On the final days of DOOM and the joyful distraction of making things
Wherein the author tries not to chew his fingernails to the quick about Kickstarter and goes off and makes things to keep his sanity.
I’m hitting the home stretch on the DOOM + MADNESS Kickstarter, and man, is it devouring all my available brain cycles. It has funded—yay!—but I’d really like to hit those stretch goals. You know the drill here: tell your pals, tell your baristas, shake those couch cushions for spare change. Let’s hit these final goals and ease some of the pressure on Mark’s brain.
In the meantime, I’ve had a little bit of time to do creative things. A few weeks ago, I went to Deernicorn’s Story Night in Olympia, WA, where I did the important thing you do the first time you go to fight night (no, wait), and ended up playing a game of Deernicorn’s BFF! on their Twitch stream (you can watch it here). It was their first run-through and the sound is a bit clumsy, but hopefully, you can see how much fun we were having.
Last week they played Yazeba’s Bed and Breakfast, which I am sorry to have missed, but I’m sure it won’t take much to talk folks into hauling it out for another go-round.
The premise of BFF! (teenagers hanging out in town and bonding via storytelling) isn’t something that I normally gravitate toward, but the mechanics are charming and the end of the round charm bracelet exchange is pretty genius. You have to be a stone cold monster to not get swept up in the game play. And see? Proof right there on screen.
And speaking of storytelling and games, there’s a reason why Skeleton Code Machine was up for an ENNIE Award this year in the category of “Best Online Content.” Their substack is an ongoing education in all things tabletop and RPG. Just a fantastic resource for methodology of mechanics, philosophy of game design, and incredibly useful resources.
Like their Make Your Own One-Page RPG chapbook. They published the entire thing in six parts on their substack, and you can find the first part here. I’m eagerly awaiting the print version, because I’m a tactile sort of fellow. It’s so good, friends. And not only in the discussion about mechanics and game play, but in the practical matters of turning all your notes into a coherent document, down to design tips and templates for layout. Go get it. Everyone should have this handy.
Especially since the One-Page RPG Jam 2024 is going on until August 25th. Itch.io is an enormous resource for indie game design, and the community is running game jams like this all the time. If you want to fuss about with making RPGs and other types of games, you ned to be aware of Itch.io.
I have notes for “Jam Badger” that I need to format into a one-pager, but, you know <waves at the stacks of things to do>.
I did manage to make a thing in the last few days. I was at the Willamette Writers conference over last weekend, and I sat in on a session of “Exquisite Corpse” that Eric Witchey did. There were a dozen of so of us writers, and we made some truly magnificent corpses. I scampered off with all the body parts and determined that, indeed, a productive and focused sort of critter could produce a physical product over night.
