Solo Playtesting and Scores

I started to play this a few dozen times, and boy was it time consuming.  I also showed a round or two to my wife(who understands my crazy) and my friend who is a gamer, to see if the basic activity of playing a round was fun or interesting at all.  I saw that as my minimum viable product--playing a single hand and seeing if any decisions get made or if you can get better by playing again.

A game would take me about an hour to do by myself, because every time I picked up a hand, I was confused what that player was supposed to be doing, as I had just played 3 other totally different turns.  But this is the best way to figure out obvious mechanical or logical flaws in the design.  I saw the constant brain-burn as a possible sign that I was at least on the track to making each player make meaningful choices.  There was so much going on, I'd often obstruct one player's plans totally unintentionally.

Evernote and Rules

I write everything that pops into my head in Evernote.

The increasing list of ideas and notes that was being kept up with became impossible to reference, so I decided it was time, after just a week or so, to write up some rules.  I believe there is a best structure to rules and explaining/teaching a game:

Name
Theme
Who am I?
Victory Condition
Components List
Round Order
Turn Structure
Common Special Rules(combat/auctions/special actions/etc)
Miscellaneous

I also believe in writing out clear goals for a project.  I need to be able to forget what I was doing or why I was doing it, and be able to go back and read what my past self wrote and start back up again.  If you don't know what exactly your goals are, you won't know how to sort feedback, find collaborators, or make decisions between similarly good choices.

So, I sorted that out, and that always helps me see where my game is unready.  Usually there is an entire facet of the game I have ignored, like turn structure, victory condition, etc.

Almost every part of this document changes over and over.  One thing that doesn't get changed much is the goals.  Here is that section:

"Design Goals:Produce a heavily thematic set collection game with emergent strategy.  The game should start slow and simple, while decisions will grow increasingly complex as the game goes on, and end swiftly.  It should feel tense yet lighthearted.  Players should benefit from different pacing strategies, knowing that if they advance too fast, they will be vulnerable, and if they get left behind, they are in a good place to catch up while the big crabs are fighting."

The Alpha Prototype: A Deck of Playing Cards

Ever since I was a boy...

Ok I won't go that far back.  But I will set the context in the fact that this idea cropped up in the middle of attempting to work out the kinks in two other game ideas I was kicking around, both of which ended up being incredibly large ideas and also basically done before by games I hadn't heard of yet.  Many of the mechanisms are based on things I've tried in various forms over and over, and the influences go back to my very childhood.

So this didn't fall out of the sky.

Shell Beach Development Blog!

This is going to be the place I post the story of how my game, Shell Beach, comes along.  It will begin with a few posts that have already happened for documentary purposes, but will catch up soon enough.

Please feel free to leave a comment or shoot me an email.  You can also message me on Reddit or BGG as '3kindsofsalt".

I figure nobody is going to care about this blog other than fellow hobby designers, so I will assume my readers have a few notebooks of scrawled ideas, more than a few baggies of index card prototypes, and a love for games as a critical part of the human experience.

I want you to know that I sincerely think that you have something special to offer the world.  If you want to design a game, you should.  You shouldn't just do it for exercise, you should do it for the joy of others. Your idea is probably not even really a game yet, but is still probably better than you think.  I know too well the feeling of not wanting someone to see the game I just came up with because it's on slips of paper with coins, and I can't actually draw stars or triangles, and the theme sounds stupid when I say it out loud.  I don't think your idea is stupid.