Posted by Ian in Creative Agenda, Game Design, Personal Reflection, Simulationist.
I’ve been fiddling around with Uns in some of my spare time and trying to figure our how to relate the spatial and temporal elements of the game. It is not too complicated, really, but when I was thinking through the discrete spatial locations and movement between them, I kept having this faint sense of familiarity. It was like I was mimicking something I couldn’t quite remember.
(more…)
Posted by Ian in Applied, Creative Agenda, Game Design, Personal Reflection, Simulationist.
As I think about what it might look like to play Uns, I keep wondering about this issue of character ownership. Superficially, the game is all about the character ownership. There is one player, one main character, and everything basically happens for the sake of them.
But that really doesn’t capture what the game is about. The rigid constraints of the module system (here are the places you can go, period) makes any sense of ownership more limited. The character serves as a screen to be drawn through the setting, an organizing element that structures play, helps narrow down what can or ought to happen where.
(more…)
Posted by Ian in Creative Agenda, Game Design, Playing cards, Simulationist, Small Idea.
As I start to fiddle with cards, seeing what it looks and feels like to have a hand of cards as a tool for playing Uns, I very quickly find myself wanting the face cards to be more than just another card of some suit or another. While I think getting too fiddly with card meanings can be distracting, face cards, well, have faces.
(more…)
Posted by Ian in Actual Game, Creative Agenda, Game Design, Playing cards, Simulationist.
It needs a shorter name, to be sure. I’ll just call it Uns until I figure out something. It is easier to type, neither long nor with too many capital letters. There is a braindump’s worth of drafting in the sketching a game page, above. Emphasis on draft and dump.
I just want to start thinking about how to approach this in a fairly concrete fashion, so I’m setting some parameters for myself. I hope that I might end up with something with more reach, but I don’t want to aim for that since that only fosters my own tendency of sidetracking myself with shiny mechanics.
- 2-Person Play, roughly traditional GM-player
- Playing card based (the suits are evocative and seem better-suited for guiding description)
- Module-like play, which means finite and discrete locations through which the player can move, each detailed before play begins
- Mechanics should encourage both players to engage with descriptions and elaborate upon them, activate them
This begins to resemble a plan.
