Hello friends!
End of year greetings from Fly Paper Games!
It's been a busy year for this fledgling company, and I have lots to reflect on that hasn't been out there in the public sphere yet.
First, obviously, Emily and I finished and shipped Saga of a Dying World, our first game. Super exciting! It's such fun to have the game still come up in conversation and still be in peoples' minds, even months after it essentially left our lives.
I have spent the months since Saga's release working through a few different things.
First, I designed a small set to complement the recent release of Magic's newest set, Ixalan. It was a fun exercise to elaborate on some game design mechanics, write some cool flavor text, and make something fun for my friends. Unfortunately, a couple things have stalled that particular project.
Playtesting and Timing: Ideally, I need seven other knowledgable Magic players to all be in a room together for three hours to test it, and that's a little hard to do in December. Also, I think I've lost a little "playtesting cred" among my Magic playing friends - they all gave so much time to testing Saga, that I think following that up with a tightly-scheduled Magic set hasn't been met with a ton of enthusiasm. Also-also, my work schedule keeps messing things up.
Cruel Reality: More importantly, though, Wizards of the Coast announced a return of their reality-show-esque Great Designer Search, where contestants compete for a six-month paid internship designing Magic. Obviously, I feel like I've been training my whole life for this, so I'm giving it a go (along with thirty thousand other people, probably - but never tell me the odds!). I had already winced a little at the intellectual-property concerns of publishing your own derivative set of Magic on the internet under the name of your game-making company, but the Great Designer Search made me decide that now was not a good time to go public.
As it is, then, I'll probably just shelve the Ixalan Bonus Set, and treat it as a design exercise to do Bonus Sets for future Magic sets when the timing works out a little better.
Beyond that, though, I've been working on two prototypes. The first is a Catan-meets-Dungeon-Crawler, which is probably in the realm of Above and Below (a game I've only seen played at a distance, though, so who knows). Here's a picture of the first playtest, with a generic Fantasy theme. The mechanics and gameplay are in a solid place, but the narrative needs a lot of work and a whole new setting - it just feels like a dozen other games, right now, which overshadows any of the cool things I discovered. More work to be done.
I'm also pushing forward a game that plays with the idea of Chess, and turns it into a dystopian adventure game through a ruined landscape. More to come on that one...
It's been such an incredible year, and I'm looking ahead to more of them to come. Thanks again for tuning in, for your support, and for your well wishes.
Happy holidays!
James