Welcome to Two Scooters Press!
Game text is finished!
The text of Blowback is done. Three quick bits of supplemental material (revised character sheet, Push Pyramid, and Job Dossier), and it’s ready for outside playtesting. I should get the supplemental material done tomorrow.
Let me know if you’re interested in running it for me, and I’ll share the document with you (and thank you in the book). You can comment here, or on Facebook, or on Twitter, or email me… You get the idea.
(And if you just want to give me thoughts on it, I’m interested in that too. I just want to control how many people have access to what is almost the final text.)
[Blowback for $1K] State of the project
Things have been going along decently for the last couple of months, with a few hiccups. But we seem to be back on track:
Game Completion
I totally missed my deadline of having a completed game text by Dreamation. Part of this was due to my entire family getting violently ill, myself included; mostly, though, it was the convergence of multiple projects and not enough hours in the day. Right now, though, the text is 80% finished and it’s looking great— all that’s left is to write up the last bits of The Agency Handbook and the author notes, and then it’s just compiling appendices from there on out.
The game itself is finished, design-wise, and I’ve been enjoying it thoroughly. I need to get a multi-session playtest going, just to double-check the game progression works as well as I think it does, and then we’ll be gold.
Budget
After some deliberation, I’ve decided to shell out $200 to Mr. Ryan Macklin for game editing. Let me be frank: despite my high esteem for Ryan, and how flattered I was when he reached out to make the offer (he’s the best in the business, and super busy with projects like Primetime Adventures 3.0), I was dubious about shelling out 20% of the grant to have someone go “Hey, just so you know, your participles are dangling.” In my past projects, I’ve had multiple people take multiple passes at the plaintext version of the document simply because they enjoyed the project and were willing to be a pair of fresh eyes, and that’s worked out fine. So, after Ryan made me the offer at Dreamation, I told him that I was pleased and thankful and that I would think about it.
During my thinking— which, in all honesty, tended more towards “It’s a generous offer, how do I politely say no?”— Ryan made this blog post about his editing philosophy. Which made me say, “Oh. I need that.”
It wasn’t a decision I made easily, but it was a decision worth making. Since there’s a lot more riding on this game than on a usual release for me, and simply because I love this game and I’m a damned perfectionist, it needs to be right the first time. People need to be able to understand the rules, my intent in writing them, and what they should be able to change or throw out if they want and still have a workable game. Part of the problem is that I always understand that stuff intuitively, because I’m the one who wrote it— and the friends who check out my stuff are also pretty used to the way I communicate. Not everyone will be. So I’m willing to take the risk and make the investment in a better text.
I’ve also shelled out another $50 on art, which altogether, brings the leftover budget to $642.50.
Update; also a contest
Things are going really well for the text of Blowback. I finished writing the final section of the players’ guide, and have started The Agency Handbook. In the meantime, I’m running a contest over on Story Games asking people to stat up their hometown. The coolest town wins you a free book!
Budget post coming soon.
Blowback: New playtest preview, Dreamation correction
Hey guys! It turns out I’m running Blowback on Sunday morning, not Saturday. Sorry. You can still get in touch with me about playing in it, though!
Here’s the latest version of the Blowback document, and it includes Mission: Blowback: Playtest document 2
Enjoy!
Blowback at Dreamation
Hi guys! I’m running two official games of Blowback as a part of Indie Games Explosion at Dreamation 2010 in Morristown, NJ (February 18-21). The first game is Thursday night at 8 PM, the next is Saturday morning at 9 AM. These are “playtest track” games, so you can get into them one of two ways: if you’ve signed up for a playtester badge at the con and are interested in Blowback, let me know. If you haven’t signed up for a playtester badge– you’re getting a regular or GM badge– let me know, and I can invite you personally. I want to do my best to ensure that everyone who wants to try Blowback can.
Going along with that: if neither of those times work for you, get in touch with me and I’ll try to put together something off-the-schedule for you at another time. (If you find other people who want to play at that time, even easier.) I never really sign up to play games before the con itself, so my schedule’s pretty open.
Anyway, the take-home lesson here: if you want to play Blowback at Dreamation, comment or email me. And if you want to just hang out, contact me too. Chances are I’d love to hang out with you again\meet you.
[Blowback for $1K] Progress report!
Happy new year, folks! I just wanted to give everyone an update on my progress.
Timeline
I am 49 days away from my first deadline: a polished playtest document. I’m halfway through writing it, and I’ve done some more playtesting, including a really fun game with Epidiah Ravachol, Emily Care Boss, Vincent Baker, and Ben Lehman earlier last month. We recorded the session, and it’s been useful to play back and help me figure out how to word exactly what we’re doing. I actually want to have the document finished by the end of the month, so I can get a bound copy printed up for personal use at Lulu– Vincent did that for the MC Guide for Apocalypse World, and it seems really useful to have an easily-portable, take-notes-in version, especially before running it at Dreamation.
That reminds me: we’re running it at Dreamation! There’s a new “Playtest” track this year, so if you want to play, please sign up as a playtester when you register for Dreamation. I think if you playtest enough games, you get in free, just like a GM. So there you go! Comment or email me if you do– if I understand correctly, the GMs choose who play in their games, and I want to make sure everyone who wants to play Blowback can.
Budget
I’ve spent $27 on media for a trailer I’m putting together, $46 on art (including the cover), $14.50 on printing costs, and $20 on JiffyCon attendance, for a total of $107.50, leaving a total of $892.50 for the rest of the project. The next expenditures I see are probably art-related; I’m not sure if I’m going to count Dreamation expenses toward the total or not. Dreamation’s pretty inexpensive for Two Scooters as cons go, since we don’t have to pay for hotel space and GMs attend free. There’s still meals, the gas to get to Jersey, etc.
Game Progress
A lot of good things have been happening with the game. The things I’m most excited about right now are The Agency’s tools, including a consequence pyramid that restricts the GM and allows him to “unlock” new tactics and complications when characters fail rolls. One of the pieces of feedback I’ve gotten the most is that failure needs to happen more often, so I’m messing with probabilities a little. People are always initially concerned that Analysis will drag on too long without a mechanical limit, but when the game begins, the psychological impact of seeing The Agency collect all dice that don’t go to the players seems to limit things nicely. (Emergent details like that make me really happy.) So far the games I’ve played have skewed a good deal darker than Burn Notice, but the stories have been satisfying and each game has ended with players wanting to play again.
Which means the next trick is to get a multi-session game going..
JiffyCon Playtest Wrap-Up (And AP report!)
The first real playtest of Blowback went off with flying colors. In fact, you can read an AP report by two of the players over here on The Forge. As I told the players during a break: I’d played through Analysis twice, talked through Mission once, and sort of had an idea in my head of how Blowback was supposed to go. With those things in mind, Analysis and Mission both went extremely smoothly, with only two minor changes that I’d make. Blowback was rushed, since we were running out of time, but it ended on a pretty interesting note. All in all, I’d say it was a success, and my thanks go out to Jim, Chuck, Sam and Kate for taking a chance on the game. I’ll update the text to reflect the changes we made and finish writing up Mission in the next few days, and then release the next phase of the playtest document.
In other news, I got the paper samples from 360digital and I’m extremely impressed. I think I know who I’ll be using to print the game. The only disappointment is that their matte laminate scratches easily– but that’s true of ALL matte laminate, so it’s hard to blame them.
New character sheet: just in time for JiffyCon
With thanks to Shreyas. You can download it in PDF form here.
[$1K] And here’s a point in 360digitalbooks’ favor:
I emailed them to ask if I could perhaps purchase a copy of a full-color book they’ve printed in the past, as I was concerned because I’d never seen their work.
The rep mailed me back 15 minutes later to let me know that a full-color children’s book and a guide book with samples of all of their papers and covers was already mailed to the address on my quote.
So THAT’s promising.