Spent some time last night brainstorming. I had been thinking I might like to do some sort of physical game involving a bunch of dice, but the only ideas that spoke to me theme-wise involved cards, so a card game it shall be. I've winnowed it down from ~~3~~4 ideas to one that I think I'm happy with.

Spent some time this afternoon cleaning up my office and digging my print & play set out of the closet, and I'm ready to mock up some cards soon and manipulate them at the desk to confirm the idea has legs.

Assuming it's good, rough timeline is to refine the deck from "a bunch of ideas" to "a real draft" this evening. Tomorrow afternoon is Rules Writing, Layout, and getting some Developer Art onto the cards. Probably some alternation there doing sketches on and off around the critical work.

Stretch goal will be a TTS implementation, but since I've never looked at that tool before it definitely gets bumped to post-Compo if time is an issue. I'm making sure to give myself plenty of breaks.

Since it was received as feedback for my last game I will definitely try to schedule some time to video a rules explanation / sample game.

Completed first draft on schedule last night, played a few demo games with myself at the table to confirm the basic idea works and check for any major issues. Noticed the SCUBA Divers weren't as interesting as I hoped; second draft makes them more interesting but possibly too powerful. Pushing decision on that along with other tweaks back to a later polish round, I want to make sure I get a complete game out the door at this point.

Drafted up the rules this morning, using the LibreOffice Writer file I used last year for Loopin' Gluey as a template. Got distracted playing around with fonts because Orbitron didn't have the right feel; for now we're going with Goudy Bookletter 1911. It has an old-timey feel that suits the Cousteau mood acceptably, I think.

Next I started working on implementing my card layout. Writer is probably not the best tool for the job, but in a tight timeline figuring out how to wrangle it to what I want seemed faster than looking for a better tool. This blog marks my first test-print of a card sheet and cut up to sleeves.

I'm not thrilled with kicking card art further down the road, but I think the next step is to input the current versions of the card text into the template so I have a complete game, then move into art and polish.

If you're a more audio/visual sort of person, I've highlighted this segment from a recent Twitch stream in which I discussed how I use card sleeves with backers for prototyping and talked a bit about importing assets into card faces in Tabletop Simulator.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1006134378

People last year asked for a bit more insight into my process.

Here's what I've done so far: 9pm looked at the theme. Let it cook a bit while watching some TV with my wife. Chilled for a bit, slept.

Woke up, lay in bed thinking over the theme and mechanics. Saturday morning seems to be my best thinking time for this kind of thing, and if I can come up with a kernel or two that I can run with, I can spend the afternoon tinkering with them and hope one of them coalesces into a workable game. (My LD49 entry came together after discarding at least 3 basic mechanics as entirely non-functional, but I knew I wanted to do some sort of dexterity game about things not falling with readily available components)

So here's my kernel I'll be working from: "Delay the inevitable" + "LD/50" + dice -- each round, something encourages/requires you to roll an increasing number of dice. If the combined roll is >50 you lose (or the game ends).

• Try to get "press your luck" feeling in.
• Probably a solo game, both because this kernel supports that and because they're easier for people to try
• LD/50 is 15
• This means 25-30 dice are probably adequate again (Liar's Dice/Perudo has 30)

Noodling will be around making something fun, how hard I want to lean into the medical theme vs leave it as quiet inspiration/an in-joke sort of thing as people might find it uncomfortable, whether I can tie the results of rolls into the next round usefully (so it matters what you get not just whether you hit 50), whether an additional randomizer [cards] is desired or will be crufty and a board is sufficient, what the actual game is -- why am I pulling dice, what makes me want to use more, where's the tension encouraging me to pull more than I "should", what is creating inevitability (is it inevitable that I'll eventually roll over 50 or is there some other end condition the dice are pushing back?)

I'll check in again later as I progress. I might do a desk stream at some point, but as I've recently done a major move I'm not sure I can make that work this jam.

Unscheduled nap means I'm behind where I'd hoped to be and may be bumping this one out to Jam rather than Compo (we'll see tomorrow) but as I prepare for dinner I have some progress. The card sleeves and Perudo set are both back, and I have some initial cards...enough to play around with and see if the fundamental mechanics feel functional.

...and it turns out one of the key mechanics I was thinking about to drive the Press-Your-Luck element is pretty broken, so I'll definitely have to replace or drop it. It's good I found this out relatively early.

Aspects of this design owe a definite debt to One Deck Dungeon and SIXIS by Asmadi Games. Both of those games really caused me to reconsider the potential role of dice in game design, so that's not terribly surprising.

I streamed some playtest/development cycle on Twitch last night, if you missed it you can catch the VoD at https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1445249118

Today we actually write the rules, make a PDF, and if there's time get into TTS import. I'll be streaming at least part of that process over at https://twitch.tv/marcmagus starting in a few minutes.

I will be playing submitted games live on stream and giving feedback all this week. Join me at https://twitch.tv/marcmagus to see some games, discuss, and share yours.

When you get there: !register ldjam-game-page to tell me about your game; once again we'll be doing FIFO while the queue is small and switching over to our progressive raffle as the queue fills up.

Monday's stream is going live now.

I will be playing submitted games live on stream and giving feedback all this week. Join me at https://twitch.tv/marcmagus to see some games, discuss, and share yours.

When you get there: !register ldjam-game-page to tell me about your game; once again we'll be doing FIFO while the queue is small and switching over to our progressive raffle as the queue fills up.

Tuesday's stream is going live now.

I will be playing submitted games live on stream and giving feedback all this week. Join me at https://twitch.tv/marcmagus to see some games, discuss, and share yours.

When you get there: !register ldjam-game-page to tell me about your game; once again we'll be doing FIFO while the queue is small and switching over to our progressive raffle as the queue fills up.

Wednesday's stream is going live now.

I will be playing submitted games live on stream and giving feedback all this week. Join me at https://twitch.tv/marcmagus to see some games, discuss, and share yours.

When you get there: !register ldjam-game-page to tell me about your game; once again we'll be doing FIFO while the queue is small and switching over to our progressive raffle as the queue fills up.

Thursday's stream is going live now.

I will be playing submitted games live on stream and giving feedback all this week. Join me at https://twitch.tv/marcmagus to see some games, discuss, and share yours.

When you get there: !register ldjam-game-page to tell me about your game; once again we'll be doing FIFO while the queue is small and switching over to our progressive raffle as the queue fills up.

Friday's stream is going live now.

I'll be splitting the results countdown with PomoTheDog

https://twitch.tv/marcmagus https://twitch.tv/PomoTheDog

http://multistre.am/marcmagus/PomoTheDog

I keep observing that when it comes to results time, very few of the games were ones that I had seen while I was streaming play/rate/feedback. This time I decided to collect some quick stats.

2053 games total received 20+ ratings and thus were eligible for results. I played 78 games on stream. I will assume all are in the 20+ category. This means I played 3.8% of the games with results.

Of the Top 30 Countdown, I had seen 4 games total on my streams (3 Compo, 1 Jam). So I had seen a full 13.3% of the Top 30!

I wouldn't venture a guess whether this means bringing a game to streams gives an advantage (Transparency moment: my mean Overall rating is 3.95, with other categories similarly around 4; I can't speak to other streamers), or if people self-select by not bringing less complete/less polished games for feedback, or if the kinds of developers who seek feedback will also tend to be the sort who make excellent games [I hope this last is true], or some other reason, but it's an interesting discovery.

I'm curious if people have theories. Or if the bias is even real rather than an artifact of sample size.

Regardless of whether it gives you an advantage (I hope it doesn't), I encourage you to consider bringing your game by a couple of streams next jam. There's no feedback quite like watching someone you don't know play your game without telling them how they should interact with it. You'll learn all sorts of things like what aspects of the mechanics you thought were perfectly clear aren't so clear to everybody else (speaking from personal experience), and where you may have fallen prey to "developer difficulty".

Well it's Ludum Dare 52 so it seems there's only one option for me: My game will feature a standard deck of playing cards.

My usual process which seems to work pretty well for me for both creativity and life balance is to read the theme announcement, think about things actively a little bit, and then have a normal evening watching some TV with my spouse while my creative brain turns over ideas, thinking about things as I fall asleep, and sitting down in the morning to start actually manipulating objects and see if I like what my brain has been turning over.

For which the answer this morning, as it often seems to be, is no. I've been chewing over a solitaire card game which takes a pretty literal interpretation of Harvest, using cards in a multipurpose way to represent soil, cards, and actions, and . . . so far it's both overly fussy and not gelling into anything interesting.

So now I'm casting the net back open and my brain keeps coming back to how Keith Baker added a crops-and-seasons theme to the traditional card game Casino with Illimat, and some of the other stuff that interests me, and I might have something in that vague direction that I can get behind. If this pans out the only thing I owe to Illimat is the theming, so I'm comfortable with that.

Or maybe this also won't pan out and I'll be on to another idea, or back to the first one but better. That's happened before.

This earlier schedule may push me into Jam rather than Compo; I'm not sure I'll be able to get everything I want done by 3pm tomorrow, but so it goes.

I've been thinking it would be fun to play around with the new "hat" aperiodic monotile, and the theme seems like a great fit with a variant of the monotile shared by Carlos Luna-Mota on Mastodon with pipes.

This morning I imported the image from Carlos' 3d printing plans to Inkscape, played around with it a bit, and made a print sheet that's not too wasteful (they tile, but not very neatly to a rectangle).

I printed and cut my first sheet and I'm now playing around with the pieces to see what I can come up with.

(The dark blue on is "flipped", and I'm currently using a similar blue convention to the original paper for that. I'm not quite sure how this is going to become a game: whether the tiles will be identical or have decorations printed on them directly. Regardless I will likely try to make a two-sided print sheet available so if your printer is accurate enough they will line up front to back, and will probably do a dark blue/light blue coding on either the pipes or the backgrounds to help visually identify the "flipped" tiles.)

One cool thing about the paths is that while they don't enforce perfect tilings they do visually exclude a lot of positions which don't tile, so shapes will be more closed. I'm expecting to have some kind of a "if gaps happen that's ok but you have to be reasonable about your placements" rule.

Lots of fighting with Inkscape and scissors (and discovering my only hole punch makes hearts) but I have a cardstock prototype I can play around with.

I think there's a game here...

Major to-do is replacing the colored dots with shapes or something so it's not color-dependent, but I didn't want to spend a lot of time on that before confirming I was going to use this board design.