Mar

22

Grace and Learning (and The Devil’s Reach)

Design Diary / Moments and Experiences / Promotion

I really like learning the craft of graphic design. I set out to teach myself a few years ago, largely so that I could develop more autonomy in game publishing. I’ve had spots of mentorship here and there (thanks, Brad Murray, for sending me that book and walking me through my early crises), but I’ve also spent lots of time clumping through the wilderness.

I’ve come to a conclusion about learning. It’s a messy, sloppy process. Furthermore, it’s supposed to be a messy, sloppy process. And learning graphic design is a weird nut in particular, because you’re designing messy, sloppy products. That’s tricky, because people judge products on their degree of coordination and polish. Good products aren’t messy and sloppy, right? This is especially important when your goal is to create products that you intend to sell.

I suppose one solution is to start by designing things that never see the light of day, unlovable children that you keep hidden in the basement of your hard drive. I am not excited about that solution. I want a solution where knowledge and learning are badges of honour, things you can show people while giddily exclaiming, “Look what I can do!” Another solution is to accept your limits and release messy, sloppy products until your craft improves. But that doesn’t sound like an ideal solution either – the world is regrettably full of messy, sloppy products.

An ideal solution would let you proudly demonstrate your learning at every stage, while creating graceful and polished products throughout.

That’s why I’m so excited to be working with Josh Mannon on Within the Devil’s Reach, and the first installment of the Gears of the Worm God adventure series. See, it goes like this: Josh wants to release a series of slick, high-quality adventure books for Dungeon World. The first one is on Kickstarter right now (with 48 hours to go), and he’s angling for a mid-August release on the resulting book. He wants to develop his graphic design skills and practice them along the way, but also recognizes that taking on the layout for the entire Gears of the Worm God series might be overwhelming and not leave him enough of a timeline to develop his craft with confidence.

So, Within the Devil’s Reach will bear the credit line “Layout by Joe Mcdaldno.” I’ll be developing the visual stamp of the Worm God series, and doing all the layout for book number one. I’ll be documenting my process for Josh, creating a sort of play-by-play report of what I did and why I did it. With the second book, I’ll be mentoring Josh on parts of the layout process and asking him to take on some responsibilities. By book three, that credit line will read “Layout by Josh Mannon and Joe Mcdaldno.” By book five, it’s our goal to have the credit line read “Layout by Josh Mannon, with initial consulting by Joe Mcdaldno” or even a simple “Layout by Josh Mannon.”

With each subsequent book, Josh will have new things to point to and say, “See? I did that.” He’ll be able to proudly demonstrate his learning. And it’ll exist within a graceful and polished product. My goal will be to render myself unnecessary, while ensuring that the Gears of the Worm God series looks as awesome as possible at every step of the way.

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Jan

03

Perfecting It

Design Diary / Promotion

Perfect, Unrevised is for sale. This is one of the most exciting announcements of my life. Folks can pick up the PDF for $10, and preorder the book for $22 + s&h.

This moment has been a long time coming. I’d like to share with you how I got here, and link you to some reviews and AP along the way.

In late 2005, I started reading The Forge. I participated in one or two little design contests, before stumbling upon my big RPG idea in early 2006. Imagine a game where your character sheet only told you about the things you can’t do? Imagine if play was about finding out how to work around that?

That idea in and of itself didn’t prove to be very exciting, but it did lead to Perfect. Impatient and seventeen, I rushed to design and release the game as soon as was humanly possible. I was at Gencon with the game in hand that very same year – about 6 months after my initial idea.

That’s, uh, a stupid way to design a game. In May of this year, I blogged about some of the lessons I learned in that experience.

I published the game, and was initially really excited about it. I heard some really lovely compliments from Paul Czege, who was my game design idol. Ron Edwards played it,  and then played it some more. He encountered some glaring hiccups, but generally liked it. Malcolm Craig played it too. He encountered some glaring hiccups, but generally liked it.

Over time, the glaring hiccups came to occupy more and more of my mental real estate, and reports of people having “generally liked it” were less exciting. Some time in 2007, I pulled the game off the market. I was determined to refine it and re-release it once it had been, well, perfected.

I assume this process will take about three months. It takes over three years. The game receives about 100 playtests over this period, some led by me and some blind. I posted about one session here.

I almost abandoned the game several times, because the work of editing and refining turned out to be hard. Gasp! What a surprise!

It’s then that fans and supporters came out of the woodwork, to help push me to keep going. Gary Breinholt is one of those people. He playtested every iteration of the game I put out, for years, and always came back with critique and encouragement. I shared some of that process here, in 2008.

Finally, in the early Summer of 2010, I had something that felt complete, that told the kinds of stories I wanted it to, that was easy and compelling. Playtests started to soar. Feeling immensely confident – cocky even, I put the game up as a Kickstarter project, asking for $7,000 in funds to publish the game. I managed to raise an exciting $2,660… and am ultimately glad that I failed to raise more. The game design was done, but the physical product was still far from complete.

I worked with editor Josh Roby, who was fantastic. And then I spent months slaving away in inDesign. I learned a lot about graphic design in the process, predominantly that it is a much slower craft than you would think it is.

Come to think of it, I’ve learned something about all crafts: they take much longer than you’d think. Artistry isn’t something you can just vomit onto a page. It takes years of training, honing, doing, refining, re-examining, doubting, and trusting.

It’s been exciting to actually go through that process, and give every step its due attention. At the height of my wit, I named this second edition Perfect, Unrevised – a nod at the dystopian, history-erasing setting it exists within. But truth be told, this is the project that’s taught me the value of revising – the value of hard work.

I talk about some of the important mechanical changes here. The folks at the tremendously good Ninja Vs Pirates podcast explore the mechanics and the structure of the game, with me, here.

And now, finally, it’s ready. You can buy it if you want to. Wilper did, and he reviewed it the very next day. The review is really good and comprehensive, albeit short.

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Jul

22

Things That Have Changed

Design Diary / Promotion

Brian Peters asked me:

“Can you tell me some about what’s sweeter and tastier about this new edition [of Perfect]? Game-wise, I mean.”

Brian, I’d absolutely love to tell you about some of the changes I’ve made from the first edition book and the upcoming one. Right now, I’ll focus on two: I’ve changed how Aspects work, and I’ve added Holds.

In the first version, a large part of character creation was creating Aspects. You’d give them a name, and then spend time fiddling with balancing out levels and numbers and strategizing, all before knowing how the game played out or what your choices really meant. The system for building your Aspects was broken – there were a few winning combinations that you’d be silly not to take. Some of the decisions you were making at this pre-game stage (specifically, choosing Fallouts) would have mechanical significance that as a new player would be extremely hard to predict – Fallouts are dangerous across multiple rounds or even sessions of play, not so much in an immediate, concrete moment. Before play, Aspects were complicated and hard to get a grip on.

During play, Aspects were tedious. Since your only way to get ahead in the game was to constantly rely on your small number of Aspects, you are struggling to work “Scent of My Mother’s Perfume” and “Vicious Like a Caged Animal” into every single scene. So the system was leading you down a stale and contrived path.

That whole system has been cleaned up, in a major way. You have a Resources score. In a given scene, you decide what your Resources are in that scene, and invoke those numbers that way. During character creation, your choices are dead easy: you can have Resources 6, or you can have Resources 5 and take 2 points worth of Contacts (a slightly more volatile option). The named-traits-called-Aspects thing still exists, in a different role. You create 3 Aspects, which are phrases that demonstrate things you rely on: Sharp Wit, Flawless Liar, My Father Taught Me a Code, Unremarkable Face, etc. You can invoke 1 per cycle, for a re-roll (a BIG deal in Perfect). So, now almost all of the mechanical strategizing has been taking out of character creation, and getting started with the game takes about fifteen minutes less. Play is much more about manipulating immediate resources, and much less about rely on fallback strengths.

The other new thing is Holds. I saved it for last because it’s best. In the old version of Perfect, the inspectors were always after you, once you’d committed a crime. There were lots of chases and interrogations and invasive home searches, even when it didn’t fit a character’s narrative, because that’s how the game was structured.

There was no, “Jacob, you don’t know me. My name is Inspector Raleigh. I’ve been watching you for quite some time. I’m glad you managed to make it.”

There was no Inspector looming in the shadows, collecting evidence and building a repertoire of perfect emotional weapons, biding his time. And mechanically, there wasn’t any way for the antagonist to build up resources without just intentionally losing a bunch of times, which really weakened the authority of the inspectors! Now, when you’re the antagonist, you have two choices: do you attempt to capture the criminal, or do you establish a Hold?

Holds are things that will come back to haunt the protagonist character later. They come in two flavours: Minor Holds (evidence, witness testimonies, etc – things that help the antagonist win a test), and Major Holds (secret fears, emotional weaponry, hopes and dreams, the names of loved ones – things that both help the antagonist win a test, and double the stakes). Holds change the pacing of the game. They lend it “quiet, too quiet” moments, and then they bring the hammer down and smash everything to pieces.

Source material where Holds are ruthlessly accumulated and then dropped all at once: A Clockwork Orange. Source material where the antagonist is focused on constantly weedling down a character: Quills. Holds in A Clockwork Orange might be stuff like: He loved the music of Beethoven; “Singing in the Rain”.

So, those are two changes I’m really excited about with the new system. Mechanical resources that don’t require a lot of forehead-scratching during character creation, and that lend themselves to dynamic and fluid stories; and, a way for the antagonist to bide their time, to get their dirty little strings deeper into your head before they start tugging.

Hopefully that stuff excites you too!

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May

23

Piracy Ain’t Easy (but it comes with time)

Telling Stories Together

I bought a fiddle a year ago, and spent about a year neglecting it. It’s only recently that I’ve redoubled my interest and effort, and have begun to practice several times a week. I’m taking my first lesson tomorrow, which I’m really excited about.

I have been teaching myself, thus far, out of a book. I think it’s called Fiddle For Beginners. A few months ago I bought two song books as well: Essential Rock (containing Brown Eyed Girl, Low Rider, White Wedding, Freebird, and a bunch of other random rock songs), and the soundtrack to Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl.

It’s the Pirates of the Caribbean book that I’ve been focusing on today. Specifically, One Last Shot. Very specifically, the section around :32-:52 (which is where the fiddle part essentially starts, in this book). I spent ten minutes listening to the song on Youtube before starting to play, and periodically took a moment to replay that section to see if it was still “sounding right” in my head.

I can’t play that fast while learning a song, obviously. I’m not very good yet, and so things come together very slowly. But this song seems pretty simple, and most of it is played on the A string (where I’m currently most comfortable), so I think I’ll be able to pull it off sooner or later.

When learning new things, or practicing new skills, or composing/creating new works… I always hit a wall. There’s a point where things always look futile to me, and it’s often fairly early on. It’s that point where the investment & dedication required keeps growing, and the results have slowed to a crawl. Its that point where the gap between your expectations and your results are widening, and seem like they’ll only keep widening the harder you work.

When trying to learn a song, it specifically translates to “this doesn’t sound anything like the real song”, and it seems like the harder you work the more you “lose” the right tune. And I spent about twenty minutes getting more and more frustrated by my inability to make a few eight notes and quarter notes resemble the way I knew they were supposed to come out.

Wall perhaps isn’t the best description, because you can’t just get around it and keep going. Rather, it’s a valley. The Valley of Dwindling Rewards. It takes a lot to climb out of that godforsaken valley, and the hardest part is trusting yourself. But, I managed to climb my way out of the valley with One Last Shot.

And the funny thing is… when you get out of that valley, up onto that mountaintop… even the simplest rewards feel huge. I’m rejoicing that what I am playing sounds remotely like the song, because that’s leaps and bounds ahead of where I was five minutes ago. Every few minutes, it sounds better. I get closer to the right timing, hitting the notes more cleanly, feeling proud about it.

With most projects, especially creative ones, you get less confident before you get more. My experience with writing poetry is that I am always ready to tear up the page, moments before I write something that feels true and beautiful and right. With storytelling, with performing, you’re always trembling with doubt moments before applause.

So, I wanted to share that success. That voyage into and out of the Valley of Dwindling Rewards. Back into the realm of joy and excitement.

Oh, and tangentially related: I bought a banjo. I can pretty definitively say that this song was what tipped a decision that I’ve been hemming and hawing over for a while.

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