radiant fracture

Hey my game jam is over! I'm announcing the results a little early.

Folks, that was brilliant. 32 people signed up, and there were 10 entries in the end! (Plus one after the deadline.) I ended up giving awards to four games instead of three because I liked so many.

It is damn difficult to be in charge of judging things, but I do feel like the small prize encouraged people to enter. It's so nice to win a thing.

Here are the four cup-of-coffee winners (couldn't stop at three in the end). I had lots of criteria, but it came down to -- how easy was it to tell a story that I loved through the game? All of these games helped me build a story that I wouldn't have come up with on my own and that surprised, delighted, and moved me.

• Monster in the Wilderness - ursula - a beautiful abstraction of the themes of Beowulf (or that's how I read it) - gorgeous
  
• A Moment too Late - ToriBee - You are a time-travelling tortoise who always arrives too late for the Major Historical Event and has to piece things together from the aftermath - Crept up on me!
  
• A Game of Tower - yhlee - Fantasy, surrealism, and personal growth via confronting your lies about yourself - delicious
  
• Kintsugi - elusis - A supple yet strong spine for stories of damage and repair - poignant
  

There was lots of fun and story to be had in all the games, though, and I recommend reading / playing the others.

{rf}


PS what is a good name for the cup-of-coffee prize and/or winner?

Okay, I'm going to do it!

Fractured Birthday TTRPG Game Jam
Runs Nov 1 - Dec 22
Results released Dec 31

It's my birthday. I would like there to be more small weird TTRPGs (Table-Top Role-Playing Games) in the world. Make my birthday wish come true. Create a TTRPG on the theme of fracture, breakage, and/or repair. Win a cup of coffee!

This jam comes with a tiny prize! Up to 3 (three) of my fave games will receive $10 (Canadian) so that the designer can buy themselves a congratulatory coffee.

More details and the jam submission page here: itch.io/jam/fractured-birthday-game-jam

Some Examples of Games I Like

I like spooky games, horror games, and games about feelings.

Ten Candles (beautiful doom ritual)
1000-Year-Old Vampire (roll & write delight)
This Vineyard Will Be Our Salvation (quirky, smart, critical)
Quietus
Pull Me From the Earth (Q&A excellence)
Star Crossed / Dread
Brindlewood Bay (love the crime-solving mechanic)
The Quiet Year
Debrief

Other Things I Like in Games

Collaborative storytelling
Queer & trans content / vibe
Solo journalling games, other writing games, other solo games
Unusual and / or witty mechanics (esp. physical objects)
Low-prep, improvisational games with a few rules to anchor play
Games about feeeeelings but also about story
Gamification of hard real-life activities or experiences
Games with aspects of ceremony or ritual

My Games

I think my most successful games are these, if you want to see the kinds of things I make:

You Are a Beacon (solo journalling game)
Getting There (2-player Q&A storytelling mini-game)
The Fledgling and the Vale (2-player Q&A story game)

The Lost Journals is a blog of journalling game playthroughs. The author is posting journal entries based on my journalling game You Are a Beacon!

I don't know her at all (I don't think!), but she is a wonderfully lyrical writer and is making quite an amazing thing out of my little game.

{rf}

Does anyone know a fun indie TTRPG with competitive elements? All the ones I know are delightfully co-operative...

It doesn't actually have to be super indie, but it does have to be something a student could read and come to grips with over a couple of weeks, so not all of D&D for example. (Though D&D isn't actually competitive, now that I think of it -- combative but collaborative.)

So let's say the main criteria are that it is a game with story and/or character, but also there are competitive elements between the players.

I found an intriguing list of just such games, but it's from 2006 and all the links are dead.

{rf}

Perhaps what you have been longing for all this time without knowing it is a set of instructions for how to use the quadratic formula to write poems.

If so, you are in luck. You may have it here.

It's called Quadratic Engine, as specific formal processes (such as N+1) are often called "engines" of experimental poetry.

You can have this engine for free, or you can throw me two American dollars*, which I will waste on locally made vegan ice cream with mini eggs blended in. (Yes. I know mini eggs have dairy. The ice cream crafter knows it. We all know it. She makes it on sufferance once a year because we beg her for it.)

This is an oddity, but one of my own particular small treasures. It is one of my favorite processes for rapidly producing a poem draft with evocative formal and emotional relationships.

It's a writing prompt more than a game, though the process of deciding how to interpret the formula's mathematical terms each time has a playful quality.

I find the quadratic formula a highly productive formal prompt -- like writing haiku or other small formal poems.

If you try it, let me know if it works for you. (And if you have any suggestions for additions to the file, let me know.)

You do not need to know any math to use the engine. (And you do not need to know how to drive.)

While I'm waiting for my bigger little game to take final form in my brain, I thought I'd release another, uh, little thing you can use for stuff.

{rf}

*But actually, honestly, donate it to something else. Send it to Texas or Ukraine and just have Quadratic Engine as an indirect reward.

Goodbyeeee January.

Today I made soup and a game.

Soup first. K. went to the store yesterday and asked if there was anything I needed and so I explained about the run on Campbell's chicken noodle soup ("soup for the very basic"), and while she couldn't find any in the store, she dug up a can from the back of her cupboard, and then said "I could make you chicken soup."

"I could make me chicken soup," I said. So I have.

Whenever I set out to make stew I get soup and whenever I set out to make soup I get stew and I don't know how this can still be true, but I have more or less made five cans of concentrate of my own and stuck them in the freezer.

Only I am now out of the Hawaiian Kitchen Goddess Dry Rub & Seasoning mix that I use for anything I want to taste Not Disappointing.

I used the last of the carrots that jasmine_r_s sent, because I have the sort of friends who send you emergency carrots.

The game of course I didn't make only today -- I've been working on it for a few weeks and some folks have been kind enough to look at drafts.

The title I landed on is The Fledgling and the Vale.

It's a little queerer than the other games, which is pleasing.

The game jam challenge was to use works published in 1926 (coming out of copyright in the US this year). As some folks already know, I chose Sylvia Townsend Warner's Lolly Willowes, a deeply weird and enjoyable novella.

Lolly Willowes is often read as a queer text about found family and community. It’s also legible as a text of independence and empowerment without partnership, and of reconnection to the spirit of place. The game is meant to make all those directions possible.

F&V is the first extended two-player game I've made. It has a little bit of a card-game mechanic, in that you have a hand of two cards to choose from each time you play a prompt (a question you ask the other player). I started by using a full hand of cards, but that felt unwieldy, like you'd constantly be checking the card meanings, and two felt right. (I'm only guessing based on my solo playthroughs, of course.)

Tonight at midnight was the deadline for the game jam. It might do a little more molting, iterating the details a bit, before it feels completely itself, but I'm pretty happy with how far it got.

If you like two-player dialogic games about magic, community, place, and desire, it can be had for free or pay-what-you-choose here. There's a PDF and a plain version that is meant to be maximally accessible for screen readers.

Of course now I am excited about the next game, which uses still more card mechanics in a way I find entertaining.

On the itch.io analytics page, the first game you make shows up as bars of vivacious fuschia. Each game thereafter shifts one shade more purple. That means, with good fortune, one day I'll see the bars turn blue, and green, and so forth. I mean, if they use the whole spectrum. I'd like to see that rainbow as a sign of achievement.

{rf}

Finally did my first little gouache painting with the new paints I got for Christmas:



I asked for some one-notch-nicer paints than the absolute bottom-of-the-barrel set I was working with (like, a tenth the price of anything else). I think the colour of these new ones is definitely denser and richer.

The pointillist lights came out a little more dramatic than I meant them to, so I just ran with it.

As usual, I'm posting while waiting for a pot of stew to cool -- this is gumbo, sort of, though gumbo no actual Cajun cook would recognize.

{rf}

*You can tell (or maybe not, ha) that it's painted after the Garrick Sangil photo I used in the cover art of the journalling game I made.

If you'd like a small colourful PDF of my little road trip conversation game / story prompt Getting There, you can download it free here on Itch.io. I've already posted the full text in this journal here, and a delirious run-through with sabotabby here, so the PDF is just for those who might want something more visually appealing to use on class slides or something like that.

I dunno. It's yellow. Might be cheerful. Just trying to get everything in one place.

Game Jam

I joined a game jam for the first time, but then I got buzzy and made a whole game before the jam even started, so now I need a new idea starting at 10 pm tonight.

The jam is to create a solo journalling game -- a game whose form is a series of journal entries you make in the voice of the character.

This format wasn't something I'd particularly thought about creating, but this jam was one of the few jams I identified that was a) for TTRPGs, not video games; b) starting soon; and c) asking for something I thought I could produce.

Now I can't stop making them.

My current idea (the one that's nearly finished, knock wood) is a journal that gets written out of order and then filled in via memory threads that link different entries, or "how I draft everything anyway." I like the way this brings about connections and narrative arcs that the player/writer might not otherwise have come up with. Since it's moving back and forth that is the core mechanic, the effect is going to be kind of ephemeral -- the finished result will be a linked piece of writing, but the most pleasurable part of the experience, I think, will be making the links.

I'm pleased because I had drafted a very complicated mechanic for moving from entry to entry, and then as I was walking to work today I saw how I could vastly simplify it. Now I think I can get the game onto four pages. I can see that economy is a value in game design, especially in these little TTRPGs.

I didn't actually need to go in to work, but I did need the walk, and it was good to be in the office and grab a few things and print a few things and feel At Work, even if what I actually mostly did was revise the new game. No one else was around until the cleaning staff came by -- I got there pretty late in the day, and folks are still minimizing their time in shared interior spaces.

{rf}

Hey, I made a little one-player one-shot table-top RPG game and uploaded it as a PDF to itch.io. You can find it here, free or by donation: Fundamentally unlovable creature killer in trouble.

Here's the synopsis:


It might be clear that it's as much a Concept as a Game.

Also I made some little illustrations to jeuje it up.

{rf}