Jack Blair's games newsletter - Issue #4

Lamenting my flesh vessel, Promptober and reminiscing on Move Month. I'm going to do subheadings today instead of trying to be smooth. Here goes.

Stream stuff

It was fucking cold this week. That's the first thing I have to say. My bones have hurt for five straight days. Today I was almost in too much pain to eat dinner with a fork (not a new phenomenon, but an annoying enough one to get special mention). So we were a little light on streams. Speaking of, I have a couple of appointments tomorrow, so I'll be streaming around 3pm instead of noon.

It's hard to do two things at once: rationalise that I need to be a "content creator" so that I can take breaks when there's a cold snap and I can't use my bones, and know that taking breaks can completely kill my momentum as a "personal brand". I may complain about that a little more on another thread, but right now, just know that this newsletter might be short because typing is killing me.

Game Design stuff

We're also going to be text heavy today because I've got nothing pretty to show off. It's all text. But text is fun! Writing game text is certainly the best part of design, to me. I'm never enjoying it when I have to do the visual stuff. I'm always just angrily trying to work out what fonts are.

Right now I'm just focusing on the fun stuff while I'm procrastinating doing Business Stuff and Marketing and More Graphic Design. Helping with that a lot has been #Promptober, created by Diwata from RPGSEA (that's RPG South East Asia for those not familiar, I highly recommend having a look at the website).

It probably is no secret that I love to work from prompts, so I jumped on #Promptober as soon as I remembered (*cough* october third *cough*), and I can say that as of writing this, I've done an entry for every day so far. It's been a blast. I've made moves for games that don't exist, I've made a location for the upcoming season of Qomrades, I've made game pitches to add to my eternal spreadsheet of game projects... I am a pig rolling around in mud, and the mud is just creating more word document games and projects than one person can reasonably sustain.

It reminds me of the first month that I really started getting going with game design in public, which was August 2020, when Stop Hack and Roll created Move Month, which just like promptober was a month worth of small phrases/single words as prompts, each intended to be a move. I used Move Month mostly to flesh the playbooks of Space Legs out enough that I was happy beginning campaign playtesting, and it was what kind of made me like talking about my game design in front of other people. I always liked design (I'd been working on Space Legs for about two years at this point), but actually talking about my ideas, my thinking, getting weird with it, getting into theory? That was new. And it was the beginning of the end. In the next few months I'd release the 0.4 version of Space Legs (now in 0.9) and over the course of the next year I'd release 14 more projects. Which is RIDICULOUS.

Anyway all this to say that I'm just fucking around and doing the fun parts right now. I'll do real work later probably.

Here's my (broken) thread for Promptober so far.

Hope you're having fun and being kind to your body as well this week, and may we all achieve something practical next week. Maybe.