Well, yesterday I finally drew the mysterious "O" tile from my bag! That means Other, so I could do anything I wanted, as long as it wasn't one of my real projects. So I spent maybe 45 minutes looking through my game ideas to see what struck me, and I ended up working on something I had actually come up with last week (the freshest stuff is always the most interesting, of course - after all, I was in the mood to invent it recently, so it must be what appeals to me right now!). It's a turn-based strategy game (inspired, of course, by my recent playing of Land Of Legends, though my idea plays totally differently), and all I've done so far is create tiles for it. I liked the Pumpkin Pop 2 tiles so much that that was also part of the inspiration. So I made smaller versions of tiles like that, with the cute bubble gum trees. That's all I had time to do, but I made a lot, and it was fun, and I have good ideas of how the game will be. I'm trying to keep it very simple - the best board games are ones with a few simple rules that interact well, and a board game is pretty much what a turn-based game is.
Today I drew a "C" so I need to work on card games. The main thing I have been doing there lately is actually also programming. I'm making a program to generate cards from a template and data, so I can have nice looking prototype cards without having to hand-place all the text and images on each card. I want to make a much nicer version of Dueling Doodles (formerly Art Attack) with that. In truth, I really would like to offer that game for sale. Everybody who plays it just
loves it. The problem is that unlike a computer game, a board/card game requires huge upfront investment/risk in making copies before you sell them. Some companies actually get around that with a weird system where they collect preorders (as I understand it, no money exchanges hands, people just "promise" they'll order one when it comes out), and once they get enough, they actually produce the games. That works for them, but something totally unknown like this, I'd really need to put it out there, I think. I should still try to look for publishers for it. Maybe I'll do some of that today, it is after all C day!
