[carry. a game about war.] From Game Chef to Gen Con

[Nathan P.]

I posted this in the HPP forum, but figured it was of more general interest, so I'm reposting it here as well (with a couple edits)! Below is the basic rundown of the process of getting my original Game Chef entry into print at Gen Con.

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 2 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 (thelostgm) 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. There's an AP report with all the details.

Anyway, 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.

I also went to Vericon the weekend after Dreamation to check out the Game Design seminar that Luke, Jared and Vincent were doing, and that was really helpful as well. As we all know, 10 minutes of face-to-face communication counts for, like, weeks of forum posting. It was like distilled pure design heroin injected into my arm, and I came away from that with a much better sense of which questions I needed to be asking.

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.

Luke gave me a ton of tips on how to use InDesign in a mechanical sense (I love you paragraph styles!), and he also showed me all the ugly things in my original manuscript. Many of which I knew were ugly, in my defense, but it was a solid push in the direction of putting everything in the book towards the purpose of the presentation. He was also extremely helpful with my followup questions. I felt very mentored, and I have nothing but appreciation and respect for that.

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.

One interesting note - I'm a very visual person, and I got to the point with the first draft that I just had to get the proof and hold it in my hands to see the changes that still needed to be made. In case this is a question for anyone, ALWAYS plan to go through one revision of the print files, if not more - your proof will always surprise you in one way or another.

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?

[joepub]

Hey, Nathan.
Thanks so much for sharing this story with people.


Questions, yo:

1.) Are you satisfied with the public domain art route? What does it say about your game?
I ask because I got a clipart.com account and got 150+ images of punks and alleyways and broken windows for my next game...
And I'm debating using these public domain photos, or comissioned  artwork, or a mixture.

2.) Would you have priced your book higher or lower if it contained comissioned artwork?

3.) Are there any screw-ups you encountered? Any things you would do differently?

[Nathan P.]

Hey Joe, good questions!

1.) Are you satisfied with the public domain art route? What does it say about your game?
I ask because I got a clipart.com account and got 150+ images of punks and alleyways and broken windows for my next game...
And I'm debating using these public domain photos, or comissioned  artwork, or a mixture.

I'm totally satisfied, because it totally works for this game, in particular. The images are from military sources, and are actual pictures from the field in Vietnam. I wanted to use them both to break up the text (as the text can get a bit wearying for sustained reading, just from the nature of the font), and to hilight the kinds of scenes and moods that I want gameplay to evoke. The cover image, in particular, just nails the essence of my purpose with the book, and I don't think any piece of commissioned artwork could carry (heh) the same weight that that image, what with the fact that it's an actual picture of actual people from the actual war. So, in this case, for this game, I'm more happy with these particular public domain photos than I think I would have been with commissioned work.

Now I'm going to go into a bit of a rant on the topic...I had a very interesting conversation with Remi Truer at Gen Con about art in games and art direction, which I mention mainly to pimp the fact that we need to start having these conversations. Anyway. To me, art needs to be in step with your goals for the game. Saying "I need 150 pieces of original art for this book" is something that I just don't agree with, even if its good art. Each piece of art begs the question "why is this in this book", same as a mechanic, same as a chart, etc. I think it's possible to really improve the artifact of the book with well-chosen and appropriate art (which could be a 150 pieces!), and I think it's possible to waste a lot of money on art that doesn't aid your goals as a designer of a physical artifact.

I will say that Timestream uses public domain art as well, and I am not as satisified with that. But thats a topic for another time. I mention it mainly to say that using public domain art that doesn't work can be a waste in the same way that commissioning art that doesn't work can be a waste.

2.) Would you have priced your book higher or lower if it contained comissioned artwork?

Oh jeez. I haven't even thought about that, actually. Looking at my general finances and budgets and so forth, I think it would depend mainly on how much I'm actually paying to license the art. There's some threshold where it would just be shooting myself in the foot to keep the price where it is. The price is a bit lower than some other games, and thats for a reason. But, if I had ended up paying 300 or 500 bucks for art, I would probably have priced it at 20 bucks instead of 15.

3.) Are there any screw-ups you encountered? Any things you would do differently?

Well, the original editing deadline Thor and I set got blown (which I don't blame him for - I know that Burning Empires pre-orders turned into a bigger deal than they had thought, among other things). But it would have saved me some hours if I could have incorporated edits before Dex Con instead of after.

My printer rep was not as great about getting in touch as I would have liked. Everything was going swell up through my first proofs got sent. Then a week later I heard that the second proof had some issues with cover scoring and their color printer needed to be repaired, and I got nervous. And then I diidn't really hear anything after that, and I got really nervous. Lance came through in the end, but the nervousness of the week leading up to Gen Con was not fun, and I learned the hard way about giving yourself adequete lead time for printing.

It would have been good to have run some more playtests with large groups myself, but I basically only have so many people that I game with, so I was running the game for two and three people. I'm happy with the playtesting the game got, but I always wish I could have gotten more.

But yeh, most of the process was remarkably screwup free!

[joepub]

Nathan, more questions:

1.) How do you pitch Carry? beyond "it's a game about vietnam and shit". I never heard your pitch.

2.) How does your pitch highlight what's important about Carry?

3.) What important stuff about the game do you intentionally leave out of your 30-second pitch, or whatever?
Likewise for advertising, for demoing, etc...
How do you decide what you're willing to leave out of the pitch?

[Nathan P.]

Nathan, more questions:

1.) How do you pitch Carry? beyond "it's a game about vietnam and shit". I never heard your pitch.

I had a pretty settled pitch by the end of the day on Saturday, which basically went like this:

This is a shortform roleplaying game, designed to fully play out in one session, about the Vietnam war. Specifically, it's about the burdens, issues and problems that soldiers bring with them into war, and how the experience of war just torques, twists and pressures those issues as they rub up against each other in the squad.

It was pretty clear whether a given person was interested or not after the initial pitch - if they were interested, I would go into more detail about the structure of the game and the inspirations behind it, and then offer a 10-minute demo.

2.) How does your pitch highlight what's important about Carry?

It's important to me that people don't pick the game up thinking its something its not. I want to make clear that the game isn't about guns or tactical combat, but that it is about burdens and hardship. Again, the pitch seemed to do a good job of sorting out people who would be interested from those who weren't. I thought, at least.

3.) What important stuff about the game do you intentionally leave out of your 30-second pitch, or whatever?
Likewise for advertising, for demoing, etc...
How do you decide what you're willing to leave out of the pitch?

For the pitch, I don't go into resolution mechanics at all. If they're that interested, I'd rather run the demo for them than talk about them. My demo was centered around resolving one conflict, and sometimes I would talk some more about the game (specifically about how Action scenes work) after the demo, if the conversation tended that way. I has started my demo's by saying "the game's kinda like Platoon and Full Metal Jacket" but I got some good criticism (from Joe Prince, maybe? one of the Scots, I think. It's all a blur!) that thats alienating if you're not familiar with those movies, so I dropped it.

I dunno. In general, I think describing how mechanics work is not great for pitches (you roll these dice, and you add some because of this, blah blah). If you're going to talk about mechanics, you talk about how mechanics inform play (the mechanics push you to pulling your Burdens into whats happening around you, and to addressing those Burdens). I think deciding what you can leave out of your pitch is so dependent on what your game is about and what you want your pitch to hit on (i.e. how you want to hook someone), it's hard to give a general rule.

More good questions, thanks! Did you have similar or different experiences with pitching and demoing Perfect?

[joepub]

1.) Would you have created Carry without Game Chef's initial shove?

Um...

thanks! Did you have similar or different experiences with pitching and demoing Perfect?

I also started my demo pitch by referencing stuff.
Typically I'd reference 1984 and Pride and Prejudice.
If the person gave me an, "pfffft. books. who reads books?" vibe then I'd reference Paranoia and A Clockwork Orange instead.

My original pitch involved the words: harsh. authoritarian. dystopic. controlling. exacting.

Something to the tune of, "Perfect is set in a fictional country called Cadence. It's parallel to Victorian England, but has come under the grasp of a nightmarish, dystopic government. The Inspectors are controlling and exacting - and you are a criminal who fights their grasp...." yada, yada, yada. really wordy and slightly tedious.

Then Tony pitched/demo'd the game to ME. And his pitch was totally different.
And he gave me pointers.

my new pitch involved the words: Gone horribly wrong. rebel. Criminal. against the law.

Something to the tune of, "There once was this Victorian society, and things were kind of on the downslope. Then there was a huge societal reform. To some, it was the best thing ever: everything ran like clockwork. To others, it was a nightmare: The reason it ran like clockwork was because humanity had been stripped from society. You hate this society. You are a kink in the system - something the Inspectors want to find and fix. You are a criminal. Love is against the law. Self-expression is against the law. Relationships outside of marriage - against the law. YOU - AGAINST THE LAW."