Welcome to Two Scooters Press!
[Blowback for $1K] Timeline
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
[Blowback for $1K] Creating a budget
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?
- Game Text
- Printing
- Art
- Layout and Design
- Editing
- Playtesting
- Promotion
- Online/electronic support
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:
- Game Text
- Printing
- Art
- Layout and Design Tables and cover
- Editing (assigned to Shreyas)
- Playtesting (coming from additional funds)
- Promotion
- Online/electronic support (negotiating for cheap)
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.
- Preorders
- Personal money
- 2009 tax return
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.
[Blowback] The thousand-dollar RPG
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.
Thinking critically about media and roleplaying
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.
[Blowback] Playtest Document part 1 is live!
This document only contains the information necessary to create characters and do the first phase of a job. After I get some playtesting in, I’ll write the next section! But right now I need volunteers to play with. So please, take a look and let me know what you think– and if you’re interested, let’s play sometime!
[Blowback] On killing and dying
Though initially I was thinking of Blowback as specifically being “The Burn Notice game,” its influences and inspirations are pretty diverse: Grosse Pointe Blank, My Blue Heaven, The Bourne Identity/Supremacy (haven’t seen Ultimatum yet), and more. The thing that surprises me as I get deeper into the game is noticing the commonalities between things like Burn Notice and the Bourne franchise; both have protagonists who are trying to figure out what happened to them and why, and just want their former handlers to give them what they want. There’s another important thread between these franchises, and that I think also holds true for the other sources of inspiration as well.
You’ll notice that I haven’t listed James Bond as one of the source inspirations. You might think that’s crazy and sacrilegious, or you might assume that it’s so obvious an influence for any spy game that I just chose not to list it. I’m a huge, huge fan of the Bond movies– I’ve seen every single one!– but this is not the James Bond game, unless someone hacks it for that reason. The principle difference is this: in the inspirations I list, and in Blowback, killing and dying are big deals. They have serious consequences. Sure, for 007 some people dying is a big deal; Vesper, Bond’s wife in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, people like that. But it’s still cool to shoot and kill mooks with no repercussions, because he’s Bond and a badass and that’s what he does. But whether you’re John Cusack or Jason Bourne, the people who die matter. If they died because of something you did, or because you couldn’t save them, or because you had to kill them. It’s a huge thing. There are consequences, because every body is another link back to you for the police or the vengeful family or your former handlers and associates trying to get leverage on you. There are consequences because you have to look at your face in the mirror every day.
That’s not to say that there isn’t, or shouldn’t be, killing and dying. But it’s not a frequent thing, and when it happens everything changes. Life isn’t cheap and killing isn’t easy.
[Blowback] Quick chat with Sean
[5:24pm] evilseanbot: One thing I’m wondering about
[5:24pm] evilseanbot: is
[5:25pm] evilseanbot: Can you say “I don’t want the job”?
[5:25pm] Elizabeth: I.. guess?
[5:25pm] Elizabeth: But that ’s kind of like being approached in the tavern by the dude in the dark corner and when he is like “I have a mission of vital importance” you’re like “But I wanted to stay home and throw a barbecue for my friends”
[5:26pm] evilseanbot: I know
[5:26pm] evilseanbot: Its exactly like that
[5:26pm] evilseanbot: I think it would be good to put in big bold letters “YOU TAKE THE JOB BECAUSE THAT IS HOW THE GAME IS PLAYED.”
[5:27pm] evilseanbot: Or possibly put in some sort of sub-system.
[5:27pm] evilseanbot: Like
[5:27pm] evilseanbot: You can express Resistance.
[5:28pm] evilseanbot: And then when you express Resistance, one of 3 things can happen: A) Another character can jump on the oppurtunity to take the job, He’ll better his offer and you take the job, or C) They make it -personal-.
[5:28pm] evilseanbot: Either way, job is taken, but it adds a few options.
[5:28pm] Elizabeth: Ooooh.
[5:29pm] Elizabeth: I like that a lot.
[Blowback] Scene type: Analysis
Analysis scenes happen before the job itself. There can be any number of these scenes, depending on what exactly you need to do in order to prepare yourself for the job at hand. The first Analysis scene in a job usually involves the following:
• Being approached by the Client
• Getting a rundown of the job
• Determining payment, if any
Then the group decides who is running this job. Sometimes, maybe even most of the time, the person who should run this particular job will be obvious anyway. The person in charge gets to use his or her skills and whatnots for free, of course. Bringing in the other team members costs a favor each. Of course, sometimes the client has a tie to one of the team members who, for whatever reason, isn’t suited to running the job; putting someone else in charge on a job where you brought in the client yourself costs you a favor.
The person in charge of the job brings in the team members who will be involved and delegates tasks. These tasks can involve the following:
• Doing reconnaissance
• Laying traps
• Rallying forces
• Creating diversions
There are special mechanics for doing these things, which can get you tokens to place or burn during the Mission scenes, or can cost you in the Mission scenes as well. This is the stuff where your skills and whatnots are really useful; the dice mechanic here is probably a simplified version of the pendulum mechanic* used in the Mission scenes, or maybe is an independent mechanic that informs the pendulum mechanic.
Anyway, there are a series of scenes in which individual characters do awesome things in order to set themselves up for success on the mission, and people get together at the end of the Analysis phase to finish planning for the job.
*More on the pendulum mechanic in a following post
[Blowback] How to start a game
(Let’s call GMs “The Agency” for a little extra flavor.)
So when you begin a game, you come up with your characters– the stuff I mentioned earlier, you know, your dossier. Everyone plays an Artist or a Lifer, as well as a Civillian who is important to another player’s Professional. Just because you come up with a Civillian doesn’t mean they have to be involved in every job or every session of the game; sometimes it’s nice to have them waiting in the wings for when they’re needed, and some Civillians will turn out to be more important than others. The Agency controls everyone else.
The Professionals are trapped in the same town where the players are playing the game. They’re stuck there after one big job went horribly, terribly wrong, and the Agency blacklisted them as a result. The group can brainstorm the details that the Professionals would already know: where the job took place, what the goal of the job was, what the unexpected issue was that tanked the mission, and how they barely got out alive. Since everything was planned meticulously for a job that big, obviously the job was sabotaged or the team was set up. Throughout the game, the characters will learn bits and pieces of the truth behind that fateful mission, and eventually be confronted with the choice to return to the life of a spy, retire, or something in between.. And then live (or die) with the consequences.
They find out this information in a progression of jobs for folks around town.
When making a job, The Agency rolls a d6 to determine a client:
- Dirty Gone Clean
- Innocent Bystander
- Fall Guy
- Justice Seeker
- One of the Professionals
- One of the Civillians
There’s always a bad guy who’s the entry point into the operation. The team will have to do some recon to figure out who it is and come up with a plan to exploit the person, but for the general template of the Mook, roll another d6:
- Club Kid
- Hired Muscle
- Suit
- Con Man
- Zealot
- Honeypot
And finally, roll a d6 to find out who the Boss will be. Sometimes they know it upfront, and sometimes it’s dramatically revealed later. Which works best for you should be obvious (ie, the Sleeper isn’t known from the beginning), or you can decide it later:
- Magnificent Bastard
- Old Friend
- Agent
- Sleeper
- Mastermind
- Crazy
Once The Agency has got the basic idea of what the job is, play can begin.
Next: a breakdown of the three types of scenes.
[Blowback] Distilling some ideas
(Yes, the game has a new and better title now!)
So the game has a specific premise of sorts, now. You and your friends/crew/whatever were working a job, and for a reason you’re not sure of– sabotage, perhaps, or outside influences– the job went horribly awry. As a result you’ve been completely blown, and you’re stuck in your hometown with your friends until you can win your way back into the agency’s good graces. You start knowing very little about the job, what the goal was, and who was involved, but as things progress in the game you get more and more clues. Right now I’m waffling between creating some kind of mechanized output system that generates clues at appropriate times in the fiction, or just making that one of the GM’s jobs.
The character sheet is a dossier: real name, known aliases, picture. Specializations and calling cards. And then there are two other parts:
Profile: this is what your character thinks they want. The thing that you’re making clear is your objective– you want to get out of the city and get back into the agency, you want to retire peacefully and get everyone to leave you alone, you want to defect, you want to go into witness protection.
Psychological evaluation: this contains all of the stuff your character doesn’t realize they are or they want, but seems obvious to outsiders. This is the stuff your character isn’t self-aware enough to notice, or would deny, or doesn’t realize is as important as it is: “Subject is clearly in love with his demolitionist, has delusions of grandeur and enjoys playing hero. Dangerous thrillseeking tendencies, perhaps due to a broken childhood.” and so on. You can add to or change this stuff as the game goes on.
The game progresses in a series of jobs, and each job has three types of scenes: Analysis, Mission, and Blowback.
Analysis scenes are about carefully prepping for the job at hand. Coming up with contingencies, bugging phones, surveillance, information gathering. During Analysis scenes, your relationships are used as bonuses, and favors can be exchanged.
Mission scenes are about doing the hands-on work. Infiltrating a gang on a job, exchanging money for a hostage, confronting a Boss, showing your true identity/face to the enemy. During Mission scenes, your relationships can be used as penalties, and fallout from favors can be revealed.
Blowback scenes are about what happens after and between missions, relationship issues, and dealing with fallout. During Blowback scenes, relationships can grow, diminish, or break.
More later.