Saturday, January 16, 2010

Artwork & Another Simplification

Hey all,

Happy New Year and whatnot. First off, I've been thinking about artwork a bit lately. I read a review once, I think on The Forge, saying that it was sometimes better if the game designer did some of his own artwork, because it tends to be more creative, imaginative, and exactly the image he has in his head. So, on that note, I've been starting work on drawing. I feel like I really need to get better about technique, though I often sometimes feel like my imagination is lacking. Overall I'm planning on mostly doing Spirit World drawings, and thus am trying to make them look, well, surreal. I've done about 20 or so character sketches, maybe half of them are good enough that they could be fixed up and used. I've been playing around with character proportions a lot, amongst other things.

Simplification: So, originally this game included what were basically 3 non-combat stats: Intelligence, Spirit, and Save (which had originally been three different kinds of saves). After a recent post on BGDF, I started thinking I'd be better off eliminating Intelligence (since it hit me that this is a stat that you have to initiate using, and during playtests, I think I'm the only person I've ever seen use it). Then it hit me that really I could combine Spirit and Save. I don't know, before they were both made to represent similar things. A problem I'd been having is that it seemed like either you would desperately need them, or else (more often) that they'd never come up. As a result, it was usually not worth it to try to boost your Save and Spirit. If I combine them however, I think there is a much greater chance that the new stat (which I think will just be Spirit) will come up on a regular enough basis to at least sometimes be worth boosting.

Simon

“In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.” – Antoine de Saint-ExpuĂ©ry