“Perfect” and “Done” are opposites.

At Artemis Games we can be perfectionists to a fault. We hate releasing anything with identifiable flaws – and yet as everyone knows “only God is perfect”: There are claims for many religious artistic traditions, from Islamic geometry to Amish quilting, that they deliberately include imperfections to avoid blasphemy. ¹⁾Of course that’s not even slightly true. Few people will deliberately introduce an error into their work, and of those who do none of them do it because they think they’re better than God and don’t want to upset Him. It’s a training technique for some recovering perfectionists, and a trick for many contractors, to introduce an error and never fix it.
A perfectionist will be forced to accept that searching out every error is futile, as they already know where one is (likely a tiny one) and aren’t allowed to fix it.
A contractor on the other hand does it because they know the client wants to give input – by including an obvious error for the client to fix they can avoid more difficult editing when they’re confident their product is good.

We’re not God, we don’t even actually have Artemis on the team (although we do like her, partly on account of the inherent contradiction her being the goddess of both childbirth and virginity) – so perfection isn’t an option for us.

That means we have to have a way of deciding when something is sufficiently good, rather than perfectly good. We have to have (high) standards, but also ways of accepting our limitations, and our imperfections²⁾Which there are many of, with three out of four of us having chronic health issues yet still putting out a product.

So how do we set the bar? How do we let go, and say it’s done? With the Jigsaw Fantasy project we’ve used the deadline approach – it’s done on the release date, end of story³⁾well, not quite – we’re allowed to go back and improve things post-release, as it’s purely digital and we’ve been learning to make that work – ensuring that

There are a number of facets to how to make that principle work for us, but two of them are key:

1) We need to know exactly how long it will take to finish the work – and double it to include time for problems and polish. This generally means that we need to have done about half the work before we set the deadline, or (in the case of regular projects) before we can be sure which options are ready to go.

2) There must be a set size to the project. We’ve done things with stretch goals expanding them before, but that will always make deadlines wrong, and if the deadline is wrong we no longer have a release point!

But that’s for our writing work; Jigsaw Fantasy and Concept Cards. For the game design side of things, such as Clash of Blades, we still don’t know when to call “done” done – writing for us is as much writing as polishing, but good game design is all about the polishing; I could design three unique new games in three minutes, but they’d all be terrible.

So when is “done” done?

Please follow and like us:

Today we printed up and set out a whole load of concept cards, having set up some transitional suit symbols for them (they’re not final, but they’ll work for now).

And we decided to start trying for our Kickstarter Video, going with the approach that has served us best: sitting in front of the camera for ages playing with the cards, and cutting together something cool from that.

We did get something cool, but it’s a lot longer than we can use for the final video – so we decided to share it now!

Please follow and like us:

Three of the interim suit symbols for sci-fi concept cards – destined to be replaced.

In the Concept Cards line we treat the connection between card and concept quite seriously, using it both as a design tool and a way to standardise the structure of the concepts. Every card is defined by its primary suit – and each suit has a specific meaning in any given deck.

Over the course of the 11 decks of fantasy Concept Cards the meanings of the suits varied significantly, with each suit having at least two meanings (and most having three) – so when we came to start writing the Sci-Fi Concept Cards we decided to take a step back and think about what we were going to do with the suits.

We knew we were only doing a limited set of decks for Sci-Fi, whether 3 or 4, so we could plan ahead and get them all consistent – or so we thought.

It turns out that there was a very strong reason we weren’t consistent before – different concepts have different needs. There were some inconsistencies that could be solved by planning ahead, but others can’t be.

In the end we made only one major step towards consistency: in the original (fantasy) Character Cards decks Spades was the characters profession while Diamonds was their appearance – but in the Location Cards and Plot Hooks decks Spades was physical characteristics and Diamonds was wealth – so in Sci-Fi Character Cards we’ve made Diamonds the suit of their work, how they earn their wealth, and Spades the suit of appearances.

The suit meanings as they’re currently set out are:

Clubs: Connections/Politics for Characters and Planets, Dangers for Locations.
Diamonds: Wealth, resources or profession
Hearts: Desires/behaviours for Characters, Inhabitants for Planets and Locations ¹⁾Listing the inhabitants of each character would be quite samey – E. Coli and other digestive bacteria every time.
Spades: Physical Traits

Of course, meanings aren’t the only complication when it comes to designing suit symbols. As you saw at the top, we have a set of interim images – but they’re far from the final version. For fantasy Concept Cards we had the amazing Marcos Hidalgo drawing the suit symbols, but this time around we’re looking for talent that we can afford to properly pay – people who either want to join the team, or who do such drawings as a job – rather than relying on finding another enthusiastic and artistic fan who’s just happy to be paid in decks!

My art skills (as displayed above) are massively better than they were, but they’re still not up to the standards we want for our work. By this time next month we should have better ones to show you!

Please follow and like us:

Remember, remember, the death of Kalendra,
Staked, beheaded then burned.
If Kalendra’s beheading was held at a wedding,
T’would be the birth at which she returned.

If you don’t recognise that rhyme then I’ll be quite surprised, but if you recognise the words I’ll be astonished.

Nursery rhymes have a powerful ability to infect the mind – they’re like ancient earworms – but they can also convey significant amounts of information and emotion about the history of their origin.

To illustrate, let’s first look at what the original rhyme would tell us if we were not of this world:

Remember, remember, the fifth of November
Gunpowder, treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

Well, the fifth of November is clearly a date, and one on which a major event happened. An event that involved gunpowder (the meaning of which will become clear once we discover that guns are a type of explosive crossbow), and treason.

So we have a little idea of what’s going on, but not a huge amount – it’s not a well-structured rhyme for worldbuilding, but it doesn’t need to be. Still, if we want more information we could look at the rest of the poem (which is, in my opinion, much less well composed):

Guy Fawkes, guy, t’was his intent
To blow up king and parliament.
Three score barrels were laid below
To prove old England’s overthrow.

And what shall we do with him?
Burn him!

Now we know that we’re dealing with a monotheistic monarchy (with some sort of parliament supporting the king), that Guy Fawkes is the traitor in question, and that burning someone is a fitting punishment for treason. All portrayed in a much more fun way than just listing it out.

Now for the breakdown of Kalendra’s tale – For this act I’ll go line by line, for by design it’s densely packed.

Remember, remember, the death of Kalendra,

So we start with the fact that Kalendra is someone important who is now dead. Simple enough, but slightly useful for worldbuilding.

Staked, beheaded then burned.

Okay, so someone really wanted this Kalendra dead – and from the staking we can guess that vampires are a thing in their world.

Now “hung, drawn and quartered” is a thing in our world, so overkill is entirely plausible as a torture method – but beheading wouldn’t come before burning in that case, as you don’t want them to be actually dead until the third act.

If Kalendra’s beheading was held at a wedding,

An odd image. Obviously it wasn’t held at a wedding, but the fact that it’s something that would be suggested says that just as public executions could be celebrations in our world perhaps they could be combined with other celebrations in this world.

T’would be the birth at which she returned.

This line is the most important one – obviously Kalendra came back after being massively overkilled, but significantly she didn’t do so until after the expected gap between a wedding and the first child.

So Kalendra was not a simple vampire, but if she is a Lich or similar then she is not one that can just pop back up an hour later, but one that must regain her strength – more like Voldemort than Vecna.

Slightly less obvious is what this tells us about weddings within this world: Weddings can work in many different ways in different places, but here it is clear that wedding and birth are intimately linked – and not just in the abstract “married people have kids” sense – either the fertility in this world is quite high, and as such it is to be expected that the first pregnancy will occur within a few months of the marriage, or it is commonplace that people get married during the pregnancy.

In Your Games and Stories

Continue reading →

Please follow and like us: