Escaping Development Hell
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| You've Never Heard of This |
Though it’s a screenplay I never finished, it was an idea I
cherished and when I left film behind and my creative outlet switched to game
design, it was one of the first things I ever considered.
Based ever so loosely on the fantasy RPG trope of a group of
adventurers invading some demi-human tribe’s – kobolds in this case – home and
mining it for gold and experience, yet turned on its head. In my imagination it
was the classic D&D module The Keep on the Borderlands, with the kobolds as
the protagonists… and as a board game.
Over about two and a half years it has inched along – getting far too bloated
in the process. Every other game I’ve ever designed has been far simpler, far
leaner than The Queen Must Die – but the idea would never leave me alone. I
kept coming back. There were always things about it that continued to have life.
Early play-testers responded well to a crafting system where
the kobolds rummaged in their warren for discarded detritus and built weapons
and defenses from it. A rusty blade and a wooden grip, jam together and become
a semi-functional sword; use the same grip with a metal plate, and the plate
works as a shield; tie the shield on with a leather thong and it’s a breast
plate; the thong and a metal bowl are a helmet, the helmet and some gunpowder
become an I.E.D. (And so on.)
Players also regularly responded with 'ooh's and 'aww's when the
party of adventurers were revealed – 15 different archetypes each with
different abilities, randomly drawn into a group of 6, to give each game a
unique strategic approach.
And then there’s the end game… I will talk more about the
end game at some other time, but suffice to say that players win either by
saving the Queen from the adventurers or by being the most heroic kobold who
tried to save the Queen, but failed leaving a power vacuum for the most heroic
kobold to fill – so saving the Queen might not be your best move… yet she will
put a betrayer to death if she survives.
Then the pandemic came along…
I am now, post-film career, an essential worker. Honestly,
it’s a bit laughable. I was essential for three or four months while we figured
out how to keep our essential service happening, and now I’m not so essential.
It was an exhausting few months. No time. And my brain was mush for ages after
it all calmed down. I did no designing.
Darn it all… here I was right back in development hell. I left film in part, to
avoid this! Oh how naïve I had been.
But gradually I started thinking about The Queen Must Die
again, cataloguing fresh ideas in my head. I started killing darlings in my imagination….
What if I don’t REALLY need that AP-inducing crafting system? I started dreaming
probabilities for more elegant solutions – shorter board, revised dice, simpler
randomization… stuff that made me wonder what I could possibly have been
thinking before, trimming both minutes and unnecessary complexity off the edges
of the game in my mind’s eye like excess fast from a steak. But not a
pencil-stroke ever hit cardboard.
And then I saw a posting about the Tabletop Mentorship
Program, and though I’ve called it a whim, it was more of a beacon calling me
back. I applied. And still I did nothing. Not a click of a mouse changed a
digit in a spreadsheet. Until the last day of January – a Sunday – when I got
word I’d been accepted. The crunch began. I dove back in – listing and
implementing every change that had been coalescing in my head over the past
year. Some fit like an old shoe. Some have wide stroke marks driven through
them on my notepad and will likely never get another thought. Most were somewhere
in the middle. I sort of knew how they fit, but I had to find the path there. It
took most of my evenings – though I did get a movie in with my kid, and several
episodes of Lupin in with her Mom – and most of my lunches from the IRL job
were filled with more game design tasks than food.
Simultaneously I leveraged the news of my mentorship as a
call to action for my support circles. Lots of friends, family and game-playing
acquaintances signed up to my dedicated playtest group and a few started
learning Tabletop Simulator just to help (and help fill some hours in these
long winter nights of Covid, Year Two.)
Friday was the mentorship orientation. My mentor reached out to me for the
first time (I had already sent my first message.) in the middle of it and
booked our first meeting for double the recommended time for this coming
Tuesday. That’s exciting.
And this morning, after my Sunday run, a week after finding
out I’d be participating, I had my first playtest of The Queen Must Die in
about a year.
It’s feels good to be back. It feels great to be excited
about this again.
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