My Geek Wedding & Free Spacer SitRep

Posted on Aug 30, 2010 | 4 comments

It has been a long while since I last posted. (The last one was done by one of my playtesters – Thanks Renee!) Now yes, I do have a long list of excuses, but the biggest is my wedding on August 3^rd and my long honeymoon the week after to New York City. Throughout this was all a crazy wonderful time, I have been constantly working on Free Spacer.

The book is pretty much Feature Complete, but there is undeniably much refining to do. After a large review by my production manager / Art director / wife (weird calling her that), we discovered many issues, most of which are unsurprising.

There are many things that I learned from this project:

1. Babies aren’t always easy to identify, let alone kill; a central part of my original mechanics for the system was opposed rolls. In gameplay this resulted in the GM rolling a lot of dice and made the game awkward.
2. Design is a process; no matter how many games I’ve done, I’m still surprised of how much has to be done as preliminary for the real mechanics. I created a large number of Advanced tasks that are unnecessary and, in retrospect, can be easily integrated with the standard tasks. Funny how you can never see this from the front.
3. Read other Games; seeing how other games tackle different design hurdles is invaluable. You’re unlikely do things the same way, but other’s approaches can be inspiring and help you look at issue from a whole other direction.
4. Keep your Design Pillars in view; no matter how well you know your design pillars, make sure you post them somewhere you can see to remind you to rigorously vet your design choices. It is easy to get off track, your design pillars are like the North Star, if you cannot see it you’ll design yourself in circles.

I am currently streamlining and restructuring Free Spacer’s mechanics to be more accessible, consistent, and Player-centric so that the GM doesn’t have to roll a million dice. Once this sweep of the system is finished, hopefully the game will be stable enough to talk about on this blog in more detail.