When I'm most lost, I find myself

As I mentioned in my last post, I've been working on a game but so far I've not said a whole lot about what the game actually is (in fact there's only two people that have seen anything).

Hold on to your hat because it's reveal time bitches!

The game that is so close to going to play test is so far from the game I initially intended to create. Like any story, it's best to start at the beginning. For a while my job was under threat and I was looking into possible uses for the big fat golden handshake I'd get. I looked at opening a game shop but financially it just did not look viable. As I'd decided I wanted to do something with my love of gaming so I started looking at game design.

Now, when booze isn't killing my brain cells, I'm actually a pretty smart guy so I was under no illusion that I could make a living off it. More than anything it was something to take my mind off the toxic hell hole that my workplace had become.

The first thing I needed was a genre and setting. People that come into my house will pretty instantly work out five things about me.

1. I love games.
2. I love movies.
3. I love comic books.
4. I love booze.
5. I need to hire a maid (or get a girlfriend).

Someone once told me that to make something work, you have to do something that you know. With that in mind I decided to combine my love of games, films and booze and aim to create a 1930s prohibition era game. One of the main criteria I set my self at the start of the process was that I wanted to create something truly different and I had some unique ideas around that theme. Too often recently we've seen beautifully sculpted minis on Kickstarter paired with rules that seem like an afterthought, included just so it can be marketed as a game. I didn't want to produce another game that is basically the GW system changed just enough to stop me being sued, we've seen enough of those lately and frankly, gamers deserve better.

Once the scene was set, the next thing was the game mechanics. I don't know how the pros do it but my starting point wasn't "what dice to use" or the size of the table, it was "how do I want this game to feel". It's no secret that I love the narrative side of gaming and I really wanted to reflect that on the tabletop. It never made sense to me in other games I'd played that a character can get shot 10 times and still function in the same way as if they'd not been touched. I'm not going to go into the mechanics at this stage but I will say that they are designed around creating a movie in your head.

So this project started as a semi-historical thing but then I got to number 3 on my list, my love of comic books. My family got Sky TV when it first started in the UK and I remember spending hours watching 1940s Dick Tracy cartoons. Everything in those shows was bursting with character and that is something I realised needed to be in the game. Anyone that knows me would tell you I'm not the most sensible of people and a game full of odd comic book style characters and spades of dark humour just seemed more me.

You want an irish gangster with molotov cocktails? You want his blast area to reduce each turn as he drinks away his only weapon? You got it!

Really embracing who I am and letting the game evolve to reflect that has really helped create something that I truly believe is a little bit special. That being said, at one point I did start to think I was going mad. And from that madness came Colin.....