In preparation for the next designer diary for #oathboardgame I've been playing a lot of @unormal 's brilliant Caves of Qud. Lately I've been espeically taken by the game's beautiful writing and world-building (done by @inurashii and others). They put most AAA games to shame.
The diary entry (either next week or the week after) will be mostly about working on game systems that are both modular and expressive, but I wanted to just take a moment to thank the @cavesofqud team for making something of staggering beauty.
Most evenings, after the kids are in bed, I get together to play competitive games with a bunch of siblings and old friends. Caves of Qud has turned these Discord hangs into something between free-form storytelling jams and a poetry reading. I love it. Kudos to you all.
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There are a lot of good ethical and aesthetic reasons to avoid AI Art. But, I haven't seen as many folks talk about the implications for our creative practices. When I read @Charlie_L_Hall's excellent interview, I was stuck most by how creatively bankrupt the whole endeavor was.
One thing that often gets missed in this conversation is the degree to which game making is a deeply collaborative enterprise. Despite this, it's easy to talk about a game's art as simply a coat of paint applied by a professional painter. It's a service rendered and nothing more.
The jump from here to "well, I could just get midjourney or some ethical version of midjourney to spruce it up" is really quite a short hop. So, I thought it might help to highlight how this is precisely the wrong way to think about art in games.
Over the past several months, we've been hard at work at #arcsboardgame. The work has been so intense that I haven't had time to write up new design/developer diaries to keep everyone posted. Eventually, I'd like to start doing that again, but here's a 🧵in the meantime.
Arcs has been, by far, the most challenging project I've ever undertaken and I think that's probably true for the studio at large. The game presents steep demands to basically every aspect of how we make games here.
Today, I want to look at one small challenge in the game's campaign design and give you a sense of how the game tangles with it. Let's talk about templating!
I've been thinking about this piece by @Charlie_L_Hall today. It's a nicely reported article and worth your time. But, I think it also leaves out some important things. 🧵
Most everything written about crowdfunding these days always mentions two things: first, that crowdfunding has exploded over the past fifteen years and, second, that there appears to be some burnout--both among creators and consumers for what seems like an endless hype cycle.
Really this is a less interesting point than it seems because the first point helps us explain the second. It's pretty simple really. In the beginning, the culture around crowdfunding and tabletop was pretty small. If you wanted to make money you had to appeal to a wide swath.
Today I wanted to highlight the work of two of our previewers who looked at Arcs before the campaign and say a little about the role of previewers in our KS generally. 🧵
It's worth mentioning that the world of KS previewers is...a little goofy. There's a lot of paid-hype people out there and a lot of folks looking for ways to get easy clicks. None of this is even necessarily a bad thing, it's just the nature of that corner of tabletop media.
At Leder (and WGG) we've been lucky enough to not have to rely on those folks. I say "lucky" because, as a a Midwesterner, that kind of self-promotion and hype-generation makes me uncomfortable. I can see the utility but it's not something I want to use.
I had a chance to play @Koenigvonsiam's new game, Brian Boru, today. It's really wonderful and deserving of your time. It's also given me a lot to think about, so I thought I'd write a little about the experience of playing it as designer and the idea of originality in design. 🧵
I've been following Peer's work for a long time and adore it. The King of Siam (rethemed these days to The King is Dead) remains one of my most played games. But, more than that, KoS helped me think through some elements in the design I was working on at the time, Pax Pamir (1e).
At the time, Pamir was a mess. The game was caught between two different design schools and I wasn't sure if it was possible to tell the stories I wanted to tell. KoS hit me like a bolt of lightening. It somehow did twice as much in half of the space and showed me a way forward.
For the past year, I've been working on a new title for Leder Games. It's still got a long way to go, but it's starting to take a very clear shape. Today, I want to share a little bit about what it is and what I hope to do with it. The working title is Arcs.
Arcs started very differently from any other game I've worked on. Normally, after finishing a game, I feel pretty exhausted. But, after finishing Oath, I was filled with all sorts of odd ideas that didn't fit into that game. I wanted to stay in the space but design something new.
At the time, we were working on a space game in the studio. I asked Patrick if I could play around with that setting but using a different design framework. If we liked it, we could use it for his game, or it could become it's own project or do something else.