AnnaBlackwell
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Unfinished Games and Google Drive Remnants
🕑 Added 2021-04-01 10:47:26 +0000 UTCIt probably comes as no surprise that I, like most other game designers, have a tonne of unfinished games and game ideas kicking around in my Google Drive. So, inspired by Chris Bissette's Detritus collection on itch, I thought it could be fun to take a look at my clutter and talk about them.
Think of it like an episode of Hoarders and excuse me if I get nostalgic while I write this.
The Games
First of all, here's what my Physical Games GDrive looks like.
Some of those names you'll recognise like DELVE and Apothecaria (and potentially Those Who Play if you're really paying attention to my work). Those are the games that escaped. The games that just wouldn't let go until they were done.
But I thought it would be fun to look through and see what I've created over the years, where they got to and what sort of games I've designed so lets make our way down the list and see what each of these games are shall we?
First up:
Wiretap
One player is trying to buy goods from another player while the others listen in and try to guess what is being bought.
Buyer - Gets a card that says “17 Machine Guns, 5 Grenades, 2 Knives”
Seller - Has to correctly note what is being bought on their secret sheet
CIA - Have a couple of power cards to get the buyer to repeat the last thing they said, to give them a clue as to what they’re buying, etc and must guess what is being bought.
This one very quickly got to physical prototyping where I made a bunch of these ridiculously specific cards and for some reason thought it would make sense to make the cards actual illegal items. So the buyer would be trying to get "2 bags of cocaine" and have to use euphemisms and colourful language to try clue the seller in without letting the CIA know what they were buying.
It never got past that first prototype because it was incredibly joyless and honestly quite grim and tasteless.
WASTE
The next game in the DELVE series that I will start working on once DELVE: The Dark Sea is finished and out in the world.
WASTE is a post apocalyptic map drawing game that switches to a top down view with exploration of a wasteland and building a base and outposts as the main mechanic.
The mechanic that excites me most though is the Faction Creation system which works roughly like this:
1) Discover a location
2) Determine if there are people there
3) If so, draw to see if they are friendly, hostile or netural and what their Faction STR is
3b) Determine if this location is their home and if they are themed around it
4) Write this new Faction in your notepad and mark them on the map
I've had a lot of fun randomly creating factions and trying to capture that weird Fallout gang feeling.
Parking Lot + Friendly + High STR? Motorcyle Knights known as the Order of the Silver Wheel! They ride souped up motorbikes while wearing painted motocross armour and wielding scrap metal lances.
I'll write about WASTE a lot more once I start working on it.
Tower Town
Inspired in no small part by Beasts of Balance I wanted to create a stacking game that told a story. At that point I was obsessed with village building and so this game involving stacking buildings, meeples, and resources was born. It actually got so far as to have a small publisher interested but after a failed Kickstarter of their own they had to pull out and I, sadly, didn't have the ability to print it on my own.
The story was quite simple:
The gods are, as well all well know, a foul bunch. With infinite power comes a sort of restlessness and boredom that often manifests in creative cruelty inflicted upon us. But we have endured. We’ve grit our teeth and continued to praise them. We’ve taken it in our stride.
Up until now that is.
Keros, the Great God that sits on his throne atop Mount Spire has broken the world. He claims it is a punishment for some vague misdoing. Well, we aren’t going to stand for it anymore. We will rebuild our village. We will arm our soldiers with steel and spell. We will scale that mountain and we will punch Keros in the face!
The game would have been played on this central mountain with jutting out platforms that you would have to build up to, creating this spiralling village. Placing resources let you build Buildings. Buildings let you hire special units which had their own special pieces. It was and still is the most material heavy game I've designed.
And who knows, maybe one day I'll get to make it because hot damn do I love stacking games.
TMINT
My submission for Certain Death's The Map Is Not The Territory which comes out this year so I probably shouldn't reveal too much about it.
Suffice to say my pitch was: slime moulds competing over a magical gummy bear.
Those Who Play
My first commercial product! My first RPG! It's a d10 pool system that my group and I still use even now, seven years after first making it. You can find it over at blackwellwriter.itch.io for free.
I laid it out using MS Word and gods did I want to kill myself every step of the way. Sadly I didn't have anyone to explain that I should have been using inDesign or even Publisher so every change would cause the pictures and formatting to leap around wildly.
The folder in my GDrive doesn't actually contain the TWP rulebook though. Sadly that only exists as a PDF now (a PDF which annoyingly contains my birth name). The folder instead contains all the content I wrote for the game post release.
You can check out all the stuff I wrote for TWP here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jDA0zCHLSjbFtJT4eT-NLvi9M-IZwElQ?usp=sharing
Tactics Games
Actually doesn't contain anything. I have one in the works but that might deserve a post of its own...
Pawn Shoppe
This is the game that actually became Apothecaria but you wouldn't be able to tell that by looking at it.
Essentially the Fates have tasked you with supplying The Chosen One with the item destined to help them on their quest. However, they didn't say how long it would be until The Chosen One showed up so you have to sort of make do until they arrive.
Inspired by Mousehole Press's Artefact the game was all about creating and writing about weird items and the people who buy them.
I think I might give this a lick of paint and some testing and put it up on itch but for now I've attached it to this post as Artefact Roadshow. If you try it out, let me know what you come up with.
Off Grid
I don't actually remember when I came up with this but from the sparse amount in the document, I think I might've just watched The Social Dilemma.
Competitive game in which one player must avoid the eyes of Big Brother by erasing their deck and getting “off the grid”.
Things like, tax records, bills, internet address, phone, etc are able to be used to see what cards the Citizen has. The Citizen gets cards that can block certain avenues of peeking, once these are played, those avenues are blocked for the rest of the game.
I actually quite like the idea here and think there could be some potential in it.
Monster Hunter Evolution Mod
As it says on the tin, a Monster Hunter reskin of North Star's Evolution. I should actually do that at some point as I went to the hassle of getting the blank card files from the game's creator and they were pretty psyched about it.
Also, Monster Hunter is awesome and it could be fun to do something that is literally just for fun and gives me an excuse to play more Evolution.
Mogul
Mogul! This was a card game I created with some friends back in 2017 and we thought it was great and then I got the chance to pitch it to a publisher and they pointed out that it already existed.
The point was to essentially ad-lib a film pitch by drawing cards and being overly bombastic about what you were selling.
“So listen up you Hollywood fat-cats cause this here masterpiece is gonna make your wallets burst! It’s a Genre but we’re setting it in Setting. And the main character is this sexy, smart, librarian with a gutsy attitude played by Actor. They go toe to toe with Villain over the beautiful and irresistible Side Character. Yeah, you’re thinking to yourself, that sounds amazing but it gets better. At the end it turns out Twist.
And to seal the deal, how about Gimmick!”
It's not set up for printing but you could grab a twenty sided die and play straight from the spreadsheet or painstakingly handwrite them on cards like we did when designing.
Oh, and something that isn't mentioned in the rules:
Each round, one player plays as the Studio Head to which everyone else is pitching. The Studio Head picks their favourite each round.
First filmmaker to get 3 of their films made wins.
Again, I might give this one a lick of paint, lay it out nice, make the cards, and actually release it as a print & play because damn it, we enjoyed playing it.
Lair of the Spider Queen
This was my entry to the Erotic Games Anthology by The Effing Foundation and it made it all the way to the final round before getting snubbed and even though it didn't make it in, I am still really proud of it. Mostly because I got a cheque from The Effing Foundation which is the best organisation name I've ever heard.
The pitch was: A bondage dungeon crawler.
The goal was to make something that was erotic while also still being fun and playful. I think I ended up going too far towards playful but there were still some erotic moments to be found.
As players progressed through the challenges in the dungeon which took on the form of things like:
The Living Gallery - Erotic/Comedic - Skin-Safe Pens or Body Paint
Early or Late Game
As you enter this room the light nearly blinds you. You shield your eyes to adjust then take in the scene. Dungeon denizens of all shapes and sizes are stood on pedestals with artists painting swirling patterns, fields, bold lines, all manner of designs on them. You see there is an empty pedestal and a banner showing a diamond encrusted dragon’s egg as the grand prize. But who will be the canvas?
Let the players decide who will be the canvas, for a comedic game put a two minute timer on and encourage silly designs like tiger face paint. For an erotic game, don’t use a timer and encourage more attractive designs and full body painting.
For a solo game, you will be the painter, the player cannot lose as long as they have fun.
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If they failed a challenge, they would have a body part be bound with rope (and yes there where safety measures in place about consent, understanding what everyone wanted from the game, and even a beginner's guide to bondage to ensure no slippage or pinching from the ropes).
Playtesting this was fun.
Jazz Bones
Another game that sprung from the mind and hit prototyping without any form of documentation. The folder itself is empty but I recently dug out the Cadbury's Hero tub that serves as the impromptu game box.
Essentially, you all play as skeltal jazz musicians playing a sort of free-form jazz. Each card would have a bar or two of music notation that you would have to play with the instrument you had that round. Each round everyone would draw two cards and play round in a circle, creating this weird little bit of music.
The main interest for me was trying to make the box serve as the instruments so the lid would have rubber bands stretched across it to make a rudimentary bass, the box itself was a drum, and everything else was vocal.
It was fun but I was ultimately too self-conscious to throw myself into it and test it properly.
Again, maybe another one to revisit now that I'm a more confident person.
Halloween Game
Each Halloween, I design and run a fun little escape room/ gameshow style game for my friends.
My favourite moment from one of these was our Witch themed one where they had to fill their hats with the most objects beginning with H, A, or T. One of the players left his hat on the floor to go find things so another grabbed his hat and stuffed it in hers and no-one noticed, leaving him to search madly for it until the timer ran out.
Hopefully we'll all be vaccinated by Halloween this year and I'll get to do it again.
DELVE
My breakout game, my zinequest baby. Most of the documents in this folder are financial documents (that I've now deleted) but there was one nice little surprise.
I'd made a bunch of DELVE rooms and events as part of Inktober and completely forgot to put them up so I've attached them as Inktober DELVE. Enjoy!
Convoy
This one isn't quite shelved, more on the back burner. Inspired by games like Nowhere Prophet and my own love for ragtag caravans Convoy was a co-operative boardgame where you take control of a convoy of people escaping a planet that is being destructively terraformed by out of control machines.
I kept running up against walls when designing this and constantly redesigning how things felt in an attempt to capture that roguelike feeling. My favourite part about it was that each character had value and whenver you took damage from events you had to choose between losing parts of your vehicles or losing characters.
Hopefully I can get this one working one day as I spent a lot of time on it and even used up a whole Tabletop Mentorship program on it.
Chieftain
The precursor to DELVE, Chieftain (or Card Chieftain) is a village building game - told you I was obsessed - where you use cards to determine the success of projects and tasks. Projects are things you create like ships, houses, weapons, etc. Tasks are things you do, like searching for lost villagers, slaying dragons, and finding new islands.
The game itself works quite well and is just waiting for some cover art and an actual pass through the rules to make it read well.
My favourite mechanic from it, that I might adopt for WASTE, is that the first time you draw a Face Card, it becomes a character. Every time you draw it afterwards, it means that character has somehow got involved. With hearts and diamonds being positive and clubs and spades being negative, this led to a naturally growing cast of characters and could throw really interesting curveballs into the mix as their first apperance determined who they were.
Building a fishing boat when suddenly it fails because you drew a bunch of black cards and the King of Spades. Maybe you've angered some great sea dragon by encroaching on its fishing grounds and it tears the boat to shreds. From now on that King of Spades is a sea dragon and whenever it appears, you get a nice bit of emergent narrative.
Apothecaria
My current project and Zinequest 3 baby. Apothecaria is perhaps my favourite game I've made so far and I can't wait to get it out into the world. This folder though contains the worst part of any game, the playtesting spreadsheets.
Skyscrepair
Global Game Jam 20...20, I think? The last few years have been a strange blur.
Skyscrepair is all about rebuilding a wooden block tower using meeples and a deck of cards that show you what to place. It's in my anthology of "games that use or reimagine classic toys". Some of which you can find on blackwellwriter.itch.io. Like my Pop Up Pirate! RPG which I still play when I get the chance.
Skyscrepair isn't quite print friendly yet but it will be when Toybox Trove releases.
Dead End Job
Zombie survival in a mall with exploration tables, a floor plan of the mall, and a vague idea of what I want the gameplay to feel like. The idea was to survive 100 days until the army could arrive and clear the area but sadly I discovered Project Zomboid which scratched that itch more than I felt my solo zombie survival game could.
Danger Close
The closest I've come to a political statement with my games. Danger Close was going to be an A4 page of cutesy characters in a storybook aesthetic with a few 'dangerous individuals' dotted around. Players would have to drop coins from about a foot above the page with the goal of landing in the red circles that surrounded the 'dangerous individuals'. Points where gained for clean shots while missed shots lost points based on who or what was hit.
However, I couldn't find a way to do it that didn't feel problematic so I dropped the idea.
Card Based RPG
Lifting inspiration from Chieftain this is my current design stretching exercise. An RPG that utilises card draws instead of dice rolls in a way I haven't seen yet. I won't say too much about it just yet (as I've literally only wrote three lines in it before starting this post) but I'm excited about the ideas I've had and will share when its more fleshed out.
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So that's my collection of games, the stuff I've been working on over the years that I've actually written down and thought about rather than going from brain-farm to game table.
I hope you've enjoyed this little insight and if you do try any of the games I've attached or just want to ask questions, leave a comment below :)
Comments
Sunwalker
Nice ideas here. Really curious about "Dead End Job" as I'm looking for a good solo tabletop zombie game!
Anna Blackwell
Thank you :)
Christopher Taylor-Davies
Amazing collection of ideas. So prolific
