Game Design Journal: Mapemounde 2020 - Final Thoughts

By all rights I guessed pretty accurately how this would go.

By Thursday it was clearly a question of inspiration. The work was all familiar, the layout options and ideas were set and solid, it was all down to really considering the design, and just writing the words.

The biggest challenge was making the work quality and under 4,000 words. It's easy to get a lot of mileage out of a game that is neatly packed into on booklet. 4K is perfect for that. But I had my heart set on a deck of cards and a pre-created map, as well.

Now, I did consider NOT creating my own map, and instead saying, "Go to your local chamber of commerce and get a map of your neighborhood," or included links to PDFs of the same. But that had a LOT of risks I didn't want to kick into the world, including 'go outside.'

So here's how the remainder of last week fell together, once I crossed the Rubicon and had to drop everything else to get this finished.

On Thursday I basically got next to nothing done - I was neck deep managing some personal finances, talking to my family for a long while, and checking in with other friends. I managed to practice some SQL queries, but that was about it for my "demonstrative work life" during the quarantine.

Friday threatened to repeat that routine, so I had to really do some scheduling jujitsu, and flip all my obligations on their head. By Friday night I was officially writing the guidebook and the Oracles. I figured, "If I can write the core of the game's instructions, and then write all the cards that you use to play the game, I can revise in the morning and spend Saturday night with the map."

That quickly changed. By Friday night it was clear that the oracles needed further consideration, and, worst of all, I was drifting up and down the spectrum of guessing my audience.

The entire guidebook could not be read until I decided who was going to be my audience.

This involved two vectors to consider.

First: How much active role-playing does this game demand? The more you define how and what you're doing, the more specific your audience is, and the more specific your instructions have to be. If this game is strictly about "answering creative prompts with your own creative descriptions," then I'm teaching a set of skills to a very wide audience. If this game involves "playing pretend and talking in character, improvising a story according to tone and input," then I'm talking to an entirely different and narrower crowd.

Second: How new to the experience are my intended players? Even if I had decided to go with existing TTRPG enthusiasts, that's still a lot of explanation of how you do things in this game. What would be the best way to coach, to lead, and to prompt for that crowd? If I had settled on crafting a game that could be an easy introduction to the medium for anyone, well, that's a whole new paradigm to consider.

Now I'm up against a deadline with two very huge questions to answer. Fortunately, the problem was also the solution. Given that I know one of the organizers, and had already looked over some of the early entries, I decided to take a leap of fatih about what the people playing and judging this contest would know and assume about game design.

So, I wrote a third draft, specifically for them.

Which took until Saturday night. Now I've got one day left to finish the layout, the card design, the map, and... oh, yeah... I have to write and review all of the Character Cards, too.

Strangely enough, starting slow on Sunday, I didn't feel any sort of panic or problem. I just started out with a new form of triage: First, make everything in words. Second, make the map. Third, make it pretty as best you can.

By Sunday night I was literally choosing what to work on next based on the countdown clock on the game jam's home page.

By the afternoon it was all written. By the early evening it was all put into a booklet and card format, complete with a very rushed Font and Swatches selection. By 9 o'clock I was starting the map. I had to draw this in 3 hours...

And I did!

The color design for me was a first pass at a notion that's been stirring in my thoughts. What if this whole game was packaged like a box of treasures the kids would have kept? What if the Group Cards were designed to look like Baseball Cards? And the Individual Cards looked like game components (like Uno or Dixit), and the Connection Cards were all in the style of those cheap valentines you would hand out to each other? The map could be pre-distressed, ripped up, and folded funny. You could include cheap tokens like little army men, plastic dinosaurs and Hot Wheels. Things that fit in your hand and turn over like the ideas you're inspiring between each other.

Well, clearly I've not time for that. But it did set the tone for what I could create. The Memory Deck - the list of oracles and prompts that you use to dig up memories - has three backers (Location, Character and Event). The colors come from digging through Kuler with the keyword "Pepsi." There's just something about the pallette of the next generation that screams retro crush.

For Events I simply drew a band with an empty seal. For Locations a ten-second throw together of a compass rose. For Characters I indulged myself with a ribbon floating through two crowns.

This gave me the colors I needed to finalize the booklet. Here I didn't even bother wasting time for new directions, I simply hacked the size and structure of the training booklet in The Quiet Year. If it's not broke - and is in fact shaping human rituals for the better - why fix it?

And for my last feat of strength, I threw open Illustrator, and tore into a landscape letter sized page. I imported the same color swatches, shuffled a half dozen layers into place, and just started drawing a little home town.

This was more "street map" than "commercial layout," but I think it works. For literally 2.5 hours of work, I'm feeling okay with the results.

Here's what else needs to happen for the final published version.

Foremost, using the feedback I'll get from this competition, I'll be able to pick a better direction for my audience. New or Old, Traditional or Indie, and Actors or Authors. That is the central element that needs to be addressed.

After that, I need to really figure out what the Character Cards do. There's clearly something there, to be considered, when setting up the people this story is about. But I feel like I'm missing it. What I have right now is pretty... I'll be real with you, it's thrown together right off the dome. I have no idea what it does.

Finally, the map. It needs to be bigger, and more cluttered with ads. I think a hand-drawn version will work better, from an iso perspective, rather than a straight top-down grid of the city. There's more life implied, more invitation to pour it over, if you're looking at a picture, rather than a mathematical rendering. (In either case my scale definitely needs to be addressed, it's a mess. How big are the buildings compared to the streets???)

I'm pretty pleased with something I improvised in less than a week. Especially given how much other stuff I've gotten done in the same span of time. If this plays out well at all I'll see it through. I really love games in this space, and this idea is very close to my heart.