This is actually a real blog!

I just realized I've had this thing going for a year now! This just might be a real blog now. I've had a couple of other ones which were abandoned after a few months of declining enthusiasm. This one seems to be going, albeit slowly.

Not to just make a non-post, I took a picture of a thing I did months back.

Numbers!

That's a note of me comparing dice mechanics for my Space game.
Old system was pretty basic and commonly used dice pool. For example a job needs 4 "hits" to succeed, the player rolls as many dice as he has skill value and other bonuses, and from those dice thrown he looks for 4's, 5's and 6's, and counts all of those to be the "hits". If over 4, he gets the job done, or if below - it's a bust.
New system is to throw the same amount of dice as above, but only single out the highest die (which will most probably be 6), and compare that to the job difficulty. Every 6 after the first one will add one to it (ie. four 6's is counted as 6+1+1+1 = 9), in a case of tie, compare the next highest.

I wanted to compare the amount of time it took to resolve actions for both mechanics. The new system was the winner, and so it became the new system.
I also wanted to see the tally in action, so I ended up rolling a bunch of dice (actually just pressing a randomizer button) 400 times total. What I gathered from my small experiment was that with the new system the underdog had more of a chance to win than with the old one (I'm not yet sure if this is a good thing), and the new system also gave me zero ties (which is a good thing, since it's one less result to keep in mind and less re-rolling).

I kinda am thinking about the meta design of the game at this point. Things like how players will feel about stuff, and how long any action should take, and how I want to construct my mechanics so they are as uniform as possible to not to overwhelm the new players, and so on... This kind of thinking is actually a first for me, as with my other projects I've come to realize that the "flow" of the game might be way off, so I want to start from there, and work my way building on top of those observations.

I did a thing

I was inspired by this (in finnish) to try to make my own paint bottle holder. I had just ordered these German steel hole punchers for making chits for other gaming projects, and one of them just happened to be 26mm in diameter (Vallejo & Army Painter paints are 25mm). This really got the gears moving.
I wanted to make it cheaply and relatively quickly, so cardboard was always the way I wanted to go. While visiting my mom few weeks back I found my old game box for one of the Rock band games, and it was this really high quality white cardboard.
Contrasted by the light brown color of cheap cardboard box I thought it came out alright.

First I though I made way too many holes for my paints,
but it turned out to be pretty well in the ballpark of what I needed.