Welcome! An Artist's Feelings

Behold! An introduction!

Have you ever wondered what it’s like to design a board game? Would you like to hear how we are doing it? Well this official devlog is a bit of a bait and switch, because I am the artist for the game, and I don’t know how to design the gameplay itself. HA!

I am lucky to be responsible for two things:

1. Draw cool stuff

2. Gently chaperone the game designer towards sanity, on an as-needed basis

..and even then, I don’t have to hit those markers with 100% accuracy, because perfection is a fallacy and creation is an imperfect science. [Takes a huge sip of ice coffee]

ANYWAY, hello! I’m Mia, I’m the artist for Wizard’s Loot. I have been with the project for about a year and a half now, but I’ve been playtesting the game for a few years. Mackie is our game creator (and my friend), and we recently have invited a published author on to assist in editing. We are more than just a team of game designer / visual designer; behind the scenes we have some close friends and family playtesting, advising on illustration and launching projects on Kickstarter, helping us learn how to create an LLC and do Boring Adult Tax Things, guiding us on social media matters, and so on and so forth.

Occasionally I hope to encourage Mackie to drop in and contribute to the devlog (see point #2 above) but he’s busy doing probability-math things relating to dice rolls and game balancing that I don’t understand. The overall purpose of this devlog is to give you some insight on how two people with full time jobs can go about creating a tabletop game. I also want to bring you my perspective specifically as an artist who graduated a decade ago and is only now drawing on a regular basis again. Mackie has an art degree as well, but he is definitely the brains of this outfit, where I am an organized chaosgolem composed of paint and bad jokes; he points me in a direction and hopefully art happens.

He is responsible for two things too:

1. Design an entire game and all of its components (like that’s easy, pfft)

2. Gently chaperone the artist towards sanity on a regular basis (I don’t know which one of those things is more challenging)

HERE IS A BRIEF TIMELINE OF MY EXPERIENCE WITH THE GAME WITH MACKIE OVERALL (Boy howdy are you gonna love this.)

Fall of 2013 or 2014: The first time I met Mackie (The PG Version)

My best buddy Kyle invites me and our friend Dan up to hang out on the north shore and watch some friends of theirs film a horror b-movie; me, wearing all black and with theater experience, I end up holding a water bottle full of fake blood behind an actor, as another guy in a DIY gilly suit (the monster) dismembers him. I squeeze the bottle, fake blood gets everywhere, I get a tiny credit in an unreleased indie movie. The victim in this sequence is Andrew Mackie; we become friends.

2015 – 2019: Several moments in time solidify our friendship:

• The Macalania Temple incident

• “Don’t’ save over my- I can’t believe you just saved over that.”

• The “Face Off” recovery day

• Drunk D&D

• Times in which we substituted dealing with the pain of reality with playing videogames

• The famously successful launch of Mackie’s Card Hider Cider, featuring my incredible label illustration

• A fan comic of Steve Lichman that I do not recall finishing, which is on-brand for me

And then the great beast of 2020 arrived; cue now the sounds of a ticking clock slowing, an uncomfortable silence kicks in, the air is heavy as if a storm may hit at any moment- and it does, and it’s bad, and everything feels bad, and I am not coping well with absolutely any of it…Until Mackie starts to reach out on a regular basis, and unbeknownst to both of us, without addressing the elephant of reality in the room, we start playing games on Discord together as a group and I start to feel better. Funny how friendship works. Sometimes a hello does wonders…And meanwhile, a side-gig doing chalk lettering for a liquor store ends up paying me with an iPad and I start using ProCreate for digital illustration, because that’s what all the cool kids are doing, and I thought, why not?…And about this time, Mackie reaches out to me and asks if I’d be interested in drawing some monsters for his card game that I had play tested a couple times.

That’s it! That’s how we got started. I can’t take any credit at all for this game design, it was pretty much a finished thing by the time Mackie asked me to draw art for it. And you know what a Not Great Idea is? Starting a huge commission/working art relationship with a friend on a passion project IN A COMPLETELY NEW MEDIUM, with a long history of never being able to finish friggin’ anything. My art school education gave me a working knowledge of how to replicate a Wyeth in multiple classical mediums, and here I am, ham fisted with a gifted iPad, not knowing heck about fart (am I allowed to swear in this thing?), with zero experience in digital media.

Luckily for me (you see how luck is a consistent streak throughout this process), and with a lot of persistence (more on this later), I start to git gud at drawing on the iPad. I still go way faster with physical media. You will see a combination of both in our “in-progress” cards.

Fast forward to 2022, here we are, about mid-summer, coming off of our first 3-day weekend Loot Intensive, where all we did was work on the game, eat snacks and drink (too much coffee). I can hear Mackie in my head going, “WRAP THIS UP, THIS IS TOO LONG FOR A DEV LOG. THIS ISN'T EVEN A DEV LOG! This is your FEELINGS! What are you doing!?” Ha-HA! I do what I want! Chaos! The people love reading my words! I am a bastion of inspiration!

So without further a-do: Gentlemen, ladies and they-dies; Comrades and ne’er-do-wells and nerds; my PEEPS! Here’s what we got for LIZARD’S BOOT! no wait BLIZZARD’S FLUTE!

WIZARD’S LOOT

• A complete, playable game design that is really fun and addicting: A tabletop dungeon crawler wherein you battle minions, monsters and bosses as a team, and loot the Wizard’s dungeon! This game is essentially fantasy B&E, or an unauthorized estate sale at a sorcerer’s keep. SHENANIGANS!

• A cobbled-together digital version in Tabletop Simulator used exclusively to privately playtest

• Mockups and quotes for card production, dice, and other custom game pieces

• Newly launched social media (oh god, the internet is so bad and hard)

  • Twitter: @WizardsLootGame and @SomeIdiotGames

  • Instagram: @WizardsLoot and @SomeIdiotGames

  • Mia’s Instagram is @go_rillafish and Twitter is @artbeertheatre

• A brand new website for our “parent company” www.someidiotgames.com

  • Visit us here for game updates, this blog, hosting my comics about the game, a dice-roller app, instructions on play testing

• Complete instructions that just need to be edited for clarity

• What else do we have? We have so many moving parts for this thing.

Oh yeah. The piece de la resistance...THE HOLY MOTHER OF TO-DO LISTS: THE ART FOR THE GAME*

* This is not a complete list haha oh god

• Cards:

  • Abilities: 18 / 106

  • Events: 0 / 54

  • Items/Weapons: 33 / 63

  • Loot: 8 / 90

  • Monsters: 13 / 27

  • Minions: 3 / 27

  • Creature Contracts: 0 / 16

  • Adventurer Traits: 0 / 12

  • Bosses: 1 / 14

  • Adventurers: 2 / 27

  • Active Player Help Cards: 0 / 4

  • Exploration Tile Cards: 0  / 42

• Dice:

  • Custom D6

  • Custom Search D6

• Other

  • Adventurers 3D Model [Plastic]: 0 / 1

  • Active Player 3D Model [Plastic]: 0 / 1

  • Adventurer 1 HP Punchout Tokens: 0 / 20

  • Adventurer 5 HP Punchout Tokens: 0 / 5

  • Monster 1 HP Punchout Tokens: 0 / 20

  • Monster 5 HP Punchout Tokens: 0 / 5

  • Game Box

  • Tray Insert[s]

  • Rules & Instructions Book

  • Lore Book

  • Foil packs

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

Well the next blog will be shorter, that’s for sure. I am diligently working on the card art; this weekend we had a huge break-through about card borders so we are working on mockups for that. Mackie is in charge of dealing with editing with Tony, our author friend, implementing my art onto all the cards (he is the graphic designer as well), and continuing to explore the Adult Stuff of setting up the LLC and getting more quotes on producing the physical board game pieces and whatnot.

We have a long way to go to get all of the art together, but after this weekend, you know what? We are absolutely making this happen. I have so much confidence that we are going to be able to execute this thing. At the bare minimum, Mackie has always dreamed of “just Jumanji-ing” Wizard’s Loot: Meaning, creating only 3 physical copies, one for each of us and one to hide in some local game shop for some kids to find and enjoy. But I really truly think we can knock this one out of the park.

When I play Wizard’s Loot, I usually use Madame Bois because she can draw three cards for her attacks, which gives me a lot of melee, magick and defense options based on the other players’ attributes. Typically we have 3 players, Mackie, his brother Ryan, and me, the true soul of chaos. We only had a bad time once, when the dice were cursed to roll 1’s, and we all died and I was in a bad mood. Sometimes Tabletop Simulator borks and Ryan can’t see the dungeon tile. But dag nabbit. This game is super fun. Each room has an option to be searched, so you may find 1. Nothing, 2. Loot, or 3. Another baddie to battle. You can opt in to add traits to your character and monster contracts, to make things a little more interesting. Nothing is particularly easy, but man is it satisfying. I am a little bit of a completionist in a competitive way, and I find that I want to keep playing even after we beat a boss. It feels good to smack heads and get treasure. Those sweet loots!!

NEXT TIME ON: “MACKIE REGRETS LETTING MIA TYPE OUT A DEV LOG OF ANY KIND”:

• Updates on how many more cards I’ve completed, with VISUALS!

• Updates on whatever Mackie is up to; Likely the finished card borders

• Review some more playtesting so you can get a sense of what this game is actually about

And maybe now that Mackie will see how easy it is to spill your guts on the internet, he will want to do a blog too. Yeah right.

If you have any questions about the game please contact us!

Til next time,

M

Hey, Mackie here. Dev log, oh dev log.

Where to start...

When I was created--

no no that's too much exposition.

I am horrified of being vulnerable and putting anything online. So when I started this--

nope, too sad. Too self-involved. Hmmm, I don't want to seem like I'm trying too hard. I have to make a good first impression. Or, I could just delete the whole website and hide in a shed...Let's just start with some prompts.

Why did I decide to make a board game?

I went to school for videogame art and design, focusing on 3D hard surface environment modeling. I wasn't very good at the art, but I was pretty decent at the design. After college I eventually stopped trying to break into the videogame industry and started just looking for jobs to help me survive. Flash forward a bit through the boring stuff. I got to the point in my life where I missed making and creating things that I cared about. So I just started creating stuff for the sake of creating it and having fun. I noticed that throughout my years of being a nerd that I was actually good at making game experiences through D&D homebrews, mods for videogames, and other random drunken dice rolling games and mechanics. All of this brought me to start making a dungeon crawler board game that I titled WIZARD'S LOOT! I started making this game with sticky notes around my brother's table one drunken night after Thanksgiving in about 2012. I just kept making it and playtesting it because it was fun, and then eventually deciding to make it a reality. I was going to make this a real game for other people to play [and hopefully enjoy] and then crowdfund the sucker!

Why am I making a dev log?

I believe that a big part of creating a board game as a small developer is the transparency of the process. The transparency forces the developer to commit and talk about the game to generate that ever sought after "BUZZ", but it also creates a level of trust in the potential buyer/consumer of the game. It's a very logical question to ask when looking at giving up money for a promise through a crowdfunding platform, "Am I actually going to get this thing when I throw my hard cash at it?". A dev log shows progress towards the end goal of actually having the game in your hands as a consumer. So, to sum up, I'm making a dev log to show people that I'm actually going to make this board game! But I'm also an idiot. A professional idiot. A full-time idiot. A salaried and tenured idiot. But an idiot that's going to get them the game that they helped fund and helped make a real thing. Plus I'm sure some people might actually enjoy seeing the game get made just as much as playing it, and to those freaks that have read this far into the dev log, I say hello!

What's your favorite color?

Blue. No, wait. Green.

Why a dungeon crawler board game?

Dungeon crawlers are easily my favorite type of gameplay and environment in any version or format. To me, there is very little better than getting a group together, diving into a dungeon, killing evil, and looting their corpses! I wanted to build a dungeon crawler that would be fun to go into for the first time as well as something that you can enjoy to come back to and experience in a different way [different enemies, more loot, etc.] each time. I know dungeon crawlers are not the most unique type of game out there, but I am hoping that between my designs and Mia's beautiful art the game itself can be unique and enjoyable for the players playing it.

Wait, how do I play it? What's the hook? Why is it really any different than any other dungeon crawler board game out there? And one more thing--

That's it. That's the dev log. Now go away, I have a game to continue making.

Love and kisses,

Mackie

The Idiot at Some Idiot Games

Oh, hello there. This is Tony, your friendly Wizard's Loot editor, reporting in for Dev Log duty under threat of termination without severance. Most of my writing experience has been with a number of arts and lifestyle publications here in Rhode Island, plus marketing/technical writing at my 9-5. Copy editing a tabletop dungeon crawler is a bit outside of my wheelhouse, but there is a lot of overlap with my day job and I like braining skeletons with an axe, so it's kind of perfect.

So why am I here? You've already heard from our spectacular artist and our perfectly cromulent creator/designer. Who wants to hear from the guy who is editing - not even writing, but just editing - the rule book?

I don't know, dude, maybe you're on the crapper and you're trying to reach the bottom of the internet. Or maybe you're just an obsessive kind of nerd who likes to know how the sausage is made. That's me. Nine times out of ten I think that how my favorite things were made is even more interesting than the things themselves.

The thing about creating something is that after you've lived with it for a while you start to lose track of how other people see it. When I joined the project last month, the drafted instructions that Mackie gave me were a bit of a mess, but the logic and mechanics were sound. I had plenty of questions, but not because I was presented with a clunky series of impenetrable phases and die rolls. The game works, and even better it's accessible. That accessibility is big for me. I've always liked the "idea" of tabletop gaming, but was intimidated after jumping into the deep end before my mommy finished blowing up my swimmies (never start your board game journey with Arkham Horror!). Wizard's Loot is shaping up to be the gateway drug to boardgaming I've long been looking for. I hope it will be for other people someday as well.

At this point I've made a pass through the initial setup and game phases, with an eye on refining that before moving on to tackle cleaning up the description of how Combat works. I've assigned myself the difficult task of reading through other game manuals (and accidentally turning my secretly-dorky wife into a Boss Monster fanatic) to get a sense of how they present the fundamentals and the deeper mechanics. Very excited to finally take Escape the Dark Sector for a spin this weekend.

My hope is to present the rules for this wonderful game Mackie has created in a way that is inviting for newcomers like myself, while grabbing the attention of more experienced players. Beyond that I will continue to review and refine card text, eventual packaging copy, and the deeper lore Mackie's written about the Adventurers players will be assuming the roles of.

Oh, and since Mia did this: I've known Mackie since he was a wee pup! His brother Ryan and I met and became fast friends over the Star Wars Customizable Card Game and LucasArts point-and-click adventures, like Full Throttle and Sam and Max Hit the Road, in the mid-90s (two things we could talk about endlessly together to this day!). As often happens when you make a new friend who has a little brother who likes the same stuff, you end up with two new friends. Lucky for me Mackie was cool*.

*As cool as he can be. I mean just look at him!

Tony

Twitter: @TonyPacitti

Hello Dungeon Critters & Creeps!

Designer/Idiot Mackie here again, this time talking about playtesting. We are in the playtesting phase[s] of Wizard's Loot and I want to elaborate more on what that actually means. It seems like all I ever do is say "We are still playtesting the game bla bla bla!" without offering anything more than that. So, here we go!

But first: AN EXPLANATION! Playtesting is the act of playing the game and testing each of the game mechanics as a sum of parts. Playing the game from start to finish taking notes during the game on anything that needs to be added/removed/altered/edited. After you finish playing, you make those changes [or don't]. Then, rinse and repeat until all of time stops. Kidding, but only a little. Playtesting is something that is constant throughout every process of game development. I have been playtesting Wizard's Loot since its inception and I haven't stopped playtesting it through all of the other processes that we, as a team now, have been working on.

I view playtesting as one of the most important aspects of game design and development. It truly shows if the game can live-and-breath on its own. When I randomly think of a mechanic to add into the game at 2AM, I write it down, add it into the prototype of the game the next day, and then playtest the ever-loving snot out of it to see if it works well with all of the other mechanics of the game [add in a weird analogy to spices and a big soup here]. Thankfully I have not done this with Wizard's Loot for a long time now. The game is actually really solid in its current state and I am really proud of how it plays.

So, how are we playtesting!? I hear you screaming at your monitors and phones. Well, sit back back down and I'll tell you. I have designed and imported all of the cards and components into Tabletop Simulator on Steam as my working prototype. When I want to update cards/components, I update them in that system and then save the "mod" locally and to my Steam cloud. This allows me to host the game and let everyone view the game from my local cloud within Tabletop Simulator. Technical bla bla bla aside, this means that I can easily swap out cards on the fly and save things very during and after playtesting sessions. This also allows everyone on the team to be able to play the game online since we are all a few states away from each other. When playtesting we are usually just having some drinks and rolling some dice, but every once and a while we come across a confusing situation or card that doesn't quite read well with what we are doing in the game. This is when I take those notes I was blathering on about earlier and then make changes afterwards. I then update the main files of the game and save that new version as my current game prototype. We then usually wait about a week and then playtest the game again. In-between weekly playtesting sessions I am usually playing the game either in solo mode [yes, there is going to be a solo mode for the game that is very similar to the base game] or by assigning my multiple personalities to different  adventurers and then fighting amongst myself[s] for the most loot!

Eventually we are going to start doing some in-person playtesting sessions with people and local game shops once we get another printed prototype of the game created. But, we need to finish up the first round of concept, art, and design before we do another prototype print.

If you are interested in playtesting the game in its current state, please fill out the form below on the website and I'll hit you up one of the times we plan on playtesting to come hang out with us and play the game [you'll need to have your own copy of Tabletop Simulator]: https://www.someidiotgames.com/resources/play-testers

Love and kisses,

Mackie

Captain Idiot of the Idiotship

A New Year & Being a Small Business

Hello Looters!

A happy new year indeed! Been a few months since the last dev log and wow have we been busy. Onto the news!

We are officially a Limited Liability Company!

This is really exciting for me [Mackie] since I've never actually done this before and it makes everything feel a lot more solid and real. I was always going to make Wizard's Loot regardless of being an LLC, or having a website, or anything official like that, but it does bring with it a great sense of foundation. I am really happy with creating the LLC and making it official and I am looking forward to creating a business account, and having business funds, and doing other business-related things that businessmen do with briefcases. A lot of this is brand new for me and it is equal parts exciting and horrifying. For example, I have no idea how to do business taxes because I have never done them before. But, I am excited to learn how to write things off, declare things, and figure it all out [with help of course].

That's pretty much it for this dev log, just a quick update on the business-side of things. We are still hard at work creating art and doing design for all of the cards and the components of Wizard's Loot.

Next dev log we will try outlining our social media goals and reasons why we have social media accounts at all. Stay weird everyone and go play some fun games!

Love and kisses,

Mackie

Mr. Business Idiot

Hey Everyone,

This one is very "ranty" and might get a bit depressing. But, I started writing these dev logs to give transparency into the process. So here it is.

Being a small business/LLC/'whatever I made' is hard. I've been doing it for less than a month now and I've run into more problems and annoyances since starting it that it's making me second-guess a lot of things. I genuinely want to make Wizard's Loot, and many other games after that one, but the business side of everything is causing me a lot of anger and sadness. For example:

I need to make a business bank account in order to pay contracted artists, editors, etc. I reach out to my local bank. They tell me that I need at minimum of $5,000 to open the business plus account [or whatever weird name they gave it], and if I ever go below that amount they will start syphoning off my balance because it's apparently exhausting holding all of my money. So I start researching more online banks and I move onto this second one, and apply through their portal. They deny me immediately because of "security reasons", and they can't give me any information about my denied application for the same "security reasons". I suspect that it's because I didn't say that I would be depositing $10,000 as my down deposit when opening the account, but they will never tell me so I guess it doesn't truly matter. I am currently still looking for business banking options.

Another example/rant:

I started Some Idiot Games LLC through an online business-maker-website, so I knew I would be paying for a convenience. I did this because I know I am bad when it comes to business and I have a lot of things I need to learn in order to be successful at it [and I am clearly willing to put in the effort]. But, wow! Every single time I log into my business email I am being hit with advertisements and options for $250 here! $280 there! $500 recurring monthly fee for tax advice that "you need"! I honestly feel like I just got dropped into an end-game WoW raid as a level 1. I've given this company over $1,400 to start my LLC and I feel like all I have is a piece of paper that has three letters on it. I feel like I should have taken that money and given it to my artist for more card art.

It feels like everyone just wants my small business startup money and they don't even want to help me in the slightest to actually make any more money.

I don't want to end this rant on a down note, so I am going to give my new philosophy on the business side of things. I am going to treat any business-related activity the same way I treated Elden Ring when I played through it the first time. Go into the situation with the best equipment I have at my disposal, try my best, make the best decisions I can with the information that is in front of me, learn from everything, and finally "git gud".

Later,

Mackie

Idiot Department Head

Ahoy Hoy Looty Peoples,

Going to update everyone on the schedule that we have for Wizard's Loot. Might even throw in a bit of our overall tabletop game development theory and current practices.

Current Schedule:

Phase 1 [Date: April 2023]: Art [temp or finished] on every card, rulebook and all card text created.

Phase 2 [Date: May 2023 - August 2023]: Printing prototypes, Playtesting, and Feedback.

Phase 3 [Date: May 2023 - December 2023]: Production Ready Materials.

We are currently in "Phase 1" of development and we are trying to get everything designed to a point that we can do another physical prototype printing of the game. This will allow us to start doing "Phase 2", which is live playtesting and feedback from players [remember: if you're interested in playtesting our games you can sign-up here!].

I understand that a lot of these timings are far between and a bit longer than most. I never want to rush a game. I'd rather make a single game every 5 years than churn out a bunch of half-baked games annually. This is probably not the best business plan, but my goal for this company is to make games that live and breathe within their own worlds for a long time, and that takes time. I don't want to just make games that are cobbled-together mechanics and ideas wrapped in a theme. This is also a "terrible way" to be active on social media platforms and drive interactions and blah blah blah [more to come on that in another dev log rant in the future.]. I honestly would rather have people be excited about games that I make when they are made, opposed to getting used to me making a game every year and it be another re-hashed game I might have already made. Alright, enough theoretical nonsense. Let's get into what we have so far.

Here is the current progress on all of the cards/components for phase 1:

• Cards:

  • Abilities: 16 of 54 = 29.62%

  • Events: 7 of 42 = 16.66%

  • Equipment: 24 of 47 = 51.06%

  • Loot: 15 of 60 = 25%

  • Monsters: 7 of 10 = 70%

  • Minions: 10 of 10 = 100%

  • Creature Contracts: 15 of 15 = 100%

  • Adventurer Traits: 0 of 15 = 0%

  • Bosses: 3 of 14 = 21.42%

  • Adventurers: 4 of 16 = 25%

  • Exploration Tile Cards: 0 of 22 = 0%

• 3D Models

  • Active Player Lantern: Modeled and being refined.

  • Players Token: Not started yet, but designed.

• Dice:

  • Search Die: Not started yet, but designed

  • Custom D6: Not started yet, but designed

• Tokens:

  • Red Adventurer 1HP Die Cut Tokens: 20  Not yet started, but designed

  • Red Adventurer 5HP Die Cut Tokens: 5  Not yet started, but designed

  • Green Monster 1HP Die Cut Tokens: 20  Not yet started, but designed

  • Green Monster 5HP Die Cut Tokens: 5  Not yet started, but designed

• Rulebook: Written, edited, and reviewed. Just need to design the pages and layout.

• Box/Tray/Other: Haven't started all of this since the other components come first. Plus, I'll be able to leverage a lot of the existing designs from the other components for the box art and other components that require art/design.

That's it for now, I hope this information gives you some decent expectations for the company and the games we'll be creating. Have a great rest of your day and make sure to go play some great games!

Take care,

Mackie

The Guy Who Wears the Idiot Pants

Hey wizard looters,

Been working with some manufacturers for our first game Wizard's Loot and decided to dump some of my thoughts here.

First off, wow! It is much much harder to find a manufacturer that will work with you than I originally thought it would be. I didn't think it would be as easy as going down to the local tabletop game manufacturer and asking for "one game please!", but it's a lot harder to keep on top of these companies just to get quotes. I have been in touch with about five manufacturers and so far a lot of them are fairly similar with their processes and their components. I assume all of the machines that make board game parts and pieces are fairly common between all of the manufacturers, but I also know little to nothing about the actual manufacturing processes in this industry [not yet at least!].

So, what I am looking for in a cute guy-- I mean! A board game manufacturer! I am mainly looking for a relationship that will assist me as a first time designer/publisher of a pretty component-heavy game. Wizard's Loot has 400+ cards, couple of dice, a few minis, two scoops of die-cut pieces, a lore book, and more. I want a manufacturer to actually want to make an awesome game with me opposed to just cranking out the specifications that I give them and then moving onto the next pretty guy-- I mean tabletop game designer! That might be a bit of ignorant and wishful hoping on my part, but I want to work with rad people to make rad tabletop games. That's kind of why I started this entire project and company.

Another large part of the manufacturing/quoting process is gathering all of the numbers and data into a single spot to generate an actual price-per-unit of the board game. There is an entire set of calculations and formulas to generate your 'landed cost', more about that here (outside link), but all of those calculations require a very strict list of your game components and specifications to be quoted by the manufacturer. You gather that list from working with a game manufacturer and going back-and-forth about component materials, sizes, amounts, etc. My initial thoughts and feelings for a per-unit-price of Wizard's Loot for a consumer is about $70, but all of that depends on so many numbers and factors and choices along the way. More about pricing and consumer sales and crowdfunding in later updates, but that is at least my gut feeling for the game price. So now you can see where I am in the process of developing and publishing this game.

Well, that's all I have for today. A manufacturer did just get back to me this morning, so let's hope they want to work with me on making Wizard's Loot as awesome as it possibly can be!

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

Idiot in Charge

Blind playtesting for Wizard's Loot has started and I am queasy with excitement and fear! Fearcitement? This means that I have asked the general internet to load up my game on Tabletop Simulator and play it. I don't know these people other than a mutual internet-friendship. I also won't be there to answer any questions during their gameplay so if they get confused about a rule or text on a card, they have to figure it out on their own and then hopefully tell me so I can fix it afterwards. That's what makes this 'blind', it's blind to me.

Testing is one of the most important parts of creating anything. Just installed a carburetor? You're going to need to run the engine to see how much you need to tune it. Just mixed in some sugar to your salad dressing? You're going to have to taste it and see if it's any good. Just created an entire dungeon crawler and want to see if it's actually any fun? You're going to have to put yourself out there and ask for some playtesting and feedback.

Playtesting games is vitally important because it does multiple things at once:

1] Checks that the mechanics you've built work well on their own and with each other.

2] Combines all of the pieces of the game [ex. Equipment, Adventurers, Monsters, Events, etc.] and checks if anything breaks anything else. [ex. I only drew Rend Abilities against a Skeleton! What do I do!? They ain't got no blood for me to rend!]

3] Does the rulebook feel like you're reading fantasy legal documentation written by a surly wizard-accountant that just doesn't want to be at his job anymore?

4] Does the card design bother you? Are you colorblind and you can't easily read certain letters/numbers within icons? Do you just not like the designs on the dice?

5] Some fifth thing!

Playtesting, specifically blind playtesting, does something else as well. It puts the game into the hands of people that don't owe you anything and have little to no bias about your game. This is awesome and horrifying. I hope people play it and enjoy themselves, but a weird part of me hopes that the testers find problems with it so I can fix them and make a better game. I think the biggest thing I am trying to have right now is open-mindedness and patience. I need to get the game out there, let people play it, hear their feedback and/or criticism [yes there is a difference], and then look at everything critically. Change what I need to, refine what I don't want to change, and explain everything that requires more explanation. Let's hope it goes well.

Are you reading this and want to playtest? Then head over to the Playtesters page and signup!

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

A Massive Idiot

Fatigue, exhaustion, brain squibblies, mind scramblers, whatever you want to call it. I've hit my first major fatigue wall with Wizard's Loot and Some Idiot Games.

I knew it would come eventually as I heard a lot of designers say things like, "Making a board game is exhausting." and "It's so much more work than you think.". Well, I'm here. And I'm not going to just sit here and whine at you about all of the things that have made me exhausted. NOTE: Try to not make this sound like whining. I mean it IS whining, but try to not make it sound like it.

Instead, I'm going to outline how I have been dealing with the fatigue and how it has been weirdly productive and somewhat relaxing at times. Firstly, creative exhaustion hits everyone differently so things that I've done might not work for you and this is not meant to be a "how to deal with fatigue" dev log entry. Secondly, this fatigue is in no way impairing my ability to make Wizard's Loot. Wizard's Loot is going to get made.

Alright, so what have I been doing to combat creative exhaustion? The obvious one is 'do other things'. These "things" could even be other creative projects that I have, but the other projects should use different creative areas of my brain in order for it to be productive. For example, I write a lot of tabletop role playing game [TTRPG] sessions. These allow me to be wholly creative and have little to no restrictions on what I can or can't do. Creating a tabletop game like Wizard's Loot is, at times, very restricting because I can't just write something like "and the enemies do like I don't know 3D6 damage to you or something and poisons you for a turn.". This would be very bad writing in that medium. But in a TTRPG, I can write something random like that in my notes and edit as needed during the live session. It allows me to just dump ideas out and then form them dependent on a lot of other factors and feelings within those moments. This has been extremely relaxing and freeing for me and I am excited to write sessions like this as a break from Wizard's Loot. I might even have something like that coming soon to this very website!

Something else that I do when I am creatively exhausted is...are you ready? I go outside. This company and this game isn't my only source of income, so I am able to take longer breaks from it unlike a real human job. So I can go outside and plant something or work on my bike or just sit out back with my dog and a tall beer. These actions are necessary when working on something as big as Wizard's Loot and as time intensive as social media and a crowdfunding campaign [look at me talking like I've done this a hundred times already, I haven't and I am an idiot]. And in those breaks from the game I might even have a small epiphany about a mechanic or a card that was giving me trouble. You wouldn't believe how many times I get up at 2am and write some insane note in my phone like, "Slime doesn't read well. Reduce enough attack, make bigger?". The time away from the game gives my brain a moment to catch its breath and focus on other options and alternatives to problems.

Another great resource for handling my fatigue? It's a bit obvious, but it's this dev log. The thing you're reading right now! Creating these dev logs has been a great way for me to expel a lot of fears and worries and exhaustion out into written form. I am able to compress and compartmentalize the issues as I write them and then either move on from them, or think about them enough to form the words for intelligable questions. I can then ask these questions to other people that might be able to answer them.

To be entirely honest though, at least right now, I don't want Some Idiot Games to be anything other than my creative company that I can dump all of my nerdy and random ideas into and hopefully make awesome products out of them at the cadence that I want to. I really don't want it to be my only source of income, it would take a lot of the fun out of it for me and I think I would make worse products if given stricter deadlines and timeframes in which I can be creative or not. Is that smart? No. But it's the way I want to run the business. That's it for now. I am going to reach out to a few more people about playtesting Wizard's Loot and hopefully get some more feedback and criticism on the game. Thanks for reading!

Take care,

Mackie

Goblin Idiot

The dev log title is a joke. I enjoy meeting deadlines.

Hello Wizard Looters!

Wanted to take some time today to give an update on who is actually making the game[s] behind Some Idiot Games. Going to also talk a bit about deadlines and passion projects. Here we go.

Who Are Us?

We are all a bunch of mid-30's nerds who have full-time jobs other than Some Idiot Games.

The captain of idiocy is Mackie, I'm a full-time data analyst with a 9-to-5 job that I have to work around while making the game, the company, and directing the contracted beautiful people below. I graduated from a school that doesn't exist anymore with a degree in Videogame Art & Design [yes, that's a real degree]. Hey! There are numbers and analysis in videogames just like in data sheets!

*weeps into a pillow*

Mia Bernardo is the official Wizard's Loot card art illustrator. As a recovering BFA graduate from UMass Dartmouth, she also works full time at a tax firm invoicing and performing other duties, and spends significant time trying to hide what a big nerd she is from her coworkers.

Tony Pacitti is the copyeditor for Wizard’s Loot. By day, he is a proposal writer for a tech company, which has a lot of surprising overlap with his responsibilities for Wizard's Loot, namely articulating complicated technical information in a way that’s easy to digest. When he’s not doing the 9-5 thing, reviewing Mackie’s ever-changing rulebook, or playtesting, he’s chasing his twin sons around. Coincidentally, he also went to UMass Dartmouth (he didn’t know Mia though). 

We all work full-time jobs other than making this Wizard's Loot, but when it's time to work on the game we all buckle in and ride the Passion Train to Deadline Town. That sounded a lot weirder than I intended.

Passion Projects & Deadlines

Wizard's Loot started as a passion project for me many years ago and it very much still is. The project gets more and more serious as I build the company, set up taxes, create an invoicing system, do billing, create card designs, convert color profiles to a printable version of CMYK, and other serious business things that businesses do. And with all of these changes and challenges, I rise to meet them and take Wizard's Loot more seriously because of them. This helps me define accountability for myself, the company, and the game, and ultimately, it helps build a better game.

Deadlines are something that I always struggled with before I got an actual human adult career. But now that I am defining my own deadlines and trying to meet them due to reasons that I can fully comprehend, they mean a lot more to me. I mentioned accountability earlier and that is a huge thing for me. I want to be accountable for Wizard's Loot, Some Idiot Games, as well as myself. I set out to make rad games that people can enjoy, and I intend to deliver on those promises.

I just recieved some test cards from the manufacturer I have been working with and I have been reviewing those this past week. A lot of changes need to happen with spacing, font sizing, color correcting, word trimming, and a lot more. I'll be posting some pictures of them soon up on Instagram and I would love to know what everyone thinks of them! The cards are starting to look like a real game!

Alright, that's it, I'm out of here.

Take care,

Mackie

Senior Business Idiot

Hello,

I have two screaming goblins in my head.

...I'll let that hang there for a few seconds...

The first goblin is wearing an old war helmet and swinging a whip around randomly. They are usually yelling things like, "Hurry up! Someone is going to make a Wizard's Loot-like game before you and beat you to the market and take all your fame and glory and money and loot! Then everyone will yell at you for stealing their ideas and making a worse version without soul and good stuff! You're an idiot and I hate you!"

This first goblin is correct about the 'idiot' part.

While the other goblin is wearing cheap, fake fairy wings and a doofy little hat and is trying to out-scream the other one and explain things like, "The game is going to be the game you want to make and you need to make it in the time that you have! Don't rush or stress about it! Just keep on making progress and you'll get there!".

Both of these goblins are correct and it's choosing when to listen to them that's the hard part. One drives me to create things and finish them. The other forces me to take in what I have done and allow myself to feel accomplishment for what I have already created. More recently the angry goblin with the whip has been the loudest and I feel like I am very behind while creating Wizard's Loot. It's my first board game and I feel like it is taking forever. But I am honestly learning new things every week and I am sincerely happy with the progress that we are making with the game and the company. I think the fears that I have about making the game just come up in very odd and bizarre moments. For example, a few months ago I wrote a dev log about creative fatigue and how I deal with it.

Note: Bonus points to the readers that have also read that dev log!

Additional Note: Points don't matter and you cannot redeem them for anything.

After writing that dev log I felt a surge of productivity and got a lot done with the game: card designs, scaling reworks, icon placement, touchups, new art from my wonderful artist, etc. But then I got a sinking feeling of, "Why am I not working this hard every day and every minute to get this game out the door as quickly as possible?". This question led to more questions, "When do I want Wizard's Loot to be done?" and "Am I truly just trying to finish the project? Or do I want to make the project the best it can be regardless of time?"

And here we are. Between the feeling of wanting to get the game out into the real world to see if people even like it, and wanting to bake it just a little bit longer to keep tweaking and tweaking and editing and organizing and bla bla bla. It's a series of tough decisions. And the entire time I am trying to make decisions like this, I feel like I am behind. Do other solo indie designers take this long to make a board game? Is there a rulebook or time table for this type of work? Am I really "behind"? Ultimately, and existentially, no. I could take 20 more years to finish Wizard's Loot if I really wanted to [I don't], but there comes a time in every project where it's no longer tweaking and editing and it becomes cutting and ruining. I have set a rough deadline for myself to start the crowdfunding campaign in May of 2024, that's when I want to pull back the curtain on Wizard's Loot and show as many people as I can. And I am sure that even after that moment I will still feel like I am late for everything. I think these things just take time and I need to acknowledge that and then continue to work on the project until it is done. A nebulous and vague ending to a dev log I know, but this game will get made, I am a stubborn enough idiot to make it happen.

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

The Late Idiot

Hello Loot Looties,

[Is that a good nickname for all of you? No, probably not.]

Today I will be going over the current art progress for Wizard's Loot the board game. There are two ways to look at this progress:

1] Total Card Count Completed

2] Unique Art Count Complete

I will be focusing on the 'Unique Art Count' for this update, but quickly, here are the current card component counts for Wizard's Loot:

Total Poker-Sized Cards: 400

Total Larger-Sized Cards: 45

Total Square Cards: 22

Total Cards in Wizard's Loot: 467

Alright, so understanding that there are over 450+ cards in the game, how many of these cards are unique and require their own unique art? The answer to that question: 300! So there are 300 unique pieces of art that we need for all of the cards in Wizard's Loot. That's a lot, so let's see how we are coming along. Below is the breakdown of each of the card sizes and types.

Unique Art Count

Poker-Sized Cards:

Abilities: 24 of 55

Events: 12 of 42

Equipment: 29 of 44

Loot: 21 of 53

Monsters: 7 of 10

Minions: 10 of 10

Creature Contracts: 0 of 15

Adventurer Traits: 1 of 15

Larger-Sized Cards:

Bosses: 4 of 14

Adventurers: 7 of 16

Active Player Help Cards: 4 of 4

Square Cards:

Exploration Tile Cards: 9 of 22

Totals:

Total Poker-Sized Card Art: 104 of 244 [42.62%]

Total Larger-Sized Card Art: 20 of 34 [58.82%]

Total Square Card Art: 9 of 22 [40.90%]

Total Art: 133 of 300 [44.33%]

As you can see there are some card types that are done [ex. Monsters, Active Player Help Cards], while others are just getting going. But, all of the cards are being designed and worked on currently [yes, even the Creature Contracts despite them being '0 of 15']. We are working very hard on getting all of these cards designed and laid out for review and further iterative design and you can follow the visual progress over on our Wizard's Loot Instagram!

That's all for now, just wanted to give a quick art and design update. Now, back to yelling at...I mean working with my artist <3

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

Captain Idiot

Ahoy Dungeon Dwellers and Readers,

Project size: Bigger is always better right? Yes!

Wait, no.

Well, it depends really. What size does your project want to be? What can you afford to spend on the game as the designer? What price can you sell the game at once it's done? Can you make a board game that costs $500 as a first time developer?

Spoilers: No.

Is it smart to sell your first project "at cost" to just break even and essentially trade money for potential reputation?

*shrugs*.

All of these questions and more will not get answered in this dev log, but stick around and you'll read the insane scribblings of a madman that concepted a massive board game 10 years ago and has been dealing with the repercussions ever since.

---

When I first concepted Wizard's Loot, the game had probably about 50 poker-sized cards and around 20 other components of dice, HP tokens, etc. Wizard's Loot now has hundreds of cards and a couple dozen components. The heaviest part of the project is the unique art for the cards. Unique art takes hours to art direct, sketch, redesign, color, edit, and then finalize. This isn't me complaining, I'm just trying to outline what it takes to create a single card for a game that has hundreds of them.

FUN FACT: Only posers use AI generated art!

So, when I think of making a game with 300+ cards and unique art on each card you can hear the senior artists and designers laughing miles away. I am not putting unique art on every card, but every card type/name is going to have unique art on it. For example, the Cleave Melee Ability is in the game multiple times but it only has one design for all of them. It's a lot to balance for a company's first game that I want to sell for as cheap as I can to get it out there and start building a reputation [ideally a good reputation]. Wizard's Loot has changed a lot since the first concept of it, and I would like to think that it has changed for the better in each iteration, but with each change I had to ask myself, "Is this possible to manufacture this game if I keep adding content to it?". Most of the changes were additive, so I was editing things, but I was usually adding cards, card types, components, dice, exploration tiles, etc. I recently had a discussion with my wonderful artist and she expressed her opinion that the game has a lot of cards that require unique art. I took this feedback into my brain and started playing around with scaling down the game. After a long time down in the depths of my sadness dungeon design cave, I decided she was right and I had to slim down the count of unique art cards since I was being a little too overzealous with the amount of unique pieces of art a single artist could feasibly do within the timeframes that I wanted. This was pretty hard for me to admit since I designed the game over a long time as a hobby asking myself the question, "What does my perfect dungeon crawler board game look like?". This game that I concepted had unique art on EVERY card, even the duplicates of the same Abilities [ex. Cleave] and unique flavor text on each card as well. This is a massive undertaking and making a game like that would take either a long time or a lot of money, or even both! What I ended up doing with this most recent resizing of Wizard's Loot is I compared a lot of the Loot cards that have similar gold values and removed my least favorite ones [ex. Merchant's Spyglass] to replace them with existing Loot cards [ex. 250 Gold]. This didn't change the game mechanically at all, but it did shave off parts of the game that I found were making it more unique and special.

But here is the question: "Does that resizing of the game make it easier to complete the project?"

And then a follow up question, "Does the value of resizing the project outweigh the reduction of uniqueness that the game would have with more varied Loot cards?"

Ultimately I decided on reducing the number of unique Loot cards and increasing some of the more basic Loot cards. This means that the number of total Loot cards [90] doesn't change, but the chance of getting a unique Loot card decreases. Which in a way could make getting a unique piece of Loot more enjoyable since it is now more rare. These trade-offs made sense for me and now that I have done this once, I am always looking for more ways to identify similar valuable actions like this. "Valuable" meaning making the game better, not adding value to my profit margin. My profit margin is in the toilet!

And now I retreat back to my sadness dungeon to continue my work on prototypes and game ideas!

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

Queen of the Damned Idiot

Dear Dungeon Creeps,

I want to outline some things today about publishing and what that means for Some Idiot Games as a company, but also what it means to me as a designer. But first, let's just define what the word 'publish' means.

Define: PUBLISH

To prepare and issue (a book, journal, piece of music, etc.) for public sale, distribution, or readership.

That's a bit too many words though, I like this definition better:

To make available to the public.

It's simple and effective. So, to elaborate now and use more words, the act of publishing is to take something that I have created and that I own, and then make it available to the public. Okay, so how does someone do that with a board game? I see there being two major options for someone like me, a stubborn idiot with grandiose ideas to make tabletop games:

Publishing by Crowdfunding

and

Self Publishing

READY. FIGHT!

1] Publishing by Crowdfunding

This verion of publishing is me taking the most recent version of my game, Wizard's Loot, and putting it out there on a crowdfunding platform [Gamefound, Kickstarter, IndieGoGo, etc.], hoping that it gets a lot of attention and backers interested in pre-funding it, then getting their money to a manufacturer, the manufacturer making the game, they then ship the game to a fulfillment center, and then the fulfillment center[s] ship the game to the backers. This version is such a great idea when it's pitched to you as a designer, but it honestly scares me a lot because I don't like playing with other people's money. Running a crowdfunding campaign is also a lot of work. Like, a lot a lot of work. I would honestly rather only use my money for fronting everything and then just sell the game at the price that I want to. Plus, going through a third-party crowdfunding platform eats a decent amount of the money gained for the campaign, about 8%-12% per unit for each pledge. Crowdfunding platforms do give a sort of "advertisement" though, and that can make or break a lot of campaigns. The crowdfunding site markets the game on their site and you, as the designer, can leverage that unquantifiable amount of attention into your game. Great stuff, when it works, but that steep 8%-12% is a lot in my eyes. Please keep in mind, I have never done a crowdfunding campaign, so maybe there are a lot of other things that these companies are providing that I am not aware of. But this is Publishing by Crowdfunding option that I have come to understand. A lot of work and leveraging a lot of other platforms to gain traction for your product. Nothing wrong with it for people that want to choose that option, but I am not sure I like the fundamentals of the entire structure.

2] Self Publishing

Skipping all of the crowdfunding, pledging, and pre-funding phases, I would save up my own money to fund the entire project and just pay for everything outright directly from the manufacturer. This means that I would assume all of the financial risk of the project up front, but it means that I would reap all of the potential rewards of the game directly. I like this idea as a first time designer and publisher because it means that I don't have to deal with a crowdfunding campaign. I can just make a product that I believe in, get it manufactured, and then sell it directly to the consumer. This also frees me up to define my own deadlines and not feel rushed from the act of taking people's pledged money. As stated earlier, I really dislike using other people's money. I mean, I don't like owing my friends 5 bucks, imagine me owing hundreds of people a tentative board game! With the self publishing option though, when I take someone's money I give them a copy of the product. One and done, makes a lot more sense to me. This option does however stop the concept of: MAKING A MILLION DOLLARS AND BECOMING THE TOP KICKSTARTER AND WINNING THE INTERNET! Which, to be honest, I don't really want. I would much rather have 500 copies of Wizard's Loot manufactured and sell them to 500 people, hopefully make my money back, make a little more to fund my next tabletop game/thing, and be happy with what I have accomplished. This might be a bad business plan, but it honestly makes a lot more sense to me than hiring a fulfillment center, storage solutions, crowdfunding campaign, etc. This version of the publishing process would also mean that I could control all of the marketing and advertising for the game and release it whenever it is truly done. It actually seems pretty easy to set up ads on BoardGameGeek, Instagram, Google, etc. It just takes time, which I am okay with because I want to take as much time as this project needs to be kickass.

And there it is folks, the word of the day: time. Everything that I do on my own potentially increases my bottom line for each unit sale of Wizard's Loot, but it takes a lot more of my time. So, which one do I choose? I really like the idea of controlling the scale of things for the game. Yes, I would be handling a lot more tasks and it would take a lot more of my time, but the project of Wizard's Loot and Some Idiot Games would become more "mine" in the process. So that is the current plan. I am going to shut down my crowdfunding pre-launch pages on Kickstarter and Gamefound and just plan on self publishing Wizard's Loot directly through Some Idiot Games!

Thanks for reading and I hope you have a great rest of your week.

Take care,

Mackie

Gran Idiota

[taking a break from writing an intro],

This is a good time to take a break and refresh a lot of things. I truly believe that taking breaks helps create better things. It forces your brain to refresh and ask simple, yet powerful, questions that could give you that breakthrough you need for the game/mechanic/whatever you're doing.

The holiday season is stressful enough with cooking, baking, presents, traveling, drinking [wait, that one is easy], socializing, sleeping on the floor, patting dogs [that one is easy too!], traveling back, etc. I'm going to take this time to focus on relaxing and give my board game tabletop development brain a break. I just did a few awesome playtesting sessions of Wizard's Loot with some badass people, so I have lots of feedback to read through and categorize and I want to go into all of that with fresh brain brine to make sure that I give all of it the attention it deserves.

This is a very roundabout way to say Happy Holidays, I hope all of you play some rad games, and see you on the other side [2024]!

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

The Idiot in Charge

Also known as: How to prepare for success while working a full time job and illustrating on the side.

The two biggest hurdles for me as an artist with a full time job has been time management and inspiration. Sometimes when you finally sit down to make art, you simply can’t think of what you’d like to draw. Frankly, it sucks. However, I have devised a general plan that truly does help stave off those moments of “blank-page-itis.”

Step 1: Understand your art direction.

You know how Gandalf says that we can only do the best we can with the time that we have been given? Good, you passed the nerd test. Well, I bring this up because illustration is a language, and your art direction is the question you are trying to answer with images. Like Jeopardy, but the “answer” is a shifting image like a mirage in the sands of your mind… sometimes easier to see out of the corner of your eye…

Here’s the art direction for Sorkin Prete from Mackie:

Flavor text: “Sorkin, in order, is a drunk and an alchemist. An attractive younger woman with disheveled red hair wearing red and white robes. Sorkin Prete is the daughter of an alchemist and a cleric. Her mother, the alchemist, was a brilliant woman that created many potion recipes that hospitals and churches still use today. Her father, the cleric, helped administer many of these potions and blessed them in order for them to be allowed into the churches. Sorkin is neither her mother nor her father. It is said though that she can build a potion stronger than orc skin and more magickal than wizard’s urine. Unfortunately, Sorkin’s drinking problem affects her ability to manage any sort of organized notes, so most of her recipes are “memorized”. The results of a good day’s potion-making can get her drinking money for a week. The results of bad days cause catastrophic results, usually culminating in city fines in the sum of thousands.” Sorkin should be a little easier since we've already outlined what she looks like in the Cleave Melee Ability: I really like the monk-like changes you added to her with the white tabard and red under shirt. I think her face and hair are on point and we just need to figure out accessories and a solid pose/background. She has a bandolier of potions and herbs strung over her shoulder and hanging across her chest. She also has a large satchel attached to her waist with gloves and tools spilling out of it. You already drew these, just clarifying for when you draw her in more detail. I'm struggling with her pose. I originally wrote: "Her pose should be a jaunty and/or sassy stance up on one leg with her other leg balanced against her standing knee." But I am not really sure what that means. I'll toss some poses that I like below. Let me know what your thoughts are for Sorkin and we can discuss further if needed. Otherwise do that thing you do with the pen and make my bad ideas into good visuals.

So, I came up with some sketches that Mackie really liked. We went through a few rounds of changes, and then we got really stuck on the face and hair. This was the comment that broke my brain - however, looking back, this is an extremely valuable lesson in how to communicate, and the reason I started writing this dev log.

After submitting a third complete portrait illustration of Sorkin, Mackie says: “Her hair looks like Scully’s.” I hear a test pattern in my head, and I start to drift.

• I, too, love Gillian Anderson. She is so hot.

• Is this a bad haircut?

• Is this a good haircut?

• I don’t know what to do with this statement. What do you mean it looks like Scully’s? I wasn’t looking at any pictures of her while drawing this. Am I subconsciously thinking of her? Because I’m consciously obsessed with her.. I’m spiraling. I need help.

Here’s where you ask your clarifying questions: “Okay, I need a little more info. Can you respond to the following questions so I can give you a new sketch?”

• Do you like the length of her hair?

• Do you like the shape of the cut?

• How about the color?

• Can you provide any other ACTIONABLE feedback other than her resemblance to Dana Scully?

• Also, send me pics of better hair if you have them handy.

And here is the response: “Keep the orange color, but I need her hair to be longer and messier like she doesn’t brush it often.” 

• Great, I now know what changes I need to make!

• With this feedback, I can now also google “long messy orange hair” if I need help.

Step 2: Get all the steps possible accomplished ahead of time before you sit down to draw. For example, here’s what I do:

Understand my art direction as completely as possible. Go back and ask more questions as needed.

Gather the reference images from Mackie, and then any additional images I may need, including past artwork I’ve created if I’m doing a repeat character. I want them to look the same.

Create a palette of colors to use, and create my digital canvas at the right size and DPI. Sometimes I look at paintings I like (I’m in a Maxfield Parrish phase right now, winter landscapes) and pluck some colors from there.

Look up any tutorials that apply to the piece you’re about to sketch, if applicable. Difficult pose? Try Pose Masters, or even movies that you can pause during a fight scene to sketch with.

Bonus round: Create your invoice ahead of time before you create the work. That way when the work is finished, you are already ready to send out the invoice and you don’t have one more thing to address.

In conclusion: ask questions, and clear the deck, so when you do sit down to draw, you can easily reach for a reference image or check back on the instructions without doing major digging.

-M

Hello all of You Patient People,

Mackie here. I started Some Idiot Games thinking that I would only focus on one project at a time to "keep things simple". To focus on a single project with all of my creativity to get it completed within a timely manner. That project was, and still is, Wizard's Loot, and all of the development for that project is going really well. It's just going ... slow. Let's put it this way, I planned on actually manufacturing and selling Wizard's Loot in December of 2023. Yes, that was two months ago. I just did an art/design check to see if we were on track to finish sometime soon. *checks notes* The game is about 60% art/design complete. I haven't even started working with my manufacturer on proofs and tests!

But this is what I wanted to rant talk about today: Good things take time. I'm not trying to be arrogant saying that Wizard's Loot is "good", although I hope it is. What I mean by "good" is 'well made' and 'tight'. Do all of the mechanics read and play well? Is the rulebook easy to understand? Is there any ambiguity on how the Fireball Magick Ability deals damage to the enemies? Does that piece of art stand out and look awesome? Is there another way to write that card to make it more clear? Is it fun? These are all of the questions that I have constantly floating around in the brine inside my head. It takes a lot of time to answer these questions. And I don't just mean sitting down and writing out answers to them. You have to take breaks and think about the questions from a lot of different angles and playtest the absolute crap out of them and let things go and be inspired in different ways and think laterally and so on. I believe that it's not possible to make something great without refining it over the course of a decent amount of time.

Ready for the reality of everything? Here it comes!

Good things taking time, but also, time is also money. Was that a proverb AND an idiom?

For a small company, money is always tight. I currently have expenses of about $1,500 per year [filing fees, accountant, monthly services, etc.] to keep the lights on for Some Idiot Games. Now that's not that much in terms of a company, but $1,500 is still $1,500 and every year that goes by with me not making products and potentially selling them is money that I am spending without the hope of making any of it back. Or, and this is a brand new idea I just had, have my company actually makes money! I don't want Some Idiot Games to just be focused on making money, I want it to be a creative outlet for me and other rad people I hire to make kickass stuff. But, I also can't keep tossing a minimum of $1,500 per year into a hole in the ground and still be able to buy beer food and dog treats. My idiot mission statement has always been: I'd like my current bad ideas to fund my future bad ideas.

In order to have my bad ideas to become good products, it needs to take time and a lot of hard work. I appreciate everyone's patience, including my own.

Take care,

Mackie

What an idiot.

Hello Valued Potential Consumer,

I finally got a "soft launch" version of the Some Idiot Games shop up-and-running through Shopify. Still need to tweak a lot of things, but I believe I got the basic setup for selling the few things I currently have as merch for Wizard's Loot. There are still a lot of things I need to iron out in terms of shipping profiles, fulfillment notifications, and a bunch of other things related to purchases and order flow. I am pretty happy with the current setup and I am hoping that I can actually start selling some items I have created in order to start recouping some of the money I have spent on creating Wizard's Loot. NEWS FLASH: Board games cost lots of money to create.

I have lots and lots of ideas for things to sell in the store, even including the board games that take me 10+ years to create. There are a few things being juggled around right now, but I a want to send them to a printer by this Summer and then drop them in the store for print sales and digital sales as well. Hint: If you like TTRPGs, you might like these.

That's really it for now, just a quick update on the current progress of the overall company and the launch of the online loot shop. Have a great rest of your day!

Love & Kisses,

Mackie

Idiot Shop Manager

P.S. I also lied in the title, this dev log has nothing to do with ships.

All I can do is apologize.

Dear Readers,

Announcing our new in-development tabletop game: Magick Chits

I have been developing a party game in parallel to Wizard's Loot and this is it. The game is a simple dice chucking and card slinging party game.

Roll dice and cast magick spells in an attempt to get the winning score of 42+ before someone else does.

Each die has a chance for positive points and a chance for negative points. The colors denote the percentage of risk as well as the point structure.

Low Risk = Lower Potential Score

High Risk = Higher Potential Score

The game is for 2-5 players and has a decent amount of strategy that can be squeezed out of it from everyone. I am happy with where I have gotten it so far and figured I would do a small announcement of it here. Playtesting is going well and I believe that I have a good idea of all the components and what I want the overall design of the game to be.

I wasn't going to work on multiple projects at the same time for Some Idiot Games, but it just sort of happened. I needed to cathartically create a game that was a lot simpler than Wizard's Loot, and Magick Chits was born from that. I will still be working on Wizard's Loot in parallel to this new game, but what this will allow me to do is get my proverbial feet wet with this smaller party game first. I am hoping to figure out a lot of manufacturing, legal, advertising, mechanical, and other project-related things with Magick Chits before I start doing the same with Wizard's Loot.

Take care,

Mackie

The Idiot Who Writes Things

Hello Adventuring Amigos,

Have you heard about Poll Your Own Adventure? It's a choose-your-own-adventure-style game that I ran on my Some Idiot Games Instagram Stories. It was a lot of fun and I want to break down some of the mechanics and ideas that went into building the little project out.

My artist Mia and I were recently talking about different ways to "engage socials" and all that other crap. I honestly hate social media, I view it as a tool to be used and I do not enjoy using it [this topic will be covered in a different Dev Log post]. But we were chatting about different ways to potentially use social media and make it not be terrible for me. Mia suggested a "choose-your-own-adventure-style game" and I started thinking about it more and more and how I could do it with the limited tech associated with Instagram Posts and Stories. I love GM-ing and writing adventures, so any reason for me to do something like that is alluring to me. From there I pretty much just made a small Post about it and decided to try and brute force it with IG Stories. I created a new Story and began clicking around the UI to figure out how to write a small story. Pretty easy to do with text blocks. Then I needed to figure out how to write a prompt and get engagement from users. I thought of having people reply and comment on the Stories with what they wanted a character to do, but that isn't public to other users and it's honestly asking too much from people [one of the many reasons I hate social media]. Then I found the Poll sticker and this mechanic had everything click into place for the project. I was able to write a small prompt in the headers like, "What does Ayla do?" and then have 1-4 selectable responses that users could vote on:

1] Jump into the raging volcano

2] Eat the entire sausage

3] Seduce the merman

4] Throw a dagger

After a user selects their response, they can see what everyone else voted on and which one was "winning". The most voted on option gets selected and we all move on with the adventure.

Let's talk about timing and the fleeting moments we share on this planet. Stories have a 24 hour life cycle within IG. This is perfect to let everyone within different time zones have the option to see the Story, read the prompt, and then cast their vote for the day. After 24 hours, I review the Story, see what the winning vote was, save the response into a Story Highlight on my IG Profile, and then move the Poll Your Own Adventure forward with the highest voted response. True democracy at work people.

"But wait! This just seems like a choose-your-own-adventure still. What makes it a tabletop RPG?" Thank you, other voice in my head that moves the conversation forward. I wanted dice rolls. What is a TTRPG without rolling dice and yelling about goblins? Not much to be honest. I already covered how the Poll mechanic can be used to cast votes on up to 4 options. Nerd dice come with a 4-sided die. Problem solved forever! I would write a prompt such as, "Ayla attacks the werewolf!" and have the Poll responses simply be:

1] 1

2] 2

3] 3

4] 4

The players would then roll 1D4 and select the value their die rolled, they could even use my Dice Roller I built on the website. There is an honor system here, but if someone is going to cheat in a free-to-play IG tabletop game I make, then I just have to roll with it. I am not equipped to handle that amount of jackassery. This die rolling mechanic paired with the Poll system worked really well and I treated it the same as the voted choices for actions, highest voted number is what the character rolled. One user might have rolled a 4, but if five other users rolled a 1, then it looks like Ayla's attack fails and that werewolf is going to be pissed off.

More aware readers might be thinking about ties during voting. I handled these with a text block and my own roll of the dice:

THE WINDS OF FATE GUIDE YOU

Then I would roll my own 1D4 to decide which vote wins. What is TTRPG without a little bit of chaos sprinkled in.

That's about it! I really enjoyed creating this type of game and I will absolutely be doing it again in the future. Thanks for reading and hopefully see you in the next Poll Your Own Adventure.

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

Idiot Game Master

Hey Creative Creatures,

Ever created something, or paid someone to create an asset, and then realized that you aren't going to use that asset any longer? Well...fuck, right? Fuck indeed. Well, here is how I recently un-fucked one of my recent assets that my artist created and I no longer needed for my in-development game Wizard's Loot.

Wizard's Loot has cards called Traits that each player can draw at the start of their game to attach to their Adventurer and make them more unique. Some good and some bad [these bad ones are what triggered this entire thing]. My wonderful artist recently created some art for a few of these Traits and I updated the Trait card designs to add into the playtesting version of Wizard's Loot. All good, right? You bet your cute face it was! The cards looked awesome and I've run many playtests with them. The problem? These bad Traits were not FUN! Some of them utterly bricked Adventurer stats and made other parts of the game completely off limits to some players. This was bad game design and it was time that I did something about it. I knew I had to get rid of the bad Adventurer Traits so I removed the few bad Traits that desperately needed to go, but I still had this art that I already paid for. Thankfully there are plenty of other cards that we are building out and designing all of the time for Wizard's Loot that I could look at. I took a look at the Event card deck in the game and decided to just make a few Events that could use this new art and remove a few Events that didn't have art yet [and I secretly didn't really like some of my older Event designs anyways]. And that was that. I was able to minimize the damage from my decision to remove those bad Traits by reusing the art on a newly created card. Seems like pretty straightforward advice, but I wanted to outline the specifics of how I did it to indicate that pivoting needs to happen a lot when designing something this large.

What are the takeaways of this? Hell if I know. Kidding. I should have picked up on these bad Traits not being fun in the earlier playtests and not assigned my artist to make art for them before I absolutely knew they were going to stay in the game. I was simply lucky that I thought of reusing the Trait art for some Event cards. But in the future I will need to really sign off on each piece of art that I assign to my artist for Wizard's Loot AND BEYOND!

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

Idiot. Just Idiot.

Ahoy Digital Darlings,

Well, I finally did it. I switched from using Photoshop [PS] over to using the Affinity Creative Suite [AF]. I have been using PS since CS5. Yes, you read that number correctly: 5. I have never really used any creative products other than Photoshop and that includes using PS for illustrations that I should have been using other products like Illustrator/Designer/whatever. It was honestly just a comfort level thing, plus every other time I looked for other programs they all seemed to be student projects or freeware that looked more like viruses than painting/design programs. But these prices and subscription models for Adobe products are getting absolutely ridiculous for a small business like Some Idiot Games. I have currently made ... let me check my notes ... about $100 since I started Some Idiot Games a few years ago. Small businesses don't make a lot when they start out [INTRUSIVE THOUGHT: or sometimes ever] so paying a large amount of money for software on a monthly basis would eat into those theoretical profits.

ENTER: AFFINITY!

I randomly found Affinity browsing some weird place on the internet. I started researching it and the first thing I saw about it was that it was a one time fee for the entire suite of products. That's intriguing. I read on to find that it mostly has the same utilities that Adobe products have, but just slightly different user interfaces and tool names. Even more intriguing. So, I signed up for the trial and away I went! It honestly just clicked and I began translating my PS files to Affinity and learning the layouts of the programs. I love it. If you're looking for an alternative to Adobe and their extremely predatory subscription models, check out Affinity.

Lets hope I can make some awesome stuff with these products and start making some money to keep making awesome stuff.

Love & Kisses,

Mackie

Indie Dev Idiot

Good morrow fellow dice rollers,

I love creating Tabletop Role-Playing Game [TTRPG] content. I'd be doing it without Some Idiot Games, but what this platform allows me to do is hold myself accountable to make the content better and more "professional" [I hate that word]. I always want my TTRPG content [adventures, one-pagers, roll tables, etc.] to be free, or at least a version of them to be free, but sometimes I get really excited and pay artists to work on the content as well. This costs money, as it should. So I decided to create split versions of the content. One version will always be free and available on the website. While another version will be purchasable and downloadable through my store. Sometimes this is the same version, which just means that people can toss a few bucks at me to support Some Idiot Games, and then maybe the cycle continues? That'd be nice.

Let's look at the Shadowdark-compatible adventure that I just finished: Chaya Kill. I paid the artist $1,600 to do the illustrations for it because I believed that the end result was going to be truly rad as fuck. And I was right. I fucking love the adventure I wrote and the work the artist did to visualize my nonsense. Will I make that money back? I have no idea. But I'm hoping that the more quality products I make, the more people will see the company and my work, and then be willing to pay for my nonsense. That's the model. That's it. Pretty simple, but also not guaranteed. That's why I need to keep making the things I want to make and keep pushing my work to be better and better. Then, I don't know, I become the emperor of all nerd shit? I'm just an idiot who wants to make stuff. So that's what I'm going to try and do.

Love & Kisses,

Mackie

Idiot Entrepreneur

Hello Fellow Human People,

Let's do the short version first: Fun is subjective.

Now let's do the mild/medium version: What's fun for you might not be fun for others. So what I think is fun, might be the worst thing you have ever played or been a part of. It's just the way it goes. When I design something, I think about what would be the most fun for me and as many others as possible, does it make sense [more on that below], then I aim for that.

Now let's get into it:

Today I want to explore the concept of "fun". Yes, I plan on dissecting the concept of fun and ruining everything. Kidding, but I do want to explain some reasons for why certain choices get made while I'm creating something. I refer to this as the 'Is It Fun?' principle, or ITF for short [everything has to be a three-letter-acronym, or TLA for short]. Let's start with something simple:

What's more "fun"?

Rolling 1D6?

OR

Rolling 2D6?

I think rolling 2D6 is more fun because it's rolling more dice. Rolling dice is "fun", therefore rolling more of them is more "fun". The end. Problem solved. Dev log over. I'm joking, keep reading!

Rolling 2D6 means the math is different now for whatever the mechanic is. The minimum on a 1D6 is 1 [duh]. But the minimum on 2D6 is 2 and the maximum on 2D6 is 12, which is 6 higher than the maximum on the 1D6. So 2D6 is rolling more dice, but it's also opening up the range of what the player can roll. Again, I think this is more fun. But some people might prefer the simplicity, and lack of math, of 1D6. You roll it and there you go, that's the number you got. Simple. Welcome to the concept of 'preference' and to a larger extent "fun".

For a more direct example of this, I am using 1D6 in Wizard's Loot for all ability rolls the adventurers may attempt in the game. I thought about it a lot, and wrote a whole massive fucking post about it on here [Dev Log #12 - 7/11/2023 - Dice, Dogs, and Probabilities], and decided that the game preferred the 1D6 model because it was all it truly needed. I could have forced the 2D6 model on it, but it wouldn't have been as simple and accessible as the 1D6. I tested 1D6 and 2D6 a bunch of times to get a better idea about how they both felt, I then made the "executive decision on fun" to stay with the 1D6 model. Am I wrong in that choice? Only time, and plenty of pissed off players, can tell me that.

Let's look at a completely different project that I just completed: Chaya Kill the TTRPG adventure. This adventure starts with taking agency away from players and forcing them into the specific role of a prisoner doing their last job to get released.

"Is it fun to take the ever-coveted 'choice' away from TTRPG players?" FUCKING NO!

First off, calm down. Secondly, I did this because I wanted a reason for all the starting players to have to be together for the adventure. This is always something that I struggle with when I GM. "Why the hell is an evil-as-shit gnome necromancer partnered up with the holiest-of-holy elf clerics to clear out this haunted witch's attic?" What a great question! I sure wish there was some reason within the game that I could leverage to answer that question! BOOM! I did that for you. But this might not be "fun" for some players and/or GMs. It is for me though, hence why I wrote it in the adventure.

The reason I wrote the railroad-y start to the adventure is because I think it's more fun to have that reason in the adventure for the players to hold onto and roleplay. If you don't want it in there then change it up and play the way you want to play. Play the way that is most fun for YOU. Or just live with the fact that the game wasn't created for you specifically, and be okay with that. [I'm sure the internet will be aware and respectful of that as a concept.]

Changing gears slightly because this dev log is already too long to keep ranting about that one topic. Does "the fun" make sense? This one is interesting to explain because game logic doesn't make sense, nor does it need to.

"How are you holding 4 warhammers and 35 potions?" Magic bag.

"What does the energy consumption of a level 3 spell do to a humanoid body?" Uhhhhh.

"How does the metal dragon stay hovering in the air? Wouldn't it weigh like 100,000 lbs.?" A wizard did it?

Some game logic stuff doesn't need to make sense because it takes away from the 'Is It Fun?' principle. So, when I ask myself, "Does 'the fun' make sense?". I am mostly referring to whether or not the gameplay works cohesively with all the other parts of the game and its mechanics. For example, if all the players total up their damage to the enemies and deal it together, then the enemies should do the same. Have the same "fun" mechanics working similarly for all parties/features. I think about crap like this a lot with questions like "How much damage would a rat do versus a Troll?" and "Can the consciousness of a reanimated Skeleton get cut by a magickal blade?". These thoughts haunt my weak mortal brain almost constantly, and when one of them makes sense I update the game/mechanic/flavor text accordingly.

Welp, that's it. Damn, that was a long one. Good job sticking with it until the end. I appreciate you reading my nonsense on here. It helps me to dump this shit out of my head and avoid going crazier than I already am.

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

An Idiot in the Streets, An Idiot in the Sheets

Hello all you scaly bastards <3,

I've written a dev log on sizing our first board game project: Wizard's Loot. But in this dev log I want to talk about sizing in terms of the units for the project, meaning: "How many copies should I order in anticipation to sell?" So I'm going to! And there's nothing you can do to stop me!

*ahem*

A large part of this whole "Biz-Nizz" thing I've been doing has shown me that I need to get good at a lot of things I was never aware of previously. One of them being, ordering products in the hopes that I can sell them, or 'determining scale' [woah, magic page!]. I know that sounds really obvious when I break it down to that level, but I honestly never really expected to place a print order on a physical TTRPG adventure book that I wrote and designed, therefore I never really had to answer the question 'how many of these damned things should I order?'. The hope is that you sell everything you order and make a profit, simplified calculation below:

(sale price - cost per unit) - product overhead = profit margin

($30 - $22.50 ) - $2.45 = $5.05

So yes, I sell each copy of my TTRPG adventure for $30, but that means by the end of the day I'm actually making $5.05 profit from each unit sold. Let's continue this math a bit and see how scale actually works for a product like this.

I decided to place an order for 10 physical copies of my TTRPG adventure. The cost per unit of each is $22.50, so that means my total input amount is $225. Let's say I sell all 10 at $30 per unit, this would give my account $300 [math is fun]. But it's not like I just made $300, because I have to remove my total cost per units and overhead for the total project: $22.50 + $2.45 = $24.95 x 10 = $249.50. Now I remove this total from my total money earned: $300 - $249.50 = $50.50. So I am looking at a total profit margin of $50.50 for the entire project if I sell all 10 copies. That's ... not a lot of money considering all the other expenses for actually making the product to begin with. But let's do that same math for 50 units:

Input: $22.50 + $2.45 X 50 = $1,247.50

Output: $30 X 50 = $1,500

Profit: $1,500 - $1,247.50 = $252.50

We see an increase in profits of $202 going from 10 units to 50 units! Wowey zowey! But I now need to think of the next two problems:

1] Can I feasibly sell 50 copies of this TTRPG adventure?

2] Can I afford the up front costs of $1,247.50?

Ultimately I am saying a very basic thing: Supply & Demand. But as an indie Idiot, these types of decisions can honestly bankrupt my company very easily. I chose only printing 10 copies of the adventure [and maps!] because I would rather sell out of a smaller amount of product than print 500+ of the product and have to start burying them in the New Mexico desert. Yes, my profits will always be less if I make decisions like this, but the up front costs are low enough to allow me to pay them without taking out a loan and/or selling my blood on the streets.

Well, that's what has been knocking around in my head this month. Tune in next month when I talk about slimes or something.

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

The stinky goblin retreats to their hole in the ground.

Hello Risky Rangers,

Risk.

How do you measure something like that? Can you decrease risk? What are the benefits of increasing risk?

I recently read the term "risk appetite" and I found the concept of it interesting. The quick and dirty version of it is: The amount of risk a company/person is willing to accept while achieving a goal.

I read this directly as, "How much am I willing to bet to make this creative thing a reality?" I talked about Determining Scale in the previous dev log and these two topics are very closely related. But, in that dev log I talked about scale in regards to order quantities, which is risky, but risk can take on many different forms during the attempt to achieve a goal.

For example, risk could be hiring and working with a new artist you've not met before. Risk could be not creating a TikTok account and not advertising on that platform. Wait, risk can be NOT doing something too? Yes. Risk could be choosing to make a game that has a certain mechanic in it that "everyone hates", but you add it in anyways. All of these choices add to your project's risk appetite. Every choice you make is a bet. Some bets are very fucking risky, while others are pretty safe.

This brings me to the concept of a "safe bet" and the endless creation of generic projects from larger companies that are physically afraid of risk. Most companies have a pretty simple goal: Make money. That goal is hard enough to achieve, but adding risk to their projects makes things more ... risky. There are hundreds of decisions that get made on every project that add to its risk appetite. If a company wants to make money as the primary goal, then it is common for the decision-makers to choose less risky choices and those "safe bets" begin adding up. For example, say puzzle games are really big right now. Making a puzzle game would be a pretty safe bet for a company. But what if they made a puzzle game that also included gore and blood and demons and ghosts? Well, that's a riskier bet because those topics are going to turn some people off. If a company wants to make money, they are going to choose the safer bet and therefore make a pretty generic puzzle game to sell because it's going to appeal to a wider audience. For the opposite reason, I love indie games. Indie games have a large risk appetite because they usually don't have projections and revenue markets and sales quotas and fucking BLAH BLAH BLAH. Indies will make a game they want to make because it's fun, and they might care very little about their risk appetite while making it.

I am not shitting on any specific decision from any specific company. I am trying to outline how some decisions may or may not get made on projects because of their risk appetite and what their repercussions might be. Personally, I'd like to play a weirder indie game about ghosts and demons than a generic game with the flavor-of-the-week on the cover. So, those are the games that I like to make.

To sum up 1:

Every choice during a project adds to or removes from the project's risk appetite. These choices also directly contribute to the project's viability to sell it. Think about this next time you're looking at a game that seems really weird to you. What do you think its risk appetite is? If you're a creator, think about what your current project's risk appetite is. Is it really safe? Or is it very risky? Somewhere in the middle? Where do you want your project's risk appetite to be?

To sum up 2:

If you like what you see from smaller indie studios and people, then it's important to purchase things from them. 'Vote with your dollar' is a great statement to remember when looking to support smaller groups that definitely need the support. If you buy weird stuff from weirdos, then they might make more weird stuff that you like. It's a weird circle-of-life type of thing.

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

I'm sorry I didn't talk about slimes in this dev log. Someday I'll make an entire dev log about slimes and other goopy gross creatures. I promise.

Greetings Goopy Gals,

Let's just chill out and chat about some of our favorite [slimy] monsters and how they get created.

I got asked once, "How did you create the enemies and adventurers for Wizard's Loot?" And this isn't one of those fake Q&A questions some people put out because no one is actually asking them questions [although I'm pretty close to that level of engagement]. I was asked this question during a playtesting session by @boardgame.berks and I love talking about stuff like this. I mean my initial answer was something boring like, "I don't know. I just sort of create them." Which is a pretty crappy answer to be honest, but let's jump into that question in more detail now that I can think about it and type it out, and at the same time talk about some goopy slimes!

If you're reading this dev log then you've made it pretty far into the depths of the internet cave. Since you're here, I'm assuming that you can think of a few general dungeon-style monsters: Goblins, Slimes, Skeletons, Minotaurs, etc. When I create monsters like these for a board game or TTRPG adventure, I like putting twists on these creatures to make them more interesting for a specific reason. For example, what would a slime look like in a frozen part of the world? How do they move? What would their attack patterns be like? Can they even survive there? There's a term for this called 'naturalist design' that I really like because it grounds the entire world in a sort of "fake reality". The world is obviously fake [sentient frozen slimes don't really exist, sorry to be the one to tell you], but it becomes believable within its own set of rules. For a bad example, the frozen slime wouldn't just start flying without there being a pretty good reason for it to do that. So if it did, that would definitely be a twist, but it would be bad naturalist design because it doesn't make any sense.

Jenell Jaquays was an amazing designer and their work created a term called 'Jaquaysing a dungeon', which mostly means there are multiple entrances/exits to a dungeon, multiple paths to walk down, and a general sense of non-linear design. This, to me, is a form of naturalist design because it tells me the world is the way it is regardless of player interaction. The world is grounded because it has to live and work within its own "fake reality". This is an example of naturalist design in environments. I feel that a great enemy/game/world/creation blends both 'Jaquaysing a dungeon' and 'naturalist design' to create a creature/place that is believable and plays well within its own sandbox.

How does this all play into me creating monsters and slimes and goopy girls? Well, I think about mechanics that could work within a naturalist design of the creature and the game I'm making. One that I'm particularly happy with is the Slime and Ooze passive Enemy Skill within our in development board game Wizard's Loot [big shout out to my brother for helping create this, he's great]. These enemies start with X amount of loot when the fight begins, at the end of each combat round they destroy a random piece of that loot because it dissolves within them. This does two things:

1] Game Mechanic: Creates a sense of urgency to kill them and grab that sweet loot before it dissolves.

2] Naturalist Design: Makes sense. The enemies are corrosive slime monsters, of course they're going to dissolve swords and goblets that get sucked up into them.

Sometimes this doesn't work out though. I created a Barbarian Brawler creature for Wizard's Loot in the early stages and it had a passive ability that would STUN players for a turn if it hit them. From a naturalist design point of view, it definitely worked. Big muscle person punches hard and stuns you. Long story short, this broke the game pretty easily because two Barbarian Brawlers would stun-lock the group and just kill everyone because there was no way to UN-STUN yourself before they hit you again on the next turn. This enemy also broke the solo version of the game for the same reason, if you got hit once you always got hit, then died, the end, pack the game up and go away. This is a badly designed creature and it needed to either be changed, or removed. I chose to remove it after a couple of iterations of me changing it, it just wasn't working or fitting into my game. OUT THE DOOR YOU GO BARBARIAN BRAWLER! And that's okay, the game is made better for it. There was also very little naturalist design reasoning to have a humanoid beefcake brawler punching people in a dungeon created by a wizard.

And thus ends another episode of 'Wasting Time with Mackie'. Kidding, I hope you enjoyed reading this and potentially learned something about how my rotting brain works when confronted with a design challenge.

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

*glorp*

Nope.

I have the same plan as I've always had: Make cool shit and get it in front of people that want it. In 2024 I worked with rad people to make some great stuff that I'm really proud of. I actually even sold some things to people I don't personally know, that's a huge milestone for me and the company. Did I finish every in-progress project and make thousands of dollars? Fuck no. But that's okay, I got a lot of progress done on Wizard's Loot, Magick Chits, a bunch of new TTRPG adventures, and other ideas. I really don't like the idea of cranking out work to meet quotas. I know that's a bad business plan, hence why I'm Some IDIOT Games. I want to create things as they come to me and refine them to a final product that I'll be happy with. I'm not going to be the dude that makes a board game or TTRPG every year and it wins awards and blah blah blah. Realistically, I'm going to be the dude that makes a couple of games and other nerd shit that people might like and then close up shop with a grin on my face.

So, nothing is really changing for this year with Some Idiot Games, but there's a lot I want to do. Here's some stuff I need to work on for this year [in no particular order]:

1] Reach more nerds that might like my nonsense. Ads? Conventions? Collaborations?

2] Actually finish/publish/release a game. How can I be Some Idiot Games without a game to my name?

3] Keep meeting kickass people in this space and say goodbye to the ones that are dickheads.

4] Refine my design and writing skills to make better stuff.

That's it for this shorter dev log. Stay safe out there in 2025 and play some rad games!

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

Idiot Mode: Engage!

Running a small business is hard. I'm sure everyone hears this and says, "Oh yeah. It sure sounds it."

But it really is.

My last business rant dev log was mostly about starting my LLC and trying to deal with multiple startup companies trying to grab my money while starting my business. This rant is more about selling things, or the lack of selling things, while actually running a small business. But it isn't just going to be me whining [there will be a bit of whining though], I'm also going to try and offer some feedback on things that didn't work for me and next steps that I am hopeful about.

Let's chat about an example. I've made some things since the last business rant dev log, specifically a TTRPG adventure called Chaya Kill. Trying to sell the Chaya Kill adventure has been pretty eye-opening. To be completely honest, I didn't do as much as I should have in terms of advertising and promotion. I mostly posted about the adventure on a few social media sites and hashtagged some topics related to the adventure and TTRPGs in general, while the kickass artist I hired did the same. Their following is much greater than mine, so that helped a decent amount, but I still barely got any sales for the adventure. I then thought, "Alright, I'll make a few limited physical editions of the adventure. Nerds like physical objects." I put those up on the Shopify site and "marketed" them in the same bad ways. Got about 2 sales. I felt amazing when I got the 2 sales, don't get me wrong, but at the end of the day I needed to admit that the "advertising" avenue I chose wasn't working. And it still isn't.

I decided that I needed to actually spend money to make money and tried doing a social media advertisement run. It didn't generate anything that I wanted it to. Also admitting here that I didn't do it very well and I could have focused more on it to get it into the right demographics and engagements and all that. Advertisement is hard and I'm bad at it [if that wasn't completely clear already].

With all of this "lack of conversion" and "small engagement", I started thinking. So much so that I looked into potentially closing my LLC this year [2025] and seeing if there was a way for me to still create things and sell them through my own Shopify or through another platform altogether.

Short answer: Sort of.

Longer answer: Yeah, sort of, but it would change a lot of things.

In order to still have a Shopify account/store it's recommended that I have a business bank account. In order to have a business bank account I need a business EIN/SSN/TID/thingy. In order to have any of those I need to have a business. So, I could nuke the business and just run a Shopify store through my own personal bank account, but it slightly complicates things on the tax side. It's doable, just more complicated when you start intermingling things like that.

Let's say I nuke my business though and decide to continue creating TTRPG adventures [and I will continue making TTRPG adventures, you can't stop me], then I would have to sell everything through another platform like DriveThruRPG and/or Itch.io. This isn't bad in anyway, I just don't like the idea of leveraging someone else's platform to sell my wares. I'd rather people come to me and I sell them the thing I made. Yes, because it would mean more money for me directly, but also because I can then control the product a bit more and I'm not beholden to someone else to work within their platform and constraints. I really like being able to sell digital goods and physical goods of things through my Shopify store. I like being able to write weird little blurbs about them and just have fun with it. Can I do all of that on another platform? Again, sort of.

At times I wonder if making Some Idiot Games an LLC and doing all the "right things" for creating a small business is actually what I needed to do for my creative outlet. I want to make board games and tabletop RPG shit, but I wonder if I could just simply sell my work through another existing platform. This process change would save me a lot on taxes and accounting and overhead and sanity, although change the whole process quite a bit. I could even keep my website if I wanted to. This would free me up to just focus on designing and creating more than the "bizniz" side of things, but I'd then have to live under someone else's website and sell my wares through them [which I don't really like]. So, in short [too late], I'm paying for the freedom to create the things the way I want to and try to sell them completely on my own island. It's a nice island, but I'm worried about the sustainability of the island through the years.

Get to the damned point already!

I'm going to release Wizard's Loot while I still have Some Idiot Games as an LLC and then see where that takes me before I change anything on the business side of everything. I'm also going to dive into a better way to advertise my products that doesn't involve me spending more money than I'm making. I'm not sure how I feel about sponsored content and all of those processes, but I might reach out to some people to ask about that. I am also going to research general Google ads a bit more and try a campaign of those for some of my products.

I am very happy with the work that I create and who I work with on creating all of it, but these thoughts of changing the company to better fit my needs are always in the back of my rotting brain.

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

CEO of Whining

Ahoy Dev Log Reader[s],

I love designing, in both writing and visuals. So TTRPG adventures and one-pagers are really enjoyable for me to work on. I know I write "too much" when it comes to TTRPG adventures, but I like writing them as stories for the Game Master [GM] to read as well as adapt to play with their players. Page layouts and the organization of the game mechanics is actually pretty interesting too, it's not something I thought about enjoying before but there's a huge level of satisfaction that I get from laying a TTRPG page out, stepping back, and liking the overall flow of the page. It's nice. I recently started laying out my Troika!-compatible TTRPG adventure and noticed something compared to my Shadowdark-compatible adventure.

It's different. I mean, like, really different. the Troika! adventure design is free and weird and adventurous.

The vibe of Shadowdark is black & white, clean, uniform, and easily read. Which is what initially drew me to designing and laying out an adventure in that universe. But Troika!. . . It really is different. Weird pastel colors, font sizing all over the place, left-aligned text mashing into centered-diagonal text that ends with a giant squid head. Just weird shit that frees up my brain in a relaxing way [not sure what that says about me].

Okay, but WHAT'S THE FUCKING POINT OF THIS DEV LOG!?

I'm getting to that.

If you're a designer reading this: Push your designs and get out of your comfort zone. Don't get trapped into a single style. Find your style by trying a bunch of different things to see where you want to land at that time in your life. it doesn't need to be the next amazing thing that you complete, but I guarantee that you'll learn something about design and style doing something so different that will then bleed over into your next amazing thing you complete.

If you're a player reading this: Uhh, hey. Not sure what you'll be getting out of this dev log. But, I mean, maybe you want to try and write a TTRPG adventure or one-pager or roll table. And if you do, go nuts with it. Have fun and experiment with something that you might like and see where it takes you.

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

Idiot Extraordinaire! 

Hi Market Peoples,

Marketing. MARKET-ing. Market-ING.

I have fucking no idea how to market anything successfully. And I honestly believe that if anyone tells you they know how to market your work, they're selling you something.

Marketing is one of the many things that I never thought a lot about before starting out on this adventure of making tabletop games. I understand the importance of marketing at a raw concept level, you need to get your work in front of the right people at the right time, but the monetary values associated to it drive me a little crazy. I don't see the direct correlation from dumping $200 on ads to increasing my sales. This could be because I'm an idiot and don't understand this shit. OR! I'd just rather pay artists to work with me to create rad work for $200 instead. This second option relies very heavily on a principle I will call "make it and they will come". More on this later.

I completely understand that I can pay a platform, or a person, to "market" my shit to an audience. Why did I use quotes around "market"? Because I would just be paying for some platform, or some person, to repost my garbage to their audience. That's it. Is that all marketing truly is? Again, I have no fucking idea. But I can tell you that when I paid about $40 to Instagram to repost my stuff, it got me absolutely ZERO interactions, click-throughs, engagements, and blah blah blahs. So I guess I'm more of the mind that I should focus on making rad work and hoping people will find it on their own, again the "make it and they will come" principle. Is there the chance that my work will never get seen by anyone and simply fade into the cosmic nothingness? Oh yeah buddy! But honestly, that's the roll of the dice I'm going with.

I recently read something interesting about a term called 'zero cost marketing'. Basically anyway you can market a product for zero cost [$]. I really like this idea because I think it builds hype and engagement more naturally and through "earned behavior" like posting, sharing, writing dev logs..., donating time and resources, and generally interacting within a community that you are actually part of. It absolutely relies entirely on the "make it and they will come" principle, but it allows me to focus more on creating rather than tweaking a fucking social post to make sure I'm hashtagging all the flag tags right [or whatever]. Like most things, there is a good way and a bad way to do this. For example, don't comment on someone else's shit talking about your work and trying to poach people and engagement. Instead, be apart of their community and comment actively about the subject at hand. This is a very nuanced subject and everyone is going to have their way of doing this, but remember to be respectful and not be an asshole [also great life advice!]. This also doesn't earn you a guaranteed reciprocation and sale of your product, it just means that you're building bridges within a community for free. It could mean someone clicks on your profile and checks out your work, but that shouldn't be the direct goal. This is just a really minimal example of zero cost marketing.

TO SUM UP!

Paying for marketing is a lot. I think some of the baseline percentages I've read are about 10% of your product's value and/or revenue should be spent on marketing. That is an a lot of money that I do not have as a small indie idiot, and I don't want to spend money on shit like that. I'd rather spend it on kickass art or upgrades to components and game assets. Like I said up top, I'm an idiot and don't know how to market anything successfully. But, hopefully you gained the knowledge of what zero cost marketing can be and how you can go about it.

Love and Kisses,

Mackie

BUY AND IDIOT LIKE ME TODAY!

[Insert witty and relatable greetings here],

I want to make tabletop games. And I'm fucking going to make Wizard's Loot. If it's sustainable to keep going, I'll make further tabletop shit. Trust me, I have more than a few ideas flipping around in my rusty ol' brain skillet. I'm also writing some books and other weird things that I think I could design, print, and sell. So there are plenty of product ideas I have. But recently I've been thinking more about why I created an LLC and all the systems behind it [website, online shop, shipping/fulfillment process, storage, etc.]. I'm wondering if I might have built the Supply before the Demand. Like, why did I make a company first without having any products? I guess I thought it was just time to do it, then I'd build products and market them as I went along. The main issue with this plan is that I'm slowly losing more and more money as all the fees continue to grow for my business, and I'm not recouping them with sales because I don't have enough products and I'm fucking terrible at marketing. Or maybe my products suck and I suck too? Who knows.

I'm starting to wonder if I should close down Some Idiot Games LLC and just build up my body of work for a few years. In that time I'd definitely be able to design a lot more TTRPG adventures and tabletop games. I could also still make these things and toss them into existing platforms like DriveThruRPG. Not sure how I'd sell board games though... Then! If things are going well, I could start an LLC and run that business IF it's needed. "Failure" and all of that crap is a bigger discussion that I'm sure I'll cover here at some point, but honestly I'm just trying to look at this shit pragmatically. If it's not working, I need to pivot to another process/idea.

I talked about this in another dev log and at the time I wanted to have my own platform to control it and manage it in my own way. The tradeoff for that benefit is no built-in marketing and lots of costs, pretty much making things a lot harder for me and reducing the chances of "success". I believe that to successfully run a business you need to be adaptable and "read the bones" as the kids say [no one says this]. What the bones are telling me now is, "You're losing a lot of money just to have an 'LLC' attached to the end of your name." and it's not looking very sustainable for me at the moment. Maybe there's another way to achieve what I'm trying to do. I mean I see lots of "successful" people online that just run a fucking Gmail email address and an Instagram account. They seem to be doing what they want and are mitigating the costs as much as they can.

I don't know, there isn't a clear answer and at least for this year, I'm going to chill on blowing up my small business. I'm going to really try and get Wizard's Loot printed [that's a whole other fucking annoying pivot I'm still trying to figure out] this year and make more rad shit.

Take care,

Mackie

The Biggest Idiot I Know