First off, I’ve made a subsite for Last Van Standing, check it out here: Last Van Standing.
This weekend was Carnage, and I ran a giant game of Last Van Standing. Slightly too giant, I think! Six players is feasible if everyone is very familiar with the game (or has all day), but three to four player games move along at a much better clip. Still, six players provides ample opportunity for chaos, and that chaos was on full display: Rockets boosters, oil slicks, Bear-monster versus Metal-demon grudge match; All very entertaining. Four out of the six vans exploded, which is an excellent van destruction ratio.
The action converges on the food truck.This was an excellent explosion.
Finally, if you’re interested in trying the game, the testing PDFs are almost finished, and I’ll be posting them in the next week or so. Sign up for the mailing list for the announcement!
This game has been simmering for a while. Sitting on a back burner, slowly reducing, thickening into what is now a tasty little prototype. It’s a ball bouncing wizard game, which, continuing with the culinary terms is probably something like your great aunt’s gravy. It’s a bit old school, and maybe you only remember how great it is around the holidays. But when it’s time for gravy, ohhh, you’ll wonder how you went the rest of the year gravyless.
And in much the same way that your great aunt’s recipe is a well documented secret that only she can accurately produce, Court of the Wizlord really benefits from some instructions, even if the only way to learn is to mess up Thanksgiving a few times until you figure things out.
Move your wizard with the left joystick.
Grab the orb by spinning your control point with the right joystick and holding down the right trigger.
You have limited energy. Your control point will dwindle as you run out.
You can place walls by pressing right bumper. These take energy too.
You can teleport a short distance in the direction of your control point by pressing A.
Shouting will draw the orb towards you. Hold the left trigger to charge, and release it to shout. Now that you’ve got the orb’s attention, be sure to catch it!Grab the orb and hit other players pylons to score points or eliminate them from the game.
I’m rapidly preparing to make Last Van Standing available to a larger group of players. It’s time for strangers on the Internet to tell me about the rough edges in the way only strangers on the Internet can. So I’ve been focusing on making my play materials more user friendly. Writing tutorials, finding ways to make the move templates less fiddly, and making the various cards distinguishable from one another. Also a bit prettier.
With a strong need for some card art and the determination to accept nearly anything, I was fortunate enough to stumble on a piece of software called Game Character Hub. It’s intended for use with RPG Maker, but once I found out it could randomly generate arbitrary quantities of character portraits, well … yep.gif
My ability to draw is limited, but selecting appropriate stock art is much easier. Like ordering from the kids menu easy: It’s all pictures of bland, forgettable things that will get a kid to their next meal. So where intent and skill take too much time, snap judgments win out! Generate 400 faces, thrown them on my phone, then browse at my leisure. Choose only the best! Swipe, swipe, swipe. This is easily the weirdest Tinder clone ever*.
*: it can’t last.
I have a thing for eye patches, apparently?My test art style, I’ve decided, will be a combination of these anime style character portraits, and line-traced versions of the character’s spirit machine in the background.
No, it’s not what I want in the finished game, but it’s evocative! Bold! Not-so-bad looking!
Yes, her machine is a sandwich. It is a hunger obliterating machine and also lunch.Would I recommend this over, say, using photos of movie characters? Well, they fill space and I’m allowed to use them everywhere.
Sometimes having a strong character association from a well known movie works, but I have a lot of characters, and they aren’t all high-stakes hero types. I would like some of the characters to become more distinct in your mind with play, because they failed you spectacularly or were involved in good games. Using movie heroes might create too strong a first impression. Since some of the characters are intentionally nondescript, these portraits do what I need them to.
For a discussion of whether including lots of nondescript characters in your game is a good or bad idea, well … what are blogs, if not a convenient way to publicly catalog the ways in which we have been wrong? I’m not sure if this decision holds up yet, but even a bad decision can be the right one if it gets you to the next decision! Onward!
Carnage was a ton of fun. Last Van Standing was in the prototype room, and having a devoted space was pretty cool! We were a bit off the beaten path, but the playtesters that visited had uniformly excellent feedback, which made the experience very worthwhile. Also there was a water cooler for us to stand around. I didn’t know I was waiting for this day, but I was.
Carnage: where dreams come true.I left invigorated. Two things became clear to me: First, it’s time to get the game in front of people. I understand why it’s important to get feedback early and often; creating a system where people interact with each other necessarily requires that you put it in front of people and see how they interact with each other. It’s also really easy to (continually) say “I’ll show it to people after I fix just one more thing.” Absent any external deadlines, it’s really easy to do that forever. This is what I have been doing for quite some time. Seeing people enjoy the game, even in it’s unfinished state, has convinced me it’s ready to test for reals.
Second, the Van explosion rules are off the hook in the best possible way.
Those models were all upright and unexploded at the beginning of the round.
Two weekends back, a couple friends and I took part in a 24 hour game jam sponsored by Game Theory. It was a blast. Being inexperienced, we kept the scope small and didn’t stay up all night; treated the whole thing like an exploratory mission. It worked well – we learned a bunch and came out of it with a rough but very fun game about a pumpkin aspiring to throw itself from the highest heights. Seasonally appropriate. Also it’s an allegory for life and achievement. The pumpkin splatters at the end. Okay, let’s get to the game:
Rot and Roll
This pumpkin will not quietly rot on the front steps. Keep moving (left/right arrow keys) and jumping (space) to fall from the highest height you can. Hint: you can wall jump at the edge of platforms.
This, like most things people do at my age, is an attempt to relive the best experiences of high school. Namely: sprawling six player Warhammer games with unlikely alliances and dubious tactics. The problem of course, is that we live in a faster world now. The Internet and all. Plus I’m an adult. Hour long turns are… fun? I guess? But the truth is: Ain’t nobody got time for that.
So I’ve made a game to capture some of that mayhem in a significantly shorter time. And with less space. And cheaper. It regrows hair too*
*No it doesn’t.
Here’s the pitch:
In the future, wandering crews explore what remains of the world, fighting over relics and burning one another with magical flames. Choose a faction, assemble a crew, construct a Van – your crew’s home, chariot, and totally sweet ride. Will you outmaneuver your foes or ram them head on in a knock-down drag-out fight to be the Last Van Standing? Turn any tabletop into a magical apocalypse in this rules-light, fast tactics game of miniatures and toy cars for 2 or more players.
So that’s what I’m talking about. I hope you hang around and give it a shot! Get on the mailing list, that’s where I’ll run the print and play beta.
Welcome to my blog, person of the future who is fruitfully engaged in an archive dive. If you went reverse-chronologically, I regret to inform you that you have hit the bottom. Hopefully it took you more than the three posts I currently have planned to get here.
So this is it, the beginning of it all. The First Post. A pre-retrospective.
I’ve been quietly working on a lot of projects for a while now. It’s sort of my nature to be secretive, guarded maybe? We’re not finding out. This isn’t that kind of blog. But it’s relevant: my perennial response when asked what I’ve been up to is “Y’know, the usual”. It’s true, but also such a lie. Only I know “the usual” is working on explosion rules for some crazy wargame fixated on vans, or yet another stupid wizard game.
Maybe I should start saying “Y’know, the unusual.” and progress from secretive to evasive. I’m going to try to skip that step and post updates here instead.
So, human of the future, you’ve probably got a better idea of what’s in store than I do. That’s exciting!
If I’ve collapsed under the sheer weight of my ill conceived ambition, then I hope you started reading in the present and dove backwards. Then this will be a happy ending. Back where it all began, only a glimmer in my eye to tell what is to come. Ohp – still sad. That’s a sad glimmer.
Hopefully it’s been a long trip to get here so this feels like an accomplishment for you. I imagine my writing will improve with years of practice and repetition, so this is probably a bit of a let down.
Here’s a picture of my cat, which is basically like finding buried treasure.
