas for how you would use $1000 to either make a new game or improve an existing one that hasn’t been released, and I’ll donate $1000 to the idea I like best to help make it happen”.
Conditions:
- Only pitches made on this thread, publicly, will be considered.
- No pitch made after 15 October 2009 will be considered.
- Donation will be made on or before 31 October 2009.
- If your pitch is selected, you have until the last minute of 31 October 2010 to make good on the idea. At that point, the world will know if you are person of your word, or a failure.
- This donation in no way affects any rights you have to your work. Nor does the donation create any liabilities from your work for the donator. Succeed or fail, you’re on your own.
As you might imagine, it garnered a lot of interest and 11 great pitches were offered up. In the end, I was surprised to be awarded the $1000 prize for my pitch for Blowback:
Here’s my pitch for Blowback, my Burn Notice-inspired spy game.
Blowback is a labor of love and the project I’ve most enjoyed working on in all of my forays into indie game design. It’s got all of the human, falliable relationship stuff that’s important to my enjoyment of characterization, as well as the enjoyment of spy stories like the afore-mentioned television show as well as things like the Jason Bourne movies and Spy Games. I’m pretty proud of the Momentum mechanic, which works in a way I kind of always wished Exalted successes worked (when you win, you win gloriously, when you fail, you fail gloriously). It’s important to me that the book be a wonderful thing to hold in your hands, and that the book is a strong source of reference for more than just the game’s mechanics: I want to include a bunch of “spy” information, as well as a full glossary of important vocab (for instance, the names of all the major analogues to the CIA in the world, as well as other organizations, and the lingo used within them) so that people can feel like they’re badass spies right out of the box.
The $1000 would go to a few different things. First of all, art: I’m doing a full-color book with gorgeous photography. My goal is for the photography to be mostly, if not all, produced by women, and for the art to skew subtly towards sexy, badass depictions of men in danger and non-slutty, sexy-because-they’re-badass girls saving the day. (Some people are doing similar things with fantasy, but the spy genre continues to be male-dominated, both with authors and depictions of successful spy characters. The closest I can think of are slutty, badass archaeologists, which isn’t quite the same thing.) Having more money would give me the flexibility to be choosier about my art, and commission pieces from female photographers I admire instead of relying completely on already-existing stock.
Furthermore, I’m fascinated and excited by the idea of utilizing technology in ways to make my games more accessible and to enhance the play experience, both face to face and for online play. I’d use a portion of the money on an iPhone developer kit, to allow me to create play aids for the iPhone– I enjoy games with boardgamey and other chart-type elements, and so there’s a good chance that Blowback will utilize something along those lines. If not, access to the diagrams, character dossiers you can fill in, save, and transfer to other phones alone would make gaming on the go easier.
Finally, I’d be remiss in taking that much money from the community without giving back. I’d be willing to distribute iPhone applications for other designers through the SDK I would purchase with the money, and also start a new blog which would outline all of the successes and failures of designing a game with the $1000 budget, as well as something that’s been really hard to find out in public lately: hard numbers. I will talk about deals I find, money I blow, things that paid for themselves and mistakes I never should have made. We can see if Jonathan’s right that someone with a bunch of money to blow on a game would just waste the money, and what can be done with $1000 no strings attached. I will be no-holds-barred honest, keep a running total, and a countdown to my deadline. My hope would be that other people would learn from my experiences, and good discussions could arise about some of the choices I make that would help us all. And even if the game turns out to be no fun, the information gathered would be worth the cash.
…
Except the game will be fun. Because I’ve played it and it’s fun already. So really, win win.
And true to my word, I’m going to be blogging about the hard numbers and financial information here. In the next few days, my webmaster’s going to set up separate pages (and feeds) for both the game information I post and the nuts-and-bolts financial information I post: when that happens, I’ll make a post with links to both feeds (and a link to a feed with both). Future posts will go over my quest to find a reasonably-priced printer, how I’ve found inexpensive art, and the way I tend to make budgets. I don’t present this information as a mandate: if anything, it’s the opposite. This is how I do things on a $50 budget, and it’s also the way I’ve decided to do things on a $1,000 budget. I’m certain I will make mistakes. It’s my hope that what is an invaluable learning experience for me can also be a learning experience for you as well.
So again, big thanks to Wordman: his investment in my game is quite an honor, and I’m looking forward to making it worth his while. Yours too, if you read along.
This stuff on Story Games about postmodernism in gaming and what Matt said about how it’s difficult to relate to non-gamers because RPGs make you look at media in a different way got me thinking.
Two things: I’ve never played a game with the hopes of telling an awesome story, and I think Trigun is a triumph of storytelling.
These two seem initially unrelated, so I’ll go with the second first and then tie it all together. I know a lot of anime enthusiasts (which I do not consider myself to be; I have only enjoyed two anime series, and have been forced to watch dozens more) sort of roll their eyes at Trigun, because too many fourteen-year-old catgirls think Vash is dreamy or something. I don’t know about any of that. Here’s what I do know: the narrative arc of Trigun, minus one episode, is the tightest fucking thing I have ever seen. Everything is so tightly integrated and escalates on such a perfect, steady climb. There’s the traditional triple-arc structure to a serial (Each episode furthers and concludes the episode’s story arc, furthers a multi-episode story arc, and furthers the overall story arc), but there’s more to it than that. Every character’s personal/psychological story arc steadily plugs along in every episode, with few spotlights (not counting Vash’s spotlights, since he’s the main character). We’re given views of every character from every other character’s point of view. Every mini-boss is an exaggerated facet of the personality of the big boss. The right character to die dies, and the ending is satisfying but not conclusive. That is some high-end, thoughtful, intelligent storycrafting, and when I watch it, the author in me gets blown the fuck away.
I rarely consume media with the gamer in me at the forefront. My interests as a designer are firmly in the realm of genre simulation, so I’ll watch a movie or a TV show as my normal self, then later get all excited and want more of what I just saw, so I’ll try to write something that feels the same. Not the same narrative structure, not the stuff I talked about above. I don’t want to tell a story, as that’s always striked me as a less visceral thing than the non-LARP RPG equivalent of “playing star wars” like Tovey does, where he’s a dude with a lightsaber and you’re a dude with a lightsaber and you run around making cool noises and thinking “Holy crap! I’m in Star Wars! This is awesome!”
That’s what gets me hot about Mist-Robed Gate, It’s Complicated, Annalise. “Holy crap! I’m in a kung fu movie! A WB teen drama! A monster movie!” It’s also how I approached our game of Apocalypse World back in the day. “I’m in Mad Max or Waterworld or something! Whee!” I don’t think it’s really immersion though, because I wasn’t trying to BE THE PERSON and I never become one with my character or whatever. It’s just that I use the feeling of the media I consume to inform how I interact in a game. If I don’t like the color, or it’s not a type of media I’ve consumed, it’s hard to get me excited about playing a game.
So even though the thing that gets me all hot and bothered about Trigun is its narrative arc and the construction of its story, it has never occurred to me (until this post) to play a game trying to emulate that. Yesterday, if you came up to me and said “Hey, let’s play this game, it’s like Trigun,” I would have thought “Okay, post-apocalypse.. Are we all plant-aliens or are we just lonely people in an abandoned town or what? Can I have an arm cannon?” And probably would then go through the whole game going “Whee! I’m in Trigun!” without giving a second thought to the part of the inspiration that I loved the most.
This makes me kind of really want to try and play a game where I’m sitting down and consciously putting forth a narrativist agenda. I’ve never done that before, and I don’t even know if I’d have fun or be able to pull it off. But I totes want to try.