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Patrick Rauland: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another bonus episode of The Indie Board Game Designers Podcast. As we talked about in the last Simple Elegance episode, The Game Crafter recently announced a Simple Elegance contest, so me and my friend Cody, we're gonna go through ever step of the game design process with you. And I'll be doing this with … Sorry, Cody Thompson. There we go, let me give you his whole name. Cody, how are you doing?
Cody Thompson: Good. How are you doing, Patrick?
Patrick Rauland: Well, aside from word spaghetti, I'm doing great. Cool. Well, this will be the second episode in the series. Yeah, if you haven't listened to the first one, I think you should probably start there because that's where we talked about getting game ideas, and then today in this episode, we're gonna be talking about homework from last episode and what we've done in the last two weeks.
Audience Participation
Patrick Rauland: Let me start actually with, what did our audience do? I asked you, the audience, to sort of if you are following along, to use the hashtag #SimpleElegance. Now we didn't see any of that, partially because we didn't, besides the podcast itself, we didn't promote it at all. You know, it would've been great if we shared it in The Game Crafter chat. That would've been a smart, strategic, and practical decision that neither of us did. We did get listener, Zintis Krumins, who's a former guest on the show. He did comment and say, “Hey, Patrick. For your game about metal coins, I recommend coin purse”. So I got some interaction, but not as much as we wanted. Next time, when this airs, I'm gonna share it on The Game Crafter Chat, and then maybe someone will actually follow along.
Cody Thompson: Yeah, I mean, that's what us as intellects would do.
Patrick Rauland: Oh, boy. It's funny when you do all the work but you don't promote the thing you made. So I will do better at that next time. So I want to start with past commitments, which I am further … from here on, I'm gonna start calling homework because I think that sounds better.
Homework
Patrick Rauland: So, I had a bunch of things and I'll go first if that's alright, Cody?
Cody Thompson: Yeah. Go for it.
Patrick Rauland: Alright. So immediately after the last episode, I went to Protospiel Milwaukee. I played a whole bunch of games with my friends. I did promise that I would make the rules document for a metal coin game, which I did. I did come up with name ideas for the metal coin game. I'll go through them super quickly.
- Purse, which is like a coin purse
- Numismatics, which is like someone who is a coin collector
- Coin bag
- Gold
- Currency
- Coins
- I don't know, something about patriotism because it's about different fantasy coins
- Dragon wallet if we want to go super fancy
- Mintage
- Pocket change,
- Tuppence
Patrick Rauland: I've got 11 options here, and honestly Cody, I'm not happy with any of them. I don't know. Did any of those jump out to you because they're so boring to me.
Cody Thompson: Yeah, they are kind of boring, but I did learn a few new words. I didn't know numismatics or tuppence. I have a very uneducated vocabulary.
Patrick Rauland: I got tuppence because my friend was talking about Mary Popppins and there's that song like give the tuppence to your birds. Sorry, Mary Poppins fans are gonna be very upset with me.
Patrick Rauland: Anyways. So I did my homework, I'm just unhappy with the results. The last thing for me was I just wanted to make some files for the game Streak. I did that and we'll get to that. So I did all four of my things. Cody, how did you do on yours?
Cody Thompson: Not quite bad, and as well as you are. I did start laying out Homeworld in the spreadsheet thing that we were talking about for multi deck. I found out that multi deck is really set up for just cards. It's not as much set up for tiles. But I kind of found a way to work around it. Essentially, I found out what the actual print area of the tile would be and what square area could encompass that. So I just kind of pretended that it was a square card and laid things out. I ended up using the image of the game crafter like outline to where the tile lines up and use that as a background to lay stuff out, but technically it's done out onto a card that fits a tile. Which, I mean it'll work for prototyping.
Patrick Rauland: Okay cool. So yeah it is good enough for now but it is a little bit awkward?
Cody Thompson: Yeah at first when I set it up I was like oh no, I don't think I can do this. But then I was like oh, well I can just make a square, put the image of the tile in the background temporarily, and then just lay stuff out within there and I should be able to generate an image since you generate the image to upload onto tile as square anyways.
Patrick Rauland: Very cool.
Cody Thompson: So it should work.
Patrick Rauland: Cool. Awesome.
Cody Thompson: But also while I was doing the whole spreadsheet thing, once I got to a point on there I started doing another prototype that's actually on cards.
Patrick Rauland: [inaudible 00:05:33]
New Game Ideas
Cody Thompson: So I was thinking maybe it could be for the contest but I did some quick costing out just before the podcast here and the working name currently is Dino Dice Hatchery.
Patrick Rauland: Okay.
Cody Thompson: And the dice part makes it probably not eligible for this contest.
Patrick Rauland: So why is that? Cause that might help other people.
Cody Thompson: Yeah so the thing is, dice are expensive. And when you're working under a cost constraint and so I think this game needs to be able to go up to like 8 dice per player and they're all custom dice which, custom dice are not cheap.
Patrick Rauland: Yeah. So did you look at printing on dice or did you also look into the blank dice with stickers on them?
Cody Thompson: I guess I only quickly looked at printing on dice, which is like 5 bucks a dice unless you do 10 and then it becomes like 2 bucks a dice. So I wonder-I guess I would have to check out what the price of the sticker dice are versus that.
Patrick Rauland: So I looked into the sticker dice actually for Streak, the racing game because I have-so I already have a million of those blank indented dice which are perfect for the stickers.
Cody Thompson: Yeah.
Patrick Rauland: What's great about the stickers is you can get like a bagillion on them for like 4 bucks. I think you can get 180 dice stickers for 4 bucks.
Cody Thompson: Oh wow.
Patrick Rauland: The stickers themselves are almost nothing, it's just the dice. And if I remember correctly the dice are like maybe 45 cents a unit. Just curious, are all the players dice the same color or are they all different colors you have to get different on them, different ones?
Cody Thompson: I haven't decided that yet. They don't necessarily need to be different colors but I think the path that I'm heading, having standard dice and then two development paths for your dice of different colors. So maybe like a white and then a red and a blue.
Patrick Rauland: Interesting. So I'm looking at this, I was literally looking at basically the same thing earlier this week and earlier today. I think your dice are gonna cost you a little over three and a half bucks per person. So maybe, I don't know if that'll work, especially if it's four players that's already like 13, 14 bucks, maybe?
Cody Thompson: Yeah it might be, cause besides that I really just need a deck of cards I think. And maybe a couple little 5 cent tokens to track some stuff.
Patrick Rauland: Oh. Well cool. You know what I think you should do? I think you should look one more time after this episode because the stickers are seriously super cheap and once you have the indented dice that are made for the stickers. I think if you can get the right number of dice you can do it.
Cody Thompson: Yeah. I will definitely look back into that. I know that, that is the game that I did end up, last Tuesday, cause every Wednesday we have play testing event here in Seattle where we all meet up, and so I did prototype that last Tuesday night and then got a play test of it in.
Patrick Rauland: Since you have the play test how was it? If it was a great play test then you should definitely look into it.
Cody Thompson: I mean it went as well as you could imagine a game that got concepted and prototyped the night before went.
Patrick Rauland: Okay.
Cody Thompson: I did base it off of one of the guys in our group, Randy, he has this awesome dice game that he's working on, Rolling Up Roses, and it has this cool dice mechanic and stuff. I've been trying to convince everyone that everything needs to be dinosaur themed so I told them to make it into dinosaur themed and I'd think about publishing it. He likes his flower theme that he's got going on it and it's a super cool game. He basically gave me permission to make a Dino version of it and so I didn't want to just make the same game as him. So I went on a different path and my path was not anywhere close to what he had. From my play test and then some brain storming I think I've got a good direction for it.
Patrick Rauland: Awesome. Very cool. So I kind of want to pivot from Dino Dice Hatchery, which is an awesome new idea, to-cause I actually had two new ideas. Just number one, if you don't follow the Game Crafter on Twitter, do that. Because they're always posting pictures of new components and they just shared on maybe like a week ago of new key cards, and they look so cool. They're these transparent, sci-fi looking blue, green, red, yellow key cards and they immediately reminded me on Doom. Do you remember those Cody where you had to run around and you get the blue key card and then you can go to the blue door and the blue door goes down and then you have to go in and you get the green key card, you go back into the original area, go through the green door. I think you can do something really cool with mazes and having to unlock rooms with those.
Patrick Rauland: So I don't have a game idea in me right now, but I think you could totally do a maze game and the pieces are super cheap.
Cody Thompson: Yeah I know those key card pieces were looking real sweet. I saw you posted that in the notes and I went and looked them up and they are really cool.
Patrick Rauland: Mm-hmm (affirmative). So I hope someone does something cool with key cards cause they look awesome.
Patrick Rauland: And then, do you ever have ridiculous dumb conversations Cody?
Cody Thompson: Almost every day.
Patrick Rauland: Great. Not just me. I did too and funny enough this happens at the women in game development happy hour, early on Friday Protospiel Milwaukee there was a women in game development happy hour, great we talked about all sorts of things and somehow bathroom etiquette came up. I don't know how bathroom etiquette came up, and then people were joking about-you know if your guys you don't want to stand next to each other at the urinals and then I'm like, well you just give them negative points. And then somehow ten people co-designed a worker placement game where you get negative points placing your workers next to other people in the bathroom.
Patrick Rauland: I'm probably not gonna do this, but I just love that literally that was a game that people just came up with on the spot in the bar. And actually, it could be a good game. It really could if you put work into it. So please someone make the worker placement urinal game. I will give you a vote in the contest.
Cody Thompson: Yeah no, that did sound pretty fascinating, especially the urinal deal. It's like you go into the bathroom and there's three urinals, and some guys standing right in the middle one, and it's “okay”. But I do think that the worker placement game where you being next to someone giving you some sort of negative thing does sound interesting.
Patrick Rauland: Mm-hmm (affirmative). It does.
Cody Thompson: It could be a good follow up to a Fry Thief, after your done eating, in the diner.
Patrick Rauland: Yeah there we go. Yeah you gotta vacate-no I'm not going down there. Yes. Anyway so new game ideas. Someone please go do something with those. I think I want to spend a good chunk of time today talking about basically what have we done to our games. And Cody why don't you start us off.
Updates to Existing Games
Cody's Metal Coin Game
Cody Thompson: Yeah so I think we got here first, me to talk about my metal coin game so this one will be pretty short. I haven't got my laser set up since I moved. I've got it set up but not plugged in and in a position to be able to use it so I have held off on making the prototype for the metal coin game since I'm just gonna laser cut some chip board into-and sticker paper on some simple designs on there. But for the most part I have the game designed in my head I just have to see if it actually works.
Patrick Rauland: Sure. Cool. So you're still working on it is kinda what I'm getting here.
Cody Thompson: Yeah. Yes. Probably. That's a quick one to prototype once I decide to actually make the files for the laser cutter.
Patrick Rauland: Yeah, totally. I worked on Streak, which is the racing game and I had a play test with four other people so it was cool cause it was the first five player variance of the game and it worked. It was really fun. I have a picture on Twitter I'll link to it in the show notes. It was really fun to drive around, people exploded very quickly it was great. My issue is that game in particular I tried a variant of the rules that sort of makes it even more dangerous and the game was only 10 minutes and I've asked people multiple times if I should add anything to it and they're like “No, it's pretty good as it is. Pretty darn good, I like it, you shouldn't add anything to the game”.
Patrick Rauland: But I just think I personally want to make a game that's longer than 10 minutes. That is a personal goal I have but maybe this isn't the game to do that and so I'm really wrestling with adding something to the game even though people don't think it should be added. And then there's one other problem. I priced out the components and it's roughly $23 without a box and I kinda want to have bigger board than I think. So I think this game would be right around that $29.99 threshold for this contest and if I needed to add just some cards I would actually be out of luck so I think for the next two weeks I'm gonna keep this game on the back-I'm not done with it, but I'm gonna deprioritize this game because I think it's sort of right on the edge of the price point, I'm much happier with the coin game which I'll talk about in a bit. But yeah I just-Cody do you ever have this like I think I want my game to be something else, but people are happy with it the way it is, does that make sense?
Cody Thompson: Yeah no I mean I totally get that and so that's one of the things whenever someone submits a game to me it's normally just ridiculous all sorts of stuff and then I cut half the game out and just get like, okay this is the main thing that's fun about the game, just focus on this. Which I don't know, maybe you've started instead of having it already at that grandiose place where it's all just big and bulky, you've already come from the opposite end and you're out at the point when you're like, I need to add stuff instead of wanting to subtract stuff.
Patrick Rauland: Yeah I wonder if I am one of those game designers where I just really do think of one cool simple idea and connect it to a theme. But then I do wonder if I just need to start building something around it, an economy or you play multiple games or you have different roles and you each take a turn playing a different role. Cause with Light Cycles I could totally see there being a bad player and a good player and the bad player's trying to catch the other one. There are things I could do and for me it would just be a ton of work and I don't know if I want to do that right now when the other game feels a little bit closer. I think that's the issue.
Cody Thompson: And do you mean your coin game feels closer?
Patrick Rauland: Yeah. It definitely feels closer. Anyways, so tell me a little bit about Homeworld.
Homeworld
Cody Thompson: So Homeworld, that's my big-normally I'm more like you and start with something very simple like my Dino Dice game, that was just real simple and made the minimum viable product.Where this one for the first game ever I'm attacking from the other end, I'm probably going to make all this stuff and then end up cutting out. As we talked a little earlier I did start doing some spreadsheet stuff of mainly laying out the tiles. I'm thinking there's gonna be tiles where you play this tile, and it has X amount of resources on it.
Cody Thompson: So there'll be resources for the space fairing people who that trying to colonize the planet and then there'll be ones where the Home World player can spawn their units. Me and my fiance actually sat down with this big white board we have and just went over it. That was a pretty fun process I've never actually sat down with the white board and sat there and visually went through stuff and erased and redrew stuff. So that was a cool, cool process for us together, and I did try to boil it down to simply like you have two things that you can do on your turn as each player. So like the whole simple elegance thing of you don't have much in the way of oh what am I going to do, but more in the way of okay this is what I'm gonna do, but how am I gonna execute it.
Patrick Rauland: Yeah.
Cody Thompson: So for the Homeworld player I think it's just gonna be you can either move any units that you have spawned previously or you can place a tile. And then for the space colonizer person they're going to either do an action, like move, attack, whatever, or they can explore. Or do an action as in I envision them being able to set up buildings to extract more resources and stuff. So they can do an action like that or they can move and explore.
Patrick Rauland: Yeah.
Cody Thompson: Which what's cool, I'm hoping, on their turn is when they go to explore the other player, the home world player also is involved because they choose the tile that they get to explore onto.
Patrick Rauland: With the exception of the tiles, because obviously the tiles are hidden from one player but not the other, is there any hidden information or randomness? Your game almost sounds a little bit abstract where there's a lot of-with the exception of the tiles it seems like you just do this thing or you do that thing.
Cody Thompson: Yeah so I'm thinking. So the back half I haven't quite developed what the end goal is. Is the end goal for the space colonizers to explore all the tiles before the other player takes them out? Or are they supposed to destroy the other player, or I kinda see it as an abstracting war type game.
Patrick Rauland: Mm-hmm (affirmative)
Cody Thompson: I don't know, with tile exploration and I haven't quite fully flushed it out yet. But just that dynamic of one player placing tiles and the other person exploring.
Patrick Rauland: Yeah. Very cool. And then randomly, did you by any chance happen to take a picture of the white board? I'd be curious to see what your-
Cody Thompson: I could take a picture right now actually.
Patrick Rauland: Yeah do it. Number 1, I would like to see it, but I think it would be really cool to see. I just love. I recently chatted to two game designers on the show who-and that's probably gonna be coming out a couple weeks after this, but both of them, one of them has literally notebook paper that he wrote on and the other person I think also has notebook paper he wrote on and they post picture onto their BGG page of “here's where it started”. I just think it's really cool to know where games start.
Cody Thompson: Yeah, no I'll definitely take a picture of that. I do have to say it was interesting going through this process with my fiance who isn't a game designer or anything like that. She just plays games all the time with me. Not having any idea of cost or I didn't even tell her anything like it was for a contest, that it needs to be under this budget threshold or whatever. So just seeing the ideas she had of not knowing any of those cost constraints or typical how game pieces are made like standard pieces or whatever she came up with this idea of having this hex tile except-you'll see when I show you a picture of it but, having little half circles taken out of each side. So they're almost-
Patrick Rauland: Like moon?
Cody Thompson: Yeah like a little half moon, but taken out of each side of the hex.
Patrick Rauland: Oh okay.
Cody Thompson: But having a piece that goes in there and something of representing, you're laying these things out and they have those little things slotted in there but then the other player's destroying the planet so you start pulling those out and it starts to look all beat up and everything.
Patrick Rauland: Yeah that sounds really, really cool. I like the sound of it. I guess I was thinking, when you were talking about doing the white board, would you recommend other people-if anyone besides us is doing this, for other people who are following along, would you recommend doing a white board session with your significant other?
Cody Thompson: Yeah, no I would totally do it again. I probably will again at some point for this game. It was just super cool to be able to brain storm, write out like okay-I wrote on their Home World that's game name, two player, only and it's like okay what do we have in the game? Like what kind of people. There's probably engineer people and military people and maybe scientist or whatever. And then going through the tiles and then she was like “oh what if the tile's shaped like this”
Patrick Rauland: Cool.
Cody Thompson: And you just kinda, oh this doesn't really work just erase this. So it's really cool rapid idea generation.
Patrick's Coin Game
Patrick Rauland: Awesome. I love it. Cool so let me give an update on my coin game. Number 1 I priced it out, so I added just a ton of things together on The Game Crafter and it's only 23 bucks. So what's great is I have wiggle room. So, if I need to change something I can do that. I played, I'm gonna say 4 to 6 games at Protospiel Milwaukee, which is quite a bunch. And it's great to get so any games in such a short amount of time. And I did make several times-I was able to go “what happens if we try this”? And I literally ran over the supplies table, grabbed a spare card and then wrote it on it and then played with it. Which is just the best thing. I just love being able to hear someone's feedback and in between games grab a component and use it.
Patrick Rauland: So that was cool. So minor things, I figured out the first player rule. Which this was a play tester suggestion:
The player who most recently made a cash transaction
Which for a game with coins I think is a great rule. Cody I don't think I talked to you about the board yet, right?
Cody Thompson: No, but I have seen your picture of it and it looked cool.
Patrick Rauland: Cool. Okay, so I think-I'm hoping I didn't talk about this last time. The coin game used to be you can place your coins anywhere, and it's sort of like an abstract board and whenever there's 5 coins wide that's the width of the board and now you can't go left anymore, and you can't go right anymore because it's 5 wide but if I bring a coin in from the right hand side then you could actually take a coin left. Does that make sense?
Cody Thompson: Yeah. No, and that's exactly how I envision my game playing as well.
Patrick Rauland: So I give you luck sir because I had a very hard time with that. If, you do that Cody you need to make sure all the coins stand orthogonal to each other. It's so confusing when there's a diagonal and a diagonal and a diagonal and you're like wait what line is this one on? Because also coins come in slightly different sizes like quarters and pennies and dimes-
Cody Thompson: Yeah.
Patrick Rauland: Basically I added a board. And number 1 it looks pretty, I'll include a photo in the show notes. It's 5×5. I just really wanted to make a board less game Cody but for right now, I'm going with a board. One of the problems I have that hopefully you can find a way to solve is people had a hard time visualizing the board. And then for my game specifically it's about, you're creating these secret patterns. It's really hard to create the secret pattern before you hit the edge of the board. So I think-
Cody Thompson: Yeah.
Patrick Rauland: I would love to make a game like Hive in the future where there is no board or the boar shifts as you move around but I really struggled.
Cody Thompson: It's actually something I wanted to do since one of my friends in the game design area here in Seattle has their game Abstract Academy which I think got picked up by a publisher but, that game has cards and each card is divided into four and then it's just random, abstract like this one's orange and this one's purple you know, this one's blue and then you start laying them out and once you hit I think it's actually four wide by five deep, so you can play your cards anywhere except once you hit that four wide, boom, that's what sets the board. And then once you hit five wide or whatever deep from player to player then that sets the board.
Patrick Rauland: So one of the things about cards is they're all a consistent size.
Cody Thompson: Yeah.
Patrick Rauland: So Cody since you're laser cutting your coins, I strongly recommend you make all the coins the same size. I think that'll really help with people visualizing the board. Because for me having quarters, nickles and pennies-those are the three coins I've been using, it just too confusing cause they're all slightly different sizes and so you put pennies closer together than quarters and it just-literally in some games I'm like where's this coin? I don't know I think it's there and we just had to add a board.
Patrick Rauland: It was an objective for this game design but I think I will make that an objective for a future game design.
Cody Thompson: Yeah I've been going back and forth on this as well. I think if this ever does go to a final product it will probably actually be something like the grid is actually drawn onto the bag that's holding the coins.
Patrick Rauland: That's cool.
Cody Thompson: And then make it to where the bag unwraps fully and you just lay it out flat.
Patrick Rauland: No I like that. I like it.
Cody Thompson: But I don't think you really have that capability with The Game Crafter currently.
Patrick Rauland: Correct. Okay, so I ran into one more problem with my game that I want to talk about because I think it applies to other games. I played a bunch and basically every single time I played I didn't have any really bad feedback, which was nice. But basically every single time I've played someone said “this was pretty good” and that was it. I love hearing-it's nice to hear your game is good, right? But I want to make a great game. I want to make an amazing game. I want to make a game that can win a contest and I heard very few suggestions. Like people said “It's pretty good” but they didn't know how to make it better and I'm wondering if it's because it's an abstract game. Is it harder for people to think of mechanisms?
Patrick Rauland: Because with Fry Thief, people gave me all sorts of ideas. And by the way, many of those ideas weren't good but at least they were throwing stuff at me like hey what about a card like this or a mechanic like this or what if you change the scoring system or just a million ideas. But I'm getting very few suggestions from people. Either it's perfect game, haha, or I think there's something about an abstract game and I've just not got-like people say it's pretty good but I'm not getting-tell me something that I can-like here's the worst part of the game. And maybe this is something I can work on but with Fry Thief I didn't have the same problem. So maybe for an abstract game you just need to have better vocabulary. You need to better help people hone in on problems better. Have you ever run into this Cody? I've never had this problem before.
Cody Thompson: Yeah so it's interesting you bring that up cause I think you're probably on the right path. I know I've tested a few abstract games and I know for me personally, but I'm a big theme first person, so for me personally it's always been really tough to suggest anything for an abstract. I kinda have that same thing like I've played a couple abstracts at our play testing thing and I played it and it's like “oh yeah, that was good”. I don't know what else to say cause it's not-I don't know unless-cause I guess that goes against the point of what an abstract is. If, it's thematic. I was gonna say a thematic abstract but it's like with a thematic game like Fry Thief for instance, you can sit there and you can be like oh well people know that fries are like this and oh salads are like this and you can make up mechanics that fit that. Where it's like if you're moving a piece and you can't really like-oh but if this piece did this because you know it's a fry.
Patrick Rauland: Right. Yeah. I think with Fry Thief it's like oh there should be a ketchup card, let's you put ketchup. It's just obvious and that's worth more points. It's a very intuitive leap. If anyone else is making an abstract game I think you have to do a ton of play tests because I think it takes you more play tests to get the same number of ideas from your play testers. At least that's been my experience so far.
Cody Thompson: Yeah because I mean what for an abstract you're like oh I gotta move this gold coin, does it give me a silver coin?
Patrick Rauland: Yeah right, you don't know. Anyway-
Cody Thompson: Yeah and I guess, still on that note, I guess probably coming up with language that helps steer people into direction of if you can remember situations and stuff it's like, oh in this situation did you feel like you had enough options to counter, and leaning into mechanism type talk like oh how did you feel in this situation, did you feel like you had enough control to get out of that situation.
Patrick Rauland: Yes, no I know I can ask better questions and that's something I will have to force myself to learn how to ask those better questions to get the feedback I need to get. It's something I'm gonna have to work on. Cause I'm getting “it's pretty good” and that's as far as it goes and I just don't think you win contests with pretty good.
Cody Thompson: Yeah. I agree.
Patrick Rauland: Cool, so I think I have a couple more minor point for this game, but I think I'll bring them up next time just in interest of time. So I do want to talk about things I'm giving up. I really wanted to submit a game to the Boston Festival of Indie Games, and the Board Game Workshop Contest. I want to submit games to the Board Game Workshop Contest last year, and I'm basically skipping both. I had a bunch of work come up and with this contest there's just no way I could do it without totally stressing myself out. I don't know about you Cody, but for right now-cause work's a little bit crazy right now, so between crazy work and this one contest I think I'm tapped out. So this is all I'm doing.
Cody Thompson: Yeah so I completely hear you there. Same deal with me just been working tons of overtime and with the moving and moving my fiance's mom here in a couple weeks it's just hard to find time to try to focus on more than just one other thing.
Homework
Patrick Rauland: Yes. Totally. Alright so I want to skip down to homework for next show. I have two points for myself and Cody had two points, but I added a third to his without him looking. Number 1, so I'm creating a style guide for my coin game. A style guide, this is a web word, like web development word there we go, is sort of like the look and feel, but I'm not creating specific cards it's just like I want this texture in my game, I want the font to look kind of like this. And I'm gonna have some examples of things that I like, and some examples of things I don't like. So from that then I can-I think for me I'm a very process person. I need to create the style guide before I can actually create my own version of the board or a pretty graphic version of the board. So I need to create the style guide.
Patrick Rauland: And then there is a play test of Saturday, what is it like 5 days from now, and at this play test I want to make sure-one of the suggestions that play testers did have was to have both public and private goals. So I'm gonna come up with some new cards. Some of which are gonna be now public, and some are gonna be private. So because the play test is coming this Saturday I have a deadline, I'm gonna get it done for that play test. So those are my two things.
Cody Thompson: That's interesting that's actually the public and private goal thing is something I'm gonna work on after this podcast actually for, not for the contest but for one of the games I have signed, my intergalactic crop circle championship game. Yeah so that one, that's actually on my schedule to do after this. So the stuff I'm gonna go by next week or whenever we record again, I'm gonna actually have a prototype of my coin game, and if I have a prototype that means I'll probably have play tests of it. Work more on the initial design of Home World. Like actually flush out more of what are you trying to do. Maybe finish getting things together so that I can get a prototype made. And then my Patrick assigned homework, I will price out Dino Dice Hatchery on The Game Crafter to see if that one's viable.
Patrick Rauland: Awesome. Very cool. Alright I don't know about you Cody, but I'm actually happy with my progress. I think for me, I had two good ideas and now I have one idea that I'm much happier with, and it's nice to know that, so I have some direction. So I'm gonna keep going with one of my two game ideas, and the other one I'll sort of let sit and simmer, but I'm not gonna follow it up. But at least I have one that I'm leaning towards.
Cody Thompson: Yeah, no I mean I feel good. I especially feel good about the progress I made on the Dino Dice Hatchery game cause that one came together from like, it had been an idea, but I hadn't flushed it out for a while and then all the sudden I was like I need something new to bring to Wednesday so for like five, six hours that Tuesday night you know I just say there and designed the whole thing up. Got images, made some custom dice for it and made some player boards and tested it.
Patrick Rauland: Yeah.
Cody Thompson: Watched it go up in flames.
Patrick Rauland: Yeah, right. So out of your three you have Home World, the coin game and Dino Dice Hatchery, which do you think is the best chance of succeeding?
Cody Thompson: If, I can pull off the Homeworld game I definitely think that one. Cause I think there's something special in there. That is definitely, we got still quite a bit of time before these need to be done. But that one is definitely the one I'm most excited about but am going slowest with. The coin game is probably, I have no clue what to gauge it off cause I've never done an abstract before so I mean that may be like oh this is super good you know?
Patrick Rauland: Sure.
Cody Thompson: Or it may just be like eh, it's just another game.
Patrick Rauland: Yeah.
Cody Thompson: But Dino Dice Hatchery I think is the one that's probably most-if I can get it to work in The Game Crafter pricing and stuff that one I think is very doable from a prototyping and designing in that amount of time standpoint. And then just having it on there.
Patrick Rauland: Sure.
Cody Thompson: So to summarize, most excited for Home World, most reasonable is probably Dino Dice and then the wile card is the coin game.
Patrick Rauland: I like that you have a wild card, I like that. Very cool. Cool. Well I think let's stop. By the way Cody we have 61 days, 10 hours so it's not that much time.
Cody Thompson: Yeah, yeah. That goes so fast especially since I should be launching a kick starter sometime within there as well.
Patrick Rauland: You're gonna be super busy when that happens.
Cody Thompson: Yeah I know.
Patrick Rauland: You kinda have to get the pre-work done, you know what I mean? At least get your first prototypes made or something then yeah, otherwise I can see all of your time being sucked away.
Cody Thompson: Oh yeah. It's gonna be real bad.
Wrap Up
Patrick Rauland: Very cool. Alright so Cody thank you for being on another episode here. Where can people find you online?
Cody Thompson: Probably the best place to find me if you want to chat is on Twitter at Gold Nugget Game or my personal Twitter, I think Thompson Cody M, something like that. But most people talk to me at Gold Nugget Game.
Patrick Rauland: Yep. Awesome. The hashtag by the way is simple elegance so if you have any ideas you're working on or questions please use the hashtag and hit us up on Twitter. By the way [inaudible 00:40:12] that's B as in board game, F is in fun and Trick as in Trick ticking games. The other one, sorry. I mentioned at the beginning Zentis posted a comment on the blog post. That's another great place to just be like if you have a specific thought about a game or something we talked about you can leave comments at the bottom of the show notes, so that's another great place to do that. Speaking of the website, you can visit the sight at indieboardgamedesginers.com. So I think that's all we got. Please keep making awesome stuff, any last words Cody?
Cody Thompson: Nope just thanks for having me, bye.
Patrick Rauland: Bye.