The Mindful Geek

TGC’s Mint Tin Challenge has certainly been a fun ride, albeit a bumpy one. This is, of course, the second post in my Design Journal Series for No Quarter , this one on its design(if you want to know where it all started, check out NQ ’s Ideation post ). In the last post, we had a prototype consisting of a mint tin, twelve coins, and two d10s(for life trackers).   This version was not very exiting, but here’s how it worked:   Each player had one ‘move’ coin(hit or block), one direction coins\(left or right), and 5 power coins(1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, with blank backs).   Every round, players would secretly make a move(place one coin of each type in a pile), then simultaneously reveal the pile.   A Hit would deal damage equal to the number on the power coin, and a Block would counteract a Hit, provided that they were in the same hand.   If two hits were in the same hand, only the one with the highest power hit. At first, that incarnation was actually pretty fun, but by rou

Contrary to popular belief, the color purple isn’t real. Well, that’s not quite true:   Some people consider violet(which DOES exist) to be a shade of purple.   To me, it’s more of a blue, but let’s not get lost in semantics-- The point is that most of what you think of as purple is a lie. Wait, What? Let me explain.   Unless you’ve studied lightwaves or color theory, you probably think of the range of colors as a wheel, like this: That, however, is wrong(but still useful).   Color is not a wheel, but a line.   The most accurate depiction of light(as science sees it) is something more like this: But wait a moment.   Where’s purple?   Yep, that’s right;   There is no wavelength of light that corresponds to most of what we call purple. You See? So if it doesn’t exist, how do we see it?   To understand that, we need to know how we see color in general. You can spend a lifetime studying the science of the eye, but the quick and dirty version i

I know as well as most of you what a pain it can be to get decent art on a tiny budget. In fact, for me at least, finding art is one of the biggest hurtles between a good design and a finished game.  It's expensive, it can be hard to find, and it's stressful.  And if you're like me, it's really hard to barter over the price of another creative's services;  You know they're pouring out their heart and soul for your game, and that's priceless.  But at the same time, most of us game designers don't have deep pockets, and anywhere we can save a few dollars gets us that much closer to actually getting your dream out there. Because of this struggle, I've compiled a list of some of my favorite resources for getting %100 free art, no strings attached.  Of course, it won't be tailored to your game, and you probably will need to commission some of your own stuff before all is said and done, but it can get you pretty far with your game, and might save y

This is a principle I discovered from playing social deduction games, but I’ve found it helpful in everyday reasoning as well. I call it the ‘Vizzini Effect”, named after Wallace Shawn’s character from  The Princess Bride .   For the very few of you who have not memorized every line from this brilliant film, here’s the scene I’m referencing: As it turns out, both glasses were poisoned, and the man in black(the Dread Pirate Roberts) has spent the last few years building up an immunity to Iocane powder. What In the World is That? The Vizzini Effect is the stipulation that you can never draw a conclusion based off what a person would or would not do, given that the person in question is, or might be, clever, because the same argument can be used as proof of nearly any theory. So how does it work?   Let’s take for example the case of Abel, Baker, Charlie, and Dennis.   They’re playing a game of Werewolf/Mafia, and they’ve just finished first night, during which

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This is my first attempt at a design diary for one of my games, so think of this as an experiment. It’s not the first game I’ve designed that I intend to publish, but it is the one with the closest deadline, as well the simplest game in my personal library, so it seemed like a good place to start. The way I’m going to do this for now is a three-part series, with at least one post between each part.   The first part(this post) will be called Ideation , and will cover the ‘birth’ of the game;   Where the idea came from, first thoughts, and early iterations. Next will be the Design post, where I talk about the meat of the design process.   How the original idea changed, how the current mechanics came to be, what I had to throw away, and my general design process.   If I do a design diary with a similar format for a more complex game, I may make several Design posts. Finally comes Publication , where I discuss the process the game took to getting into the hands o