There’s an odd feeling to today. Being “done” with something that has occupied so much of my mind, even if only for the past 2 weeks, makes me feel a strange sort of emptiness. It’s like I’ve been clutching on to something for so long, wringing it out, and now that it’s done and dry and my hand is empty, my hand still wants to clench. This isn’t the first time I’ve felt this way. Every Kickstarter campaign I’ve done ends with that same feeling.
There’s something to be said about this sort of focused effort when it comes to getting something done. I have had the idea to do this sort of head-to-head PrintAQuest battle since the end of the Kickstarter. I figured I’d work on it “as I had time”. But that somehow resulted in me never actually working on it. But by giving my self an arbitrary 14 day deadline starting on an arbitrary day and forcing myself to make a daily report of what I was doing, I ended up actually getting it done. Or at least getting a solid enough start on it that I had something worth sharing.
If you’ve got a project that you just can’t seem to make any headway on, and you want to get it started properly, then maybe setting an arbitrary, artificial constraint and giving yourself some accountability is the way to move forward with it.
The Idea
While working on the PrintAQuest Kickstarter, I had quite a lot of ideas rolling around in my head for where it could go next. I inadvertently tapped into a story that I’ve been working on since at least 2000. I’m pretty sure I was experimenting with the idea before even that point, but I can’t find any documentation of it from before the year 2000. At first my idea was to make episodic video game released on floppy disks (just to tell you how long ago I had this idea). But sadly I was a dumb kid in college with bigger ambitions than resources, so I ended up shelving it. Sometime later I pulled the idea off the shelf and thought “I should make a teen novel series about this.” But at that point I was a young father with bigger ambitions than time, and I shelved it again.
Then PrintAQuest came along and somehow my resources rose to meet the ambition and the story of the Alchemist’s Apprentice started to take form in earnest.
So once PrintAQuest started to be the outlet for this story that had been rattling around my head for 25 years, I decided to put together a roadmap to guide development of the whole thing. Looking over this roadmap, do you see the “Circus” there in the corner? That’s PrintAQuest: Skirmish. Like Pokemon, there’s a rival to our main character. And this rival gets his team from the circus. Yes, in the first rival battle, the heroes will be fighting literal clowns.
Now, all of this is secondary to the game itself, and can be completely ignored from the player’s perspective. But for me this story is what’s guiding the development of PrintAQuest. Without this story, I don’t think I would have had the idea of a head-to-head 2 player battle. The story is molding the game, and the game is molding the story. It’s a symbiotic relationship, and I’m kind of enjoying it.
Besides being “PrintAQuest, but 2 players, head-to-head instead of cooperative” another thing I wanted to explore with Skirmish is the idea of raised terrain. When developing the first PrintAQuest kickstarter I had the idea that stairs could be a thing, but I never really figured out how to do it. I wanted Skirmish to be where those movement rules were introduced.
I also wanted to use Skirmish explore a new way of doing the terrain. Instead of building the floor by snapping floor tiles into each other, there would be a big plate that you’d just snap the floor tiles into without needing to worry about an order of operations. It’s turned out to be much better way of doing things, meaning I’m gonna have to redo all of the existing tiles I’ve already done for PrintAQuest.
Also, Skirmish was a vehicle for testing a different way to manipulate dice. The PrintAQuest dice, as cool an idea as it was, wasn’t really working in actual practice. It was time for a change, and Skirmish would make dice manipulation a central mechanic to test it. The new dice table, I think, works much better.
And that’s pretty much the idea I went in with. Things like capture squares and victory points were invented through play testing during the 14 day process.
Arbitrary Limits
The 14 day time limit was decided on completely arbitrarily. It was an amount of time I thought I’d be able to do everything I wanted to do it, but I knew going in that there were things I didn’t plan for.
Here’s the list of things I didn’t think about, but discovered durring the process:
- You don’t work on Sunday, dummy. So you only have 12 of those days to actually do stuff.
- Packaging files up, taking pictures, uploading and making a listing always takes at least a day, usually 2 to get it right.
- Rules don’t write themselves. Give yourself 2 days for that, at least.
- There’s always at least a day of last minute changes to that upload you’re gonna make. Might as well budget for it, too.
So in the end what I expected would be 14 days of 3D modeling bliss turned into basically 7 days of modeling. And considering the minis take 2-3 days each, and the terrain another day, there was no way I was going to make 4 new characters in that time.
Having the amount of time I had to work with things basically cut in half is something I should have budgeted. But then again if I waited to start until I planned everything out, I might not have done it. There’s value in just jumping in, sometimes.
14 days is about the upper limit of time I was willing to dedicate to this. I’ve participate in 7 day video game development challenges, and several kickstarters in the past, and so I already knew that a 14 day cycle would be tough, but doable. However, I also knew that the quality of work I wanted to do demanded at least that much time.
However, as the unplanned elements started to rear their head, I had to make adjustments to get something out on time. I couldn’t make the 2 new characters I wanted to, so I used the characters I already had. And this resulted in me finding out this game would still work as the character roster got more imbalanced.
Setting an arbitrary 14 day limit motivated me to get started, and forced me to use things I didn’t originally plan to, resulting in learning that this game was more viable than I expected.
Accountability
Making a short video every day for this project was an important part of getting it out as well. While I was making the videos, I sometimes thought “I could get more done if I weren’t doing these videos. I’d have more time for working on the game.” But the truth is knowing that I would be releasing a video at the end of the day meant I needed to do something worth making a video about every day. The reporting wasn’t in the way of the process, it was the reason for it.
However, making a video every day meant that the quality was going to suffer a bit. There was no way to do a bunch of B-Roll shots and write a decent script every single day. I just needed to rely on my ability to talk off the cuff and organize my thoughts without notes. However, being as I was making short videos, 3 minutes top, I also couldn’t ramble on as I tend to do. Admittedly, I cleaned up some of my signature repetition in the edit. But if I could say what I wanted to say in only a few minutes, the edit would go quick, and I had more time for working on the game itself. So economy of communication became important as well.
Were these my best performing videos of all time? Well, they actually didn’t do that badly. But that’s not the point. Even if no one watched or commented, it’s not about the audience, it’s about the accountability.
Though the hope of it going viral did cross my mind. That would have been cool. But, again, not the point. But again again, never gonna happen if you don’t put yourself out there.
If you don’t have a YouTube channel, and don’t want to start one, there’s other options. Blogs, forums, reddit or facebook groups, or even local face-to-face groups that meet at your library. (Seriously, give them a call, you never know what they have going on.) Whatever you’re comfortable enough with, as long as you have the need to report what you’re working on to somebody hanging over you, you’ll do good things.
Sacrifice
The thing about a project like this is it requires sacrifice. If I could have been working on this the whole time I would have. But before working on Skirmish, it’s not like I I was just sitting around waiting for a project to work on. Life was happening, and if I was going to make room for working on a game, the stuff I was doing needed to be put aside.
I haven’t touched Minecraft in 14 days. As mentioned on Day 7, I missed out watching a movie with my family to make the video on Day 6. And I feel should me mention that before this I returned to the idea of writing this story as a teen novel series. I was about 3/4 of the way through, entering the 3rd act, with 18624 words written so far. However, during this period, I kinda had to put aside my habit of daily writing to work on this. Now that it’s done, I’m totally getting back into writing, though. (Just looking up that word count I ended up finishing the chapter I was in the middle of.) I may continue to avoid the call of Minecraft as long as I can, even though I hear they just dropped a new update.
Now, if I could sacrifice my day job, I’ll bet I could work on this stuff all day every day. But I really need that paycheck.
Chances are if you’re reading this or watching the videos, there’s something you’re doing that you could stop, even if temporarily, to make room for something more productive. There’s probably time during the day that you could put aside for working on that project, even if only for an hour each day. View the time you spend consuming media as time you could be making something, if only for 14 days.
Done, But Not Done
Getting Skirmish published doesn’t mean it’s done. I still want to:
- Add the 2 new character minis I planned
- Redo all of PrintAQuest’s floor and wall tiles in the new system
- Meaning I’ve also got to redo all the build instructions for every quest so far
- Get a lot of playtesting feedback
- Are the Victory Points just complicating things?
- Does Andrei’s “Start with 4 Inspiration Tokens” give him an advantage over players that don’t pick him?
- Publish the final version on Printables, Thingiverse, Maker World, etc.
- Start releasing new characters as expansions.
Just because the 14 days are up doesn’t mean I can’t touch Skirmish ever again. It just means now there’s a version out there that you can play and help me develop. Together, we can make PrintAQuest:Skirmish the best it can be. So go download, 3D print, and play PrintAQuest:Skirmish today!
