Let's see... The work this week has been less than intended. I got caught up dealing with an AI art situation (not on any of my campaigns, no worries) but can confirm that human art prevailed in the situation, so it was time well-spent.
Rulebook | 30% Keeper's Book | 0% Player Folios | 0/4 -Maker of Hands | 25% -Caged Wraith | 25% -Trophy Collector | 25% -Organ Eater | 25% Player Decks | 0/4 -Maker of Hands | 80% -Caged Wraith | 90% -Trophy Collector | 70%
I did not do what I said I would do, which was complete the 3 decks that are nearly done and then work on the Organ Eater after that. Instead, I have begun working on the Organ Eater deck. I'm curious how the decks interplay, and if I can get near finishing this one first and then compare what the classes do across them, I can ensure they're different. Namely, I want to make sure they are all unique from one another in important ways, and don't overlap too much in what they can accomplish.
Everyone can Attack, but I only want the Caged Wraith to have big spikes of high damage, while the Maker of Hands and the Trophy Collector can earn big spikes of damage over time and with effort. Most characters have access to some kind of healing in their kits, but no one can offer wider team healing in the way the Organ Eater can-- the rest do so to themselves in small amounts.
I am really excited for the Organ Eater! I have designed the unique path Actions for them, so that's 10 cards, 5 on each Path. The Organ Eater can go the Devourer path to get cards like Suck the Intestines, Eat the Heart, Pick the Brains, Drain the Kidney, and Chew the Lungs-- all of which offer them bonuses that they can offer back to their allies if they want-- or the Alchemy path, gaining Wound Salve, Adrenaline Tincture, The Gut Mix, Burn the Churn, or my favorite, Valve Release-- where they open all the valves to their internal chemistry factory and cover their body in their concoctions, letting allies come drink (or lick?) random potions from their body, letting each ally pick a bonus to gain, from healing to adding poison to their weapons-- it's proper gross and I love it.
Additionally-- the Organ Eater gets an Alchemist's Trinket deck, which is a set of 10 cards that are set aside that they can pull on to give allies bonus potions with a variety of effects.
This is great for me, because honestly? The work is feeling fun! I haven't been quite there yet for a bit, but now I'm excited to dig back into these weird characters and figure out what they're doing. We're about a week away now from me being ready to put in an order for these cards. So see you next time, as I'm past the work day stop time now and need to go do silly things now.
My apologies, working through it. I was at GenCon and sick before that, but the time since has no excuse for not updating, last week especially. I am taking on 2 days a week for Confluence and 2 days a week for HISTORIC, with one week two weeks ago lost to getting my next 3 projects ready, but they are ready now, and what work needs done on anything will be handled Monday-- my one day a week set aside for Future Projects.
At the moment, I'm notably not on track with my schedule. But let's see where exactly I am, with numbers!
I'll start copy+pasting this over to updates so we can see things come along. Yesterday and today, I was working on Caged Wraith and Maker of Hands decks. I need to write out the shared Actions (5 cards to design) for the Maker of Hands and finish the core Path card and it's ready. Caged Wraith just has a little busy work to do next Thursday and two more cards to finalize and then it's ready. Trophy Collector has some notes on all her cards, but needs several cards expanded on. Organ Eater only has the bullet points done for what the cards should be.
I've also decided to add Folios to each class. These will be single-fold brochure style handouts that explain some rules for your Class and have the quick-start to get you game ready, plus flavor on each class! I realized quickly that for some of the classes, I want to be able to reference Player States and have them have rules somewhere else, such as for the Caged Wraith. They can be Within (their soul in their body), or Without (soul out of body.) I wanted a central spot to explain what that means without using a couple cards to do it, as there are a few things that are true that need thought about: When outside your body, your body is defenseless. An ally can carry you, but then they need to take a penalty to do that. Your soul can take mental or soul damage, and your body can take physical damage, but they ignore the other damage types.
That's a lot! And it should go somewhere you can reference. I can also use those folios to include definitions for some Keywords used in the game that otherwise would be in the rulebook.
I've been keeping track of Mechanics in the spreadsheet, but may be adding more later, so it may be enough that cards need the help. I've also done a little re-design on the bottom of cards that are unique to specific paths, so it's less obtrusive and takes up less space.
This is a complex game-- as I'm sure I've noted in every update since I realize the behemoth I've been making. But I am working with clear intention to have the game done and printed in time for GAMA next year-- that's late April. So stick with me here, I will be able to knock out the 3 nearly-done class decks next week, then it's a matter of if that work prepared me for getting the 4th deck finished, 0-100.
Once the 4 player decks are ready, I'm printing all the 2.5x.3.5" cards with MakePlayingCards or drivethrufiction asap, and will then run games referencing files on my pc for the odd-sized cards and square cards, like the delves and whatnot. I'll be upsetting the timeline here for sure, but I should be able to catch up to my work here.
Thanks all for your continued patience, 7DA your pub gob
Apologies for the two week delay there. As I noted last time, getting the oracle dice and tarot and pride pins AND new book off my plate was not as simple as saying it's done now. The next week I got stuck handling the mess that was all of that. Then last week I was caught up vending at a local event (and getting ready for it) and handling the pride pin shipping. But this week I'm back to the grind. Next week I'm on the way to Gencon, so I don't know if I'll have a post for this then, but know that I'm thinking about nothing but games and how much I want to finish HISTORIC for y'all.
I have realized that posting this update on Thursday is too soon, so I'm doing Fridays from now on, with the goal that it's the last thing I do on Friday before the weekend, so I stay focused on HISTORIC the full time, Wednesday through Friday.
I also have a deadline for myself! I am vending at GAMA next year, which is an industry focused convention to get my stuff picked up by wholesalers and distributors and the like, and I would very much like to get HISTORIC in hand by then, which is late April. I would also, also like to get the 2nd editions/prints of ZOETROPE, What We Possess, and New Avernus in hand for those as well. So I have some work to get done!
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New game component. Each class has one of these cards. These will be your table presence spot. When you roll dice in the game, you generally leave them Set after rolling them. Meaning they will be called on for various things in the game based on what they last rolled. You can also Hold a die, which gets marked below the set die with a red stone. This means that if you are asked to roll that die, you leave it as is and remove the Held marker instead. Sometimes the Keeper will Hold your bad dice rolls, and other times your allies will help you hold your good dice rolls.
It has a purple edge with the Trait symbol (the book), so that your Trait can slide underneath the card. Then it has a brown edge at the bottom for your Path to sit at. The Path is the card that each class has which lets you pick which side you want to use. The Trophy Collector for example picks between The Trophy or The Banner paths, which each offer different abilities and make cards do different things. Most classes have you pick between the paths and that is your choice for the game session. The Trophy Collector is special in being able to swap which Path they're on throughout the game.
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It has not been a pretty June + July so far for my timeline as I said I would get things done. And with Gencon next week, I won't be doing much solid work on the game until August. To make up for the lost time, my focus has been on putting together all 4 core class decks before I do testing with game scenarios. The game isn't made for 2 players, so I should check it out as-intended.
......
I wrote that stuff on Wednesday, then was intending to finish and send out Friday after I did work all day. I woke up Friday so dizzy and light-headed that I couldn't really walk much. That has persisted till today, unfortunately-- though now I am feeling well enough to walk and get around a bit. I even went swimming sunday, which was really nice for the dizziness and awkward movement, as the water helped correct my problems.
At any rate, I am getting ready for Gencon for the remainder of this week, while also gauging if I will be well enough to attend. Here we go-- talk next week.
Okay, last week being a non-week wasn't helpful for anything haha. But it was my birthday and I deserved having a bit of time to myself. So I did it! That said, it meant work from last week got shoved to this week. This week has been all about shipping charges and shipping spreadsheets.
The good news is that tomorrow I'll be shipping out Tales From the Alley; next week, I'll be shipping out the Pride Pins. And as of next week as well, shipping for the Oracle Dice Campaigns (both) will be starting with the fulfillment folks, and as of this week, shipping is beginning for all 3 Tarot campaigns (Misery Tarot, Hot Housewives Tarot + booster pack project)!
That is 7 campaigns sliding off my plate.
Now, I'm not dumb-- there will be issues with the dice and tarot campaigns as they ship out and the shipping itself will take time-- we're unlikely to see items in people's hands entirely until end of August. But!! My hand in most of these things will be fairly minimal, aside from sending spreadsheets back and forth between Backerkit and my fulfillment folks.
So as we head into August from here, I will only have two past campaigns hanging out with me: Confluence and HISTORIC. I've done a really good job focusing my new projects ahead of time so the Goblin's Tarot and my book in October shouldn't affect day to day stuff much (and be ready to manufacture as soon as they fund), which means I should be able to put in more work a week on HISTORIC (and Confluence.)
Okay, back to The Trophy Collector
So last time, I put in work on getting their cards together. But I didn't finish their deck by any means. Today I've been trying to do that. Something I am really cognizant of since ZOETROPE is legibility. The text on those cards was so small that anyone without perfect eyesight struggled to read it in clear lighting, or in dim lighting (like we had in some con rooms where I ran the game for strangers) they couldn't read the card text beyond the title at all.
I printed a card out (in black and white) on printer paper. I'm realizing that 7 pt font is the smallest I want game rules text in this clear dark font on an almost-white background, with most text at 7.5 pt, with the flavor text italics able to go as small as 6pt. That was in well-lit and dim-room settings, but we both (my roommate and I) have pretty good vision (or he had on his glasses at least). This makes me wonder if I need to punch it up more, or accept that folks with worse vision will need their reading glasses to read the cards.
But as I do these cards, I wonder where exactly I'm going to fit stickers. If you recall, a piece of the game is that as you play it more, stickers get added to cards over time from different events-- mostly from dying or finishing your game sessions. Right now, the stickers are a bit up in the air. Things like +1 Physical Damage that you could tag onto a weapon or attack action to make those do more damage. Or "+Gain 1 Armor" on the Trophy Collector's cards, as stickers will be grouped based on whose cards they can be added to, with some situations letting you add stickers from whichever grouping to any kind of card to make weird or super strong things.
On Relics, I have plans for what their stickers specifically will do, and so the Relics have spaces on their cards for stickers to go specifically. Will I need to keep text short and to the point on all cards to 1) make the text larger, and 2) to make intentional spaces for stickers?
Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself. I need to finish the decks for these two classes already! So I'm focused on that tonight until I'm done with work. Specifically, I have wrapped Preparations, Search the Bags, Take a Trophy, Dominating Bulwark cards for the Trophy Collector for testing. Now, I'm heading into writing in the general use effects of Spread Wings, Chain Entrapment, Shoulder the Burden, Arm the Hopeless, Lumbering Behemoth, and Unshaking Foundation cards, which all have partial writeups for what they can do in combat. Then I need to take a look at the three trinkets, two relics, and three tools found in their deck to write the proper rules, rather than the temporary text I put on them.
I can get a decent chunk of that done yet before I hang up my hat for today, if not all of it. Then next week, it's back to the Maker of Hands to finalize text on those cards and update the text I've previously written for those cards. And since I'm supposed to do the Caged Wraith this month as well, I think I'll just sit in and get all three of those classes ready for testing. Testing just two classes will feel weird, since the game really is more meant for 3-4 players plus the GM.
I was a little nervous about how I would do prototypes without paying much, but seeing my printer pop out a beautiful copy of a card to check font size in black and white, I think I will stick to the good ol printing on printer paper, cutting the cards out, and putting then in sleeves with cards behind them.
Okay, see you next week where, you hold me to this, I will have the full Trophy Collector deck completed and the Maker of Hands deck nearly there (or done!!) for testing.
Hello folks, no real work this week, as tomorrow is my birthday! (Yay) And I've been caught up with figuring out the shipping cost stuff for the three tarot and two oracle dice projects, but that's wrapping itself up this week as well, so next week as normal.
