This post is coming in a little hot, because I’ve regrettably gotten myself quite distracted. Due to a confluence of unrelated events, my three semi-regular weekly game groups were all on hold for the first half of October. To bridge the gap for myself, I dug into a daily writing challenge for the month of October. The challenge is described here (but requires a bsky account to view): https://bsky.app/profile/diwatamnl.bsky.social/post/3m243seqz4c2s
I find that prompts, jams, and other kinds of time-boxed design challenges are incredibly helpful for my own creativity. I’m prone to endlessly jotting half-considered ideas, but at a certain point the desperation to get something done kicks in and it pushes me to commit to an idea earlier than I otherwise would, sometimes with positive results.
Before I go further, I feel compelled to mention: I’m fortunate to be in a position where my weekly obligations add up to much less than a standard 40-hour work week. Part of the reason I’ve tumbled into a rabbit hole for several of these daily prompts is because I have that time right now. I don't necessarily expect anyone to measure themself against my work, but it's definitely something I've done with other folks' work during busier periods of my life. To everyone, always: find your own creative rhythms any way you possibly can, and always give yourself time to rest when possible.
Highlights
Since the challenge is still ongoing, I’d like to just share a few that I especially enjoyed writing or felt particularly fond of the result.
Glade of Solitude
Glade of Solitude is a game about witches-in-training getting lost in a mystical forest and losing the ability to communicate directly with each other. By using their potion-crafting training, intuition, and trust in each other, they must survive until they can unravel the curse and get free from the Glade of Solitude.
With no time or occasion to playtest, I had no reason not to jump straight to a bunch of ambitious ideas. I used a little map of hexes to give players options for which parts of their curse they unravel, to allow strategizing around remaining resources, and for introducing a loose sequential narrative structure. The game discourages nearly all player communication during potion making (which functions like a heavily-modified prisoners dilemma, where players are trying to produce certain combinations without knowing each others' choices), and then it gradually reintroduces communication in limited ways.
Honestly, I think it probably has some wild balance issues and I haven’t the slightest idea how well the communication restrictions would work in play. Would it be nigh impossible to collaborate even as restrictions lift? Or would it become trivial far sooner than I hope? This is heavily reliant on in-person play, so it’s hard to say till I revisit it and properly test it.
Jajanken Duel
Jajanken Duel is a game inspired by Shonen duels and the series of escalating taunts, reveals, and mind games that are often exchanged while the duel unfolds. It’s loosely inspired by my recent watch of Hunter x Hunter (hence the name and the rock-paper-scissors structure, for those familiar), and it attempts to capture the emotional and dramatic arcs of such heightened exchanges.
I had fun trying to laser focus on genre specificity while also keeping actual game content broad and flexible. The game uses 3/4 of a deck of cards to implement a modified version of rock-paper-scissors and the remaining 1/4 for special prompts that players draw from to rally when they lose a round. I was pleased with the economical use of cards, and I’m happy with how concise and straightforward it is in general.
The core of the game is the prompts that players answer when they win or lose a round, so there’s certainly room to expand on them, to make them both more plentiful and more precise. Also, since ties are resolved by the rank of the cards used, I haven’t fully worked out what kind of incentives it produces choosing which card to play. It may be technically optimal to always choose the highest-value card in your hand, and that could ultimately make it a bit boring; I’ll have to play it out a bit to get a sense for it.
Survivors
Survivors is a dark story about a group of sapient zombie-folk who are accosted by unturned survivors while trucking supplies to another community. In order to escape their predicament, they must rely on their few strengths and maintain their resolve for the communities that they hope to protect.
If Glade of Solitude was unwieldy (but fun!) because of its mechanical ambitions, Survivors was tricky because its thematic ambitions. I wanted to invert certain zombie genre trappings in order to unravel my discomfort with them, and I landed in a place that has a huge number of uncomfortable parallels. Most of them are parallels I've thought through and attempted to deliberately incorporate to produce fruitful discomfort, but they’re still topics that are tough to handle and I’m barely semi-confident in my treatment of them.
That said, ambitious attempts can be gratifying even if you’re unsure of their success. As with the others, the actual probabilities need to be mapped out in more detail before I’d have a sense of how closely it aligns with the tension I’m hoping for. Additionally, I was quite happy with how it uses a spread of stats to emphasize thematic ideas, but dissatisfied with the way that the unturned player character is the most literally vulnerable. This really does muddy some key thematic goals, but I do still think it’s mechanically compelling.
I’d also want to revisit the way that backstory is delivered and make it more prominent and more naturally integrated. As it is, it’s kind of shoehorned in to bring depth to characters and what they’re trying to protect. Regardless, writing something really heavy and uncomfortable (but intentional) was new territory that I’m glad to have explored at least a little bit.
Ongoing
If you’re interested, you’re welcome to follow along on bluesky! I’ve been deeply touched to hear from friends telling me they’ve read along, and though I must remind myself that I’m doing this exercise for the sake of my own growth, I must also never fail to be moved by my friends’ attention and encouragement.
When this is all over, I hope to work through what I made and pick out some to produce more fully, in whatever form they might take. Till then, let’s see if I can keep up the momentum!