From Game Chef to Gen Con [split]

[Jason Morningstar]

Yeah, what she said, and also I'd love to hear about the transformation from Game Chef entry to functional, complete game. 

[Nathan P.]

I decided to play with these shiny moderator tools, and split this post of off the Ask A Frequent Question thread. And cuz it's a good topic for its own thread.

Game Chef Aught-Five

I had followed the Game Chef challenge in 2004 when it was here at the Forge, and it looked totally awesome. When Game Chef came around the next year, but bigger and better, I was very excited to participate. So I wrote this game, blah blah blah.

The feedback on the game confirmed my feelings about the weaknesses that were in that original draft. I ran one playtest in the weeks following Game Chef, which confirmed some more suspicions and showed me that there really needed some work to be done to get the game where I wanted it. Most noticably, there were no Burdens in the original submission, and those, as it turned out, are the heart and soul of the game.

Anyway. I got really positive feedback from the Game Chef process, and carry ended up in the "Inner Circle," the top 9 of the 35 or so games submitted (though it didn't end up in the top 3). I know we're supposed to be all helpful and hippy and shit, but being a placed finisher was a huge ego boost to me, and it really helped give me the confidence to keep working on the game.

The Next 6 Months

Though not right away. That summer I was also finishing up Timestream, which got released in it's initial PDF form 4 days short of one year ago. And then I went back to school to start out my senior year, and I basically didn't do much with the game all first semester. I did, however, decide that if I was going to do this whole self-publishing thing, I was really going to do it, which meant starting to go to conventions to promote my games, meet people, and so on.

Dreamation 06

So I went to Dreamation at the beginning of this year, it being the first big local con that I could actually get to (well, I tried to get to Southern Exposure, but that had some badness and I didn't end up making it....). In the month or so prior, I had starting looking at carry again, and I did a rewrite of the rules and starting asking some pointed questions to myself about my goals for the game, whether it was acheiving them, and so on. And I decided to schedule a "playtest session" of the game as part of the Indie Games Explosion. I remember Jeff and RobNJ finding me as we were wrapping up a playtest session of Mortal Coil on Friday night (my first Con game EVAR!) and begging off from my scheduled midnight session, as they were exhausted. Totally understandable, and I thanked them for their interest, and we said maybe we could do a pickup or something. The next night, Rob took the initiative and I ended up sitting down with, like, 6 people to run through a couple of scenes. The AP report has all the details.

This playtest was HUGELY inspirational and helpful, and it really gave me the "this game is going to be really good once it works" feeling. It totally motivated me. I started soliciting outside playtests and got some great feedback from Joe McDonald and another group, in addition to my own playtests. Over the next month or two I felt like I was homing on the text, but I was still missing something to really take the game to the next level, make it really visceral and painfully good.

The BW Krew Kicks My Ass

And then I went to I-CON, and ended up running the game for Thor, Dro & Mayuran. A lesson to everyone - there is a skill to playtesting, and these three guys have it in spades. At the end of this game, I held the broken shards of my game in my bleeding hands and saw the future.

Resolving Burdens was the final major peice to fall into conceptual place, and that came directely out of this playtest, along with a host of more minor changes. But once I had that idea down, the rest was shaping, smoothing, honing and streamlining. Around this time I started thinking about production, and contacted Jenn Rogers and Keith Sen(k)owski about doing art. Back when I was writing the original Game Chef entry, I had thought it would be cool if the final product was in the style of a military field manual - and then Keith yelled at me and told me he'd kick me in the throat if I didn't do that. Jenn was out of reach of my budget anyway, and I decided to stow my dreams of actually commissioning art some day and going the route that I did - public domain military photos and the field manual style for the final artifact.

DexCon: The Final Peices Fall Into Place

So I spent the next couple of months rewriting and pulling the graphic design together. I solicited Thor to edit the game, and he was just coming off of Burning Empires but did it anyway, and I am eternally grateful. I also scheduled one game for DexCon, as at the time I was scheduling I thought I would only be able to be there for one day.

Well, I was wrong, and I'm glad. Vinny actually called me and asked if I could run more sessions because he thought there would be demand....and wouldn't you know if, I had three awesome games of carry, back-to-back-to-back, over three nights. This is also when Luke sat down with me and did to my manuscript what Thor, Dro and Mayuran had done to my mechanics at I-CON. The three games showed me the final tweaks I needed to make, mechanically (mainly dramatically streamlining Endgame and jiggering a couple of things about how Burdens work in Action Scenes), and also showed me that the game was good. All I had to do was get the physical labor done.

The Blur

The weeks between DexCon and Gen Con are a blur in my memory. I was working full days in addition to getting the book ready for print and incorporating Thor's edits and Alexander's anal-retentive copy nitpicks (thanks Alexander!). My first proofs came back in good order, but my revised files seemed to vanish into the ether, and I had a span of about four days when I didn't think my books were going to be ready for Gen Con.

Thankfully, things were progressing just fine behind the scenes, and I was the grateful recipient of one box of 109 copies of the finished product on Thursday morning in the Exhibitors Hall.

And that's the basics of how it happened! Any questions?

[Jason Morningstar]

That echoes my own experience in many ways, although I got no Burning Wheel crew love (next project, guys!).  I'd written The Roach and more or less shelved it until I got some outside confirmation that it had definite merit.  Did you have any mentoring in the layout and printing phases?

[Nathan P.]

Yeh, it's interesting how just a little bit of feedback can be hugely inspirational.

As for mentoring - Luke basically showed me the ropes on using InDesign right (I love you paragraph styles!), and then he answered my questions and poked holes in the layout-y things I was still doing wrong through the three weeks or so of production proper. Thor also gave me some above-and-beyond editing, sending me edits to my final final draft, and Alexander Newman volunteered to do an OCD proofing run on the text. I felt very mentored by these three guys, though it was a lot of me going "here's where I'm at!" and them going "you suck. fix this and this." But I learned a lot from that process, and the game is better for it.

The production stuff, dealing with the printer and all that, I was handling on my own, and though it turned out fine, it showed me that people really aren't kidding when they tell you to leave adequete lead time. They really, really aren't.

[Martin Higham]

My copy arrived early this week. It looks great and I can't wait to read it once I've finished absorbing Polaris which arrived the day before.

I'm really looking forward to playing this game. I see the web site has got a couple of useful downloads too - excellent stuff.

Thanks for all the hard work

Martin

[Nathan P.]

Hi Martin,

Awesome! I look forward to hearing about your play!