Ah! So, before I begin this post proper: I’ve moved to Nelson, a small artsy city built up the side of a heavily-wooded mountain. It overlooks a pristine lake, is populated by lots of amazing coffee shops & restaurants & galleries (a selfish amount for its size, really), and is wonderful. I feel so at peace, re-collected, grounded.
And, thus, it’s time to start blogging again. With a fresh perspective & vitality. And to kick that off, I’m going to start a little series called Design Diary. Expect one every Friday. I’m going to move through all of my design & publishing efforts, and explore some lessons learned and successes achieved. I’m going to try to focus on the social elements of play & design, but might drift the conversation elsewhere if it feels right.
Although I designed some other stuff (and released some PDFs of it) prior to it, I still think of Perfect as my first game. I started working on Perfect shortly after I started participating at The Forge, in early 2006. The Forge was really lively back then – an active design community and lots of people sharing thoughtful reports of actual play. The theory forums had recently shut down, forcing people out of their heads and back to the drawing boards. There were lots of designers, and I could feel the energy in the “room”. There was an excitement about the fact that anyone could be a designer, that it didn’t have to cost a million dollars, that indie design was growing and thriving.
Excitement is infectious. It’s also really hard to build structures around. The result (I feel) is that 2006 was a year of really exciting but incomplete products. Shock: Social Science Fiction is an amazing game and a novel take on how worldbuilding and roleplaying can interact, but the original text is extremely opaque and spotted with errors. After a couple years and two revisions, its definitely doing itself more justice. But it came out of a year of premature releases and a culture of enthusiasm > follow-through.
I’m not meaning to harsh on Joshua AC Newman. He’s a bombin’ cool designer, and Shock: is a bombin’ cool game. Other games saw premature releases that year too, Perfect being a prime example. Perfect was released without adequate playtesting, without adequate revision and design tweaking, while early fans were cautioning me to develop it further and continue considering it. It lacked polish. It was far from perfect, ironically enough.
There were several lessons that I learned from that experience, that I subsequently forgot about. I’m trying really hard to ingrain them into my design process, to re-learn them and to take them seriously.
Heed the Advice of Those Lending a Hand. This doesn’t mean that you should let your friends design your games. You shouldn’t. But designs florish when they exist within a social process. If you are lucky enough to have interested and thoughtful people that want to support you, as I did when first designing Perfect, you need to hear and engage with what they say. To do less is a disservice to yourself, to them, to your game, and to the community that is rallying around your work. It’s quite simple: when good-natured and thoughtful people support your vision and offer wisdom, take it seriously. This is one of the most meaningful and hard to come by things in the world.
The reason that I take the time to spell that one out is that design is an art form, and there is a notion of artist as monolithic and brilliant and untouchable. When you step into that artist role, especially when you pour lots of your creativity and hard work into it, it’s easy to forget that you aren’t monolithic and brilliant and untouchable. In fact, you’re hard-worked and blind to your own weaknesses and you’re only one person. It can become easy to reject the good support of those who’ve put less sweat into something. The first lesson is: don’t. Don’t reject support, and encouragement, and love. It’s find to consider it and decide it isn’t for you. It’s fine to take it with a grain of salt, or a cup of salt. It’s fine to debate and hesitate. But treat all support and perspective like it’s super important, because it is.
Slow Down. I was very concerned with getting Perfect ready for Gencon. This was a grave mistake. The game and the product suffered as a result, and I burnt out some of my support network by pushing unrealistic deadlines upon them. That damage to my support network was made even worse by the fact that the person editing and doing layout for me (David Artman) was doing it absolutely free.
My design process used to be: Create, Release. That’s a terrible design process. A more sustainable and thoughtful design process might be: Consider, Create, Reconsider, Share, Revise, Invite Critique, Edit, Release. I used to see editing (especially entrusting my work to external editors and critiquers) as unnecessary in my design process. Even worse, I saw it as an affront to my process.
Everything suffered as a result of rushing, of not taking time to let things simmer, of not engaging in a dialogue of improvement. Creating, especially the initial burst of creativity it takes to produce a first draft, is actually a tiny fraction of the process of designing and publishing a game.
It’s Not Done Until You’re Proud Of It. The world has a ton of artists, of art, of games, of bands, of professionals. The amount of stuff we produce and participate in is astounding. And, as a result, the world has no need of things which are good enough. And I reproach myself for going to press with something that I told myself was “good enough.” If it isn’t something that you’re unwaveringly proud of, there’s zero need for it.
The first version of Perfect is the last thing I have ever published before I was totally proud of it.
In conclusion… Heed the Advice of Those Lending a Hand, Slow Down, and It’s Not Done Until You’re Proud Of It.
Those are the lessons learned in publishing the first edition of Perfect. As I get closer and closer to being finished Perfect, Unrevised (my cleverly named second edition), I’m having to remind myself of these lessons constantly.
Posted by mcdaldno
