Post #8 S.O.S. – Designers who suffer from it and the women who love them
Note: In addition to being a year since my last blog post, this blog started about seven or eight months ago, so some things have changed since I initially wrote it. It makes it all the more relevant, just stay tuned you’ll see what I mean.
If you haven’t heard the term before, SOS stands for “shiny object syndrome“. It’s a form of ADHD that is especially prevalent in those who undertake creative endeavors. It’s the reason I have dozens and dozens of unfinished stories written on my phone, some of them novels in the making with numerous chapters already completed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s good to be interested in many things. For me, it keeps life from getting boring and sometimes if I’m stuck on some thing that just isn’t working a change can lubricate my mental machine. The downside is… Many unfinished projects. This is the reason my Muse drinks. (She also carries a whip, but that’s a story for another time.)
I listen to several Game Designer escape room podcasts and it’s been said by more than one person that ideas are cheap, real designing is grinding out a prototype, play testing, changing, killing off your darlings, making new Proto types, more play testing… Ad infinitum, or at least until the idea comes to some kind of fruition.
Sidenote: yes, we are still working on board and card games. Everything here still applies, but we have added another project to the mix, “escape room in a giant box”, under the title of “Curious Contraptions”. I’ll go into more detail on that project in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, you can see where my brain ran off to when I started this post. Confused? Yeah, me too.
I have a list with over 60 ideas for games and a half dozen or so that we’ve made prototypes for and a few that have had some kind of play testing. My problem is my ideas won’t just sit there on a list and behave themselves. Nope, they want to stand up, stretch, move around the room, grab some card stock, make a few quick designs on the computer… You know, just to see how it might look. That’s how it starts and the next thing I know I’m down the “new game idea rabbit hole“. Fortunately for me, I have a partner who’s better at staying the course with a single idea. Cesar and I had a design session some months ago and he very gently mentioned that we still needed to do a “how to play“ video for One Letter Better (still on to-do list BTW) before we started on designing our latest creation, Deep Salvage (currently on hold … sigh). Of course he was right and I begrudgingly conceded as we laid the cards out on the table. We wrote out the script for the video but the whole time I kept looking at the box from The Game Crafter that was full of all sorts of little plastic ships and other pieces that we want to use in our prototype for the new game. I have to admit, though, I did feel a lot better when we finally did start with the new game knowing that an important step had been taken care of for One Letter Better.
Editorial note: We are currently in search mode for said notes as they seem to have disappeared. One Letter Better has moved to the forefront of our efforts, more on that soon.
One Letter Better as far as we can tell is ready to go, we are just looking for people to play test it and give us feedback. And make some videos. And think about putting it on Kickstarter or game found or some such platform in the near future. So even when a game is done, it isn’t really done.
Editorial note #2: We received some very encouraging feedback on OLB at Strategicon last weekend. A gentelman from an “undisclosed game company” asked why it wasn’t on Kickstarter already. Several of our players asked where they could buy a copy. So we have moved up the launch timeline. Soon … very soon.
Even a condition like SOS has a sort of lifecycle. We have several ideas for videos to promote One Letter Better, all of which are going to take some time to produce. And although there’s a chance of videography becoming all consuming, at least there’s an endpoint. Once the Director yells “that’s a wrap“, we post the videos and move on. And there you have one of the built-in dangers of being independent game designers. We have to wear so many hats that we get used to bouncing from one activity to another. It becomes the perfect opportunity for SOS to rear its ugly head and drag my brain off into a direction I didn’t even see coming. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes those trips produce some amazing results. I’ve learned from my past with writing and other endeavors to just give in for a little bit, make some notes, keep them where I can find them (this part is vitally important! As we have discovered recently) and try to get back to the task at hand. This is how I ended up with a list of game ideas… And story ideas… And inventions… And numerous other products of mental exercise. Trust me, when I die someone will be spending days or weeks going through all the notes stored on my phone and computer, shaking their head and wondering why I never became a famous author/Game Designer/inventor. I have days when I wonder that too and then… SQUIRREL! Yeah, it’s like that. My mind has 1000 browser windows open at any given time and it’s not always easy to stay on the most important one. I’m getting a little better as I get older, probably because I don’t have the energy to run off chasing rabbits the way I used to when I was younger. Also, I’m slowly learning the benefits of completing things. And a partner who also suffers from SOS but not as bad …. Most projects are completely worthless until they are finished at least to some degree. Games don’t have to be 100% before they are play tested. Most of the time feedback is crucial for getting the last 10% to 50% right.
OK, this blog post has rambled on long enough and some of the things in it have changed. (See Editorial notes). Stay tuned and be nice to someone.