Tiny Worlds Jam Postmortem

Remember how I said I was going to try and do fewer game Jams this year to focus on major projects? Yeah, that new year's resolution lasted for, what, a week?

That aside, my entry for the Tiny World Jam, the Brink, is probably the one I feel the most conflicted on. On one hand I managed to do quite a bit that I am happy with, or at least happy I attempted, on the other hand, there's a lot I should have done better. So without further ado, lets talk it.

The Bad
First of all, I need to address the root of all the problems I have with the Brink; time management. Doing an eight page zine for a TRPG setting in 2 weeks might seem daunting, but I made a war game in 2 weeks (granted, it was a hacked together mess, but my point still stands). Unlike Terminal Engagement, I miss managed my time badly with the Brink, and I don't have the excuse of IRL events disrupting my plans, I just didn't focus.

It was this lack of time which meant I didn't make stat blocks for NPCs and Creatures. I've made it no secret that I really, really, like Mothership, and originally, I wanted this to be a Mothership module, however my lack of time management meant that I wasn't able make stats and mechanics for them, which should say something about how much of a rush job it was.

The Visual assets for the Brink that I created weren't great. I still need a lot of practice making images, though I will say I do feel pretty good about the logos I made for the factions. I do think I can do something inventive with Inkscape but its obvious I need a lot of practice. In the mean time I should not only practice but look at making a library of images that I can use in future projects.

Finally, I'm not 100% percent happy with my writing. I can't really pin down what exactly I dislike about it, my best guess is I don't feel like I've done enough to paint a good picture of the creatures and how they behave.

The Good
There are some parts of my writing which I do like and I'll try to repeat in the future. One of those bright spots is when it came to the faction leaders, I decided to give each one a secret, as well as spell out their agenda. With one of them, the agenda was basically the same as their faction's goal, but for the other's there's the potential for their goal to conflict with their faction's goal. The secrets were their to give a plothook as well as potential leverage for players to use, and I quite like that.

Now, remember how I've gone on and on about building a library of assets to use, and how I constantly curse past me for not doing that? Well I've begun to build that library by getting some fancy fonts to use. This was complicated somewhat by the fact LibreOffice didn't want to acknowledge that they existed until I reinstalled the program after uninstalling, but that wasn't a major issue and I had something of a backup plan. Still, having some fancy fonts around is a good thing, just need some fancy images to go with them.

Now while I'm unhappy with the quality of the visual assets, and I'm not completely happy with all the page layouts,I'm glad I was able to do more of them at the very least. As much as I would wish otherwise, I'm not going to get good this kind of thing if I don't do it.

The Future
I can't help but think back to the post-mortem of Operation Green Box, my entry for the last FIST game jam. While in retrospect I feel like I was a bit harsh on myself in a few places, I do stand by my opinion that sometimes failure is a good teacher. I bringing this up because I'm not happy with the brink. It's a novel chimera of ideas and concepts, but I don't think I did them justice.

That being said, this project, more than any other outlines my need to finally get a library of assets together as well as learning to cobbled together my own with Inkscape and GIMP. So in the immediate future I'll be doing that.

I've also signed myself up for this year's Kaiju Jam. I've got a fun idea for that one that hopefully won't be as challenging to make as TE.

Anyway, whoever you are, take care, and I'll see you again soon.

-Tableplant