The time has come for me to do a bit of clean-up and cutting back on my back projects.
Somewhere in the middle of the run-up to GenCon, attending the fun in Indy, and mulling/digesting things afterwards, I felt a need to put more focused effort into just a few things. Which means changing away from my normal style of having a dozen things all in-flux at the same time.
It’ll be a “personal growth” thing for me. I’ve generally just gone where the muse has lead and not worried too much about planning ahead of time. So, I’m in the middle of a “sit down” discussion with her in my head. Time to setup the guidelines of our relationship moving forward and see what fun she’ll be able to conjure up within those boundaries. I know that creative restrictions can produce a wealth of ideas for a particular project. We’ll see if it does the same thing on a more general scale.
Here are the changes I’ll be working toward over the next few weeks …
Making Jump Gate a flagship: While I will likely leave all of my current POD games out on TheGameCrafter.com, I will focus on raising awareness about Jump Gate, and not spend much time promoting any of the others. With the new, Third Edition, I am extremely proud of how Jump Gate plays for any number of players. It’s a very solid gateway type game that I’m more excited about now than I have been since the GAMES award happened a couple years ago. I’ll be running “learn to play” events at cons that I attend, and will start on the sequels as add-ons/extensions of this base game.
Moving Some Favorites to the Back Burner: Cutting back means that a few of the things I’ve been developing, tweaking and testing will need to be set aside so that I can apply that work time to the in-focus games. This will be tough, because these are a few of my inner-kid favorites: SharkBait, Cosmic Critters, and King of Danger will all be paused for now. I see potential for all of them in the future, but they will not be the priority at this time.
Designing for Publisher Wants: I will focus on just a small handful of games, targeting them to land with a publisher. I’ve already updated my Current Projects Page to show what’s ready and what’s really close. These will be in the foreground of what I post about going forward. At GenCon, I was able to chat with a number of publishers to see what it is they are looking for … I will use those things as the guidelines for what I try to develop.
Also, as a result of this, expect the header of my site to change a bit … focusing more on Jump Gate, the current projects that have my focus, “talking shop” and discussions with/about other designers.
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