The forgotten taste of free time!

I have been working long hours, and when I do come home I spend my free time with my girlfriend.  (Pro Tip: Spending time with your girlfriend makes them happy.  Do not put them off to work on your game, its never worth it).  This does not leave a lot of free time to work on my game or write about it.

Needless to say, I have been working very hard on Taipan, but as my past posts discouraging you from working on art would indicate, the second you start adding art, the development time suddenly becomes takes much longer to keep focus and maintain your development and testing pace.

This past week I got to print my cards and get them cut out and sleeved. The total process took almost a full week, but that was mostly because I was doing it an hour at a time when every I had a little free time.

It took me 2 days to cut all of the print outs.

Cutting the cards wasn't difficult, just boring and time consuming.  In the end I didn't make the guides small enough so some of the cards wouldn't fit in the sleeves.  This required more cutting as I was trying to slide the cards into the sleeves.  That was frustrating.

In the end, the leftovers look like this

Here all the cards before they got put into their sleeves.

The final count is 5, Ship Cards, 14 Captain Cards, 34 Cargo Cards, 32 Combat Cards, 48 Event Cards, and 29 City Cards.  I also printed out a new version of the Map using the new art and the new cities that I added.  The map and all of the cards look great.

The final product looked great.

This past Thursday night, I left work early to attend the Dragon Valley release party.  My friend CW just got the first print run of his game Dragon Valley that he got funded through Kickstarter.  It looks great and I am very happy for him.  When Taipan is ready to go, I will have to pick his brain about the whole Kickstarter process.

Dragon Valley is now available.

While I was at the Dragon Valley party, I got a chance to sit down a play a partial game of Taipan.  I say a partial game because I didnt have a lot of time, so I quickly came up with a rule that I thought would make the game take about half as long.  I was right, a game that I thought should take about 90 minutes took about 45.  Just enough for the game to get going, but not enough to get a good sense of the flow of the game.

The start of the first game of Taipan I have played in about a month.

It did help to identify a few new problems.   Not enough threats from Pirates allowed for player to hang on to their money instead of spending it on upgrades or paying off their Debt.  Some Event Cards still reference the old Cargo type Medicine which has been replaced by Tea.  Upgrades were too expensive in the cities other than Hong Kong.

With all the new rules and mechanics, I am not surprised there are all new problems to solve.  Well, I guess its back to work.  I will try to have an update about the new changes soon.

Taipan is still here...just barely!

Things are moving along very slowly.  Work has kept me busy and I have had several setbacks with the cards and data sets.  There wasn't much point in posting till I had some good progress to report.  Sadly this is a report on how little progress I have made.

My ship was nearly sunk by adding all this art!  As cool as it can be RESIST!

On my last post about Taipan I showed off the new art I had been doing and trying my damnedest to dissuade you from following in my footsteps.  DO NOT DO ANY ART until the game is done.  Remember that mantra I was chanting a few weeks ago?  Well, doing art continues to take a big wet bite out of my ass.  In the process of making images I could post for you all to see, I saved on of my more complex Data Set images into a single layer JPEG.  What does this mean?  I will have to rebuild that file from scratch.

Since I had a free weekend (the first in almost a Month) I thought I would have an opportunity to finally print the new cards with all the new art.  Sadly this will not be the case.  I have been finding lots of little problems with the Data Sets since adding the Art References and now I will have to rebuild the City Modifier Event Cards.  It brings up one more good point about not doing the art yet.  Its one more moving piece that you have to get lined up with all the others.  It adds another layer of complication to your design process and just gets in the way of making the fun.

Sailing once again.  I will have more news soon.

I hope to have good news in the coming week.

And I thought I was soooo clever!

Well, its been a fun week.  I have been working late every night as we try to meet our deadlines.  It seems that working 12+ hours a day does tend to cut into your Play Time....who knew?  That Said I did manage to get a basic art layout for all of my cards.

From left to right: Cargo, Captain, Damage, Cities

I am still using the test art for the Captain and Cargo Cards but that will be changing soon. You can see the difference in visual quality on the Cargo and Captain Cards compared to the City and Damage Cards.  I will have to go back and rework them so they look like the same art. Thanks to my good friend Ben and his fantastic info about how Public Domain works, I should have most of the art done in the next week or two.


Now for this weeks lesson:  DO NOT ADD ANY ART until your game is much closer to being done.  There are a many, many....MANY reasons for this:

1.) Cards Change and so does the Art.  There is no point in making art that will get thrown away.  You will be driven mad by how often you will change stats, layouts and cards.  Save your sanity. 

2.) Printer Ink Costs are not cheep.  There is no point printing out all the ink and colors if the balance of the cards are broken.  Save your money. 

3.) Until you have an artist hired, your art will be inconsistent and look like its from different games (like my cards).  Save your time.

4.) Once you add art, you have invested a significant amount of time and money into your game.  Now you will be less likely to make the changes that your game needs because it will mess with all that work you put in, making you more resistance to change.  Save your creativity.

5.) When you finally bring your game to a publisher, and persuade them to publish your game, they will hire an artist and have all of the art redone.  This can be very frustrating since you grow attached to the work you put into your art.  The Publisher will have other ideas about how best to market this game they are taking a chance on and will (unless you are a world class artist) insist on changing the look and layout of the art.

In the end, you should resist adding art.  I know it makes it all look better and gets others more excited about it, but you will only kick yourself.   Making art is very time consuming. Unless you are an artist, you will be better off using stick figures and focusing on making the game play and mechanics fun.


I know all of this and I still do it.  Almost every game I have ever made I started piling the art on almost from day one.  Maybe I am starting to learn since this time I waited a full 2 months to start in with the art.

A first look at the Cards

I have my first prototype of what the Cards will look like so wanted to share it with you.

The new Hotness!

It has taken a lot longer than I originally thought, partially because of work monopolizing my time, all the gaming I have done over the Holidays, and the complexity that my Data Sets have taken on.  In addition, while working on creating the new Data Sets, I became unhappy with some of the Event Cards.  I have been struggling with how to make the old Event Cards, which only affected an individual player, work on a Global Scale to affect all players evenly.  Many of the Cards just didn't work, so I had to scrap them and create new ones.  Some of the ones I kept needed to have their mechanics changed.  

The Deadly Storm.

The Storm Cards were the most problematic Events.  Where they once just hit a single player, they now needed to affect an area.  I played around with dividing the map into 3 section, north center, and south.  To make it simple I even thought about making Storms affect the whole map, but this felt cheep.  Instead I choose to use the same mechanic that I use on a lot of Event Cards.  Draw a Cargo Card to choose a random city and then any ship up to 2 spaces from the city at the end of the round will receive damage.  This lets players avoid the area and escape it if they happen to be caught in the area when the storm hits.  This way, if a player takes damage from a storm, in most cases it will be their choice if they want to risk the storm.

The Pirate Bounty, a dangerous way to make some extra cash. 

To complete the Data Sets I needed to include the pointers to the Images that will be on the cards.  Once I had the place holders for the images, I couldn't stand looking at the empty Data Sheet "Fill Space" where the image would be placed when the Data was called.  So I got to work on inserting the image references into the Data Sets.  Even with the much faster process for creating the Art Images, it is very time consuming trying to find images that fit the theme and time period, and are free and/or Public Domain.  This is why it is always good to make a game themed to a fictional setting so you don't need to worry about being historically inaccurate. 

This photo for Ship Upgrades does not look right and will be changing.

It is very difficult to find images that fit for the cards I need to represent.  It has forced me to choose a few images I am not happy about and will be changing the first chance I get.  This image doesn't fit the other images because its built from a photograph.  This is one of the images I will change when I find a suitable replacement.

A picture is worth a thousand words...

I have been working on a combination of Game Designs for the latest version of Taipan and new Art.  I have to admit that the Art is derailing me a bit and keeping me from getting my cards printed.  But since I don't have the time to organize and play my game this week, it's not that big of a deal.


I have added a new Debt system to Taipan that should make for a clearer Win Condition for the game.  Players must return to Hong Kong to pay off the 50 Coin of Debt they start the game with. The first player to pay off all their Debt ends the game.  The player who has the most Money and is Debt Free, wins.

I have created Coin Art for a 1,5 and 10 Coin.  I also have the Debt Coins made (The red one on the Right).  I searched for a while to find coins that were minted close to the same time the game is set.  I think the Silver Coin was the only one that was not made in the same time period (about 40 years later).  Also, the Debt Coin is not a Coin at all. It's a Wall Plaque that was created in the same time period.

In addition, I have been experimenting with paintings from the same time period (1750-1850) to try out some different ideas for what the final card images will look like.  It's very hard to get them all to match perfectly.  The art from that era was all so different from one another.  Also, there really isn't a lot that survived very well.  Much of it is too dark or too damaged to modify and ends up looking bad after I do my process to them.

 The Rebellion City Modifier Card

This will be one of the City Cards

This will be ether a Storm or Wrecked Ship Event Card.

I am playing with some textures to make them look like they are painted on rough canvas, but those are not ready to show yet.  I have a lot more images as well, but I will save those for another day.  I hope to have a sample card ready to show some time this week, depending on free time.  I am also going to get one last night of gaming in tomorrow.  We are supposed to play Automobiles, so I will have an update about that tomorrow or the next day.

And the vote is in....

...and the polls are closed!  The theme of Taipan will remain set in a historical Earth.  With how popular the Steampunk genre is at this time, I have to say I am kinda surprised that it didn't go that way.   I am also not disappointed.  I have a feeling that changing themes would have been more work than I thought it would be.

A great paining of the ship HMS Nemesis destroying War Junks in 1843 during 
the first Opium War.  The Chinese Junk Captains called her the "Devil Ship".

With my art bug temporarily satisfied, I have returned to working on making changes based on the last play test that went so horribly wrong.  Mostly card changes and minor adjustments to various rules.  But there are some major changes to the game as well:


The first big change is that all event cards will be a global even that will effect all players equally.  This will be good for eliminating the severe amount of random swing in the games outcome, but makes the world map feel a bit small and static.  I am wondering if I should have two decks, one for Global Events and one for  Player Events.


The Second big change will be making all city Cargo Values based on a universal value that only changes slightly.  For Example: Hong Kong is stable with its Rice cargo selling for 1 coin.  2 Spaces away Shanghai will sell their rice between 1-3.  4 Spaces away Hai Phong will sell their rice between 2-4.  Additionally, where the price is very good, the cargo value will be marked by a special color.  Buying or selling the specially marked colors will cause the card to change to the next pricing card for that city.  This is somewhat similar to the value of goods in San Juan, with a value token for every city.

In San Juan, the value of Goods changes very little but it makes a big difference.

Change number three will be that every city will let the player Upgrade their ship.  The difference being that Hong Kong is the least expensive place to do this.  Hong Kong will have the Upgrades for 4 while everywhere else will have them for 6.


The Fourth change is that all players start with -50 in debt tokens.  This is the players score.  The first player to pay off his debt ends the game once all players finish their turn.  The player with the most coin and least amount of debt wins.


The last big change is that a player's ships can be destroyed.  If a player reaches 0 on any of his stats, his ship is destroyed.  The player looses all cargo, half of their carried coin, and is returned to Hong Kong.  The player receives a -5 Debt Marker and may continue playing on his next turn.


There are lots of other smaller changes, and I could write all day explaining everything I am doing to change the game and the rules, but I think I will just start working on the changes instead.  On a similar note: I am trying very hard not to copy Merchants and Marauders.  It's a great game and there is no reason to have another game just like that one.  Its just that they did so many things right that, even when I am not directly copying it, its hard not to see similarities in what they did and what I am doing.

Such a good game, I must do my best to learn from it but not copy it. No small task!

The New Map

I have been searching the web for a lot of images that will work for my game.  Public domain images that I can use a series of Photoshop Filters to speed up the work of making the art all match a certain style.  I want the art to be cool and not just a low-res screen grab of free art.

However, after last weeks disastrous play test, it occurred to me that I still don't have all my cards and mechanics nailed down.  But being in an artistic mood I felt the need to make some art, so I dove into working on a new map for my game.  What you see before you is the final result.

LEFT SIDE: The new high res map.  RIGHT SIDE: The old quick map.

I think its clear to see the superior product here.  The new map is an amalgam of lots of maps mashed together.  Various parts of the maps have been shifted around to make room on my game board, and countless Filters have created the feel of a textured and painted surface.

With the holidays fast approaching I expect to get a lot of work done on the game.  Check back soon for more updates.

The Dangerous Time....

Board games are a lot easier to make than a computer game.  I can sit down, build all the parts, design all the mechanics, and do all the art myself.  But wow is that time consuming.  I worked for a solid month getting Taipan to a playable state for the NaGa DeMon last month.  And now I feel like I am floundering. This is a dangerous time for me during the game development cycle.  If I don't stay focused I will loose interest and start working on something else.  Once that happens I loose all my  steam I had for the last game I was building.

I just got a bunch of games and we are supposed to play one of them (Mansions of Madness) tomorrow night.  So I cleared off my table and put Taipan in a box with the intent of setting up and learning the new game.  As I did this, I thought to myself, this is how all of my ideas end.  I put it up with every intent to start working on it again right away, but it never happens.  Since I stopped working on Taipan, I already have two new ideas I want to start building.  A city building game and an Assassin game.

A long time ago, I was an artist.  I worked for Blizzard North working on the Diablo games as an Animator, Modeler, and Designer.  At some point I started doing more design and less art and eventually my art skills atrophied.  I don't get much opportunity to do art on a regular basis anymore, but my current job is giving me some artistic outlets that has re-fired my old love of doing art.  This past weekend I had some free time, so I got to do some art tests.  Here is the progression of my art skills coming back to life after almost a decade of cobwebs had built up:

Early free hand drawing with no reference. (5 minutes)

Painting of a military captain from the 1800's (10 minutes)

Cheesy girl from Halloween costume picture. (15 minutes)

Photo of an actor from a Hong Kong movie (25 minutes) 

Painting of a Merchant from the 1800's (4 hours)

I will undoubtably get a bit faster with each new image I do, but I have 60 unique cards that all need art.  Lets do that math and assume my current time as an average: 60x4 = 240 hours. Not to mention the game board, and box art.  If I were to do all the art myself, based on how much free time I have, it would take me about 240/4 + Flex Time = 60 days to get the game done.  I will not have that kind patience and this project will cease to make progress.

I tried some quick solutions where I took pictures I was referencing and automated the process with photoshop.  Here are the results:

Paining of a Captain from the 1800's (5 Minutes) 

Paining of a Port in Japan (5 Minutes)

Paining of a Junk hit by a storm (5 Minutes)

So now I have the time down to a very reasonable time but there are some problems.  1.) Each on of these images took a long time to find.  Color images from the 1800's are just not that common.  Most are black and white etchings or portrait paintings of nobility in Europe.  2.) I don't think these look as good as the last portrait I did.  The richness of color and cartoony quality of the Merchant I feel looks a lot better than the automated washed out image of the Captain.  3.) And this is the big one.  I have no idea where some of these images came from.  They could be copyrighted and I could be sued for using them.  Board Games already don't make enough money to make a living without having to worry about legal issues.

Dangerous times indeed!

The Last Resource

I am very happy to say that I have finished the final art for all Cargo Cards.  The Silk turned out great but I am not as happy with the Medical Crate.  But really what can you do with a box.  Maybe I can try making it look like a Red Urn or one of the those cool chinese pots with the decorative feet.

Silk and Medical Crate Artwork

I am also working on creating a new card type I want to play with after the next play test.  The Captain Cards!  Players will choose one of these cards at the start of the game.  Each one gives some minor ability that is useful at deferent times during the game.  Here are some examples:

• Navigator: Moving into or out of Port can be ignored once per Sailing Phase.
• Noble: Starts the game with 12 Coin.
• Raider: In combat, Sail Damage counts as “Destroyed” when attacking pirates.
• Merchant: Gain +1 Coin on every sale.
• Shipwritght: May repair up to 1 Damage Card in between each port visit.

I plan to have about 10 Captains for the final list, but might go as high as 12 or 14 depending on printing limits.  The print sheets may have enough room that it will cost me nothing to print more cards.


On a different topic.  I make a comment on another game design blog about changing the theme of my game and how hard it would be, then I did my post about Mechanics verses Theme.  I was toying with the idea of changing my game to be set in a Steampunk setting.  Then I found this game, Kings of Air and Steam, funded though Kickstarter.  Its a Steampunk, merchant trading game!  There goes that idea.  I guess Ill stick with my historical 1800's Far East Merchant Trading game.

Then I found this image by the artists Raybender, and swung back the other way all over again.

This image has so much cool, I want to play that game.  In reality, I think this is a totally different game, and I will not try to make my game into this one.  This game could be cool though.  Maybe one where the Imperium has hired the players to hunt the metal horrors of the recent tech war that just ended.   The aquatatons, mindless machines set to task by the defeated Empire, sink any ships in the channels.  Players hunt them down using various weapons, but they can salvage parts from the machines to improve their weapons, upgrade their ship, and to make repairs.  The players are granted Status (the victory points) for each machine destroyed.

OK, thats enough"stream of consciousness" designing...I just thought the image was so cool that I had to share.

New Resource Art and New Games!

I havent had a lot of free time this week, work has been very busy, but I did get to work a little on some my Resource Art for Taipan. 

I am not to happy with the Gun Powder Barrel.  I lost track of what I was doing and ended up with something more detailed and less cartoony than I was originally going for.  You can see how the Rock and the Gold Coins are limited to about 4-6 colors, but the Barrel uses lots of blended colors, stippled shading, etc.  The only part I did correctly was the Black Powder at the top of the barrel. I will go back and redo it when I have the time.

On a side note, and completely unrelated to my game, my friend Bryan just took a bulk order of games from all of our friends to get them at a discounted price.  I put in a request and have these games on the way:

I am very excited to try Mansions of Madness but, if I had half a brain, I should have also got Merchants and Marauders.  Seeing that I am working on a similar type of game, having that on hand as reference might have been a good idea.  Oh well, maybe for Christmas.  =)

Fierce battle with the Plague!

Getting sick sucks!  Thankfully I can sit on the couch covered in blankets,  drink my tea, eat my soup, and still work on my game.  I came home early on Friday after having a nasty battle with insomnia Thursday night.  It must have made me vulnerable to what everyone is getting sick from right now.  When I got home I tried to sleep when I got home but just couldn't, so I started working on the notes from the play test session Thursday night.  Bryan Pope gave me some great note and suggestions.

Some things I am going to try will change the game a bit but should create a smoother experience. The biggest change will be each player will only get 1 action on their turn.  They will draw an Event Card and then they can ether Move or perform Port Actions.  Then it will be the next players turn.  The thought here is that is will speed up the game and reduce some of the confusion that is happening about what part of the turn it is (Event, Move, or Port Action).  The only question is who's turn it is.  The other thing this does is reduce how powerful multiple sails are (for increased movement) by making it so players who have fast ships don't effectively get two actions.  


The next big change is a massive overhaul to the Event Deck.  There was to much random chaos making the game swing wildly from one turn to the next.  I have reduced the bonuses and negative effects of the Event Cards to prevent a single random event making a significant change to the outcome of the game.


Lastly, I have been working on some custom art for the game.  I have a long ways to go but at least I will be able to start selling the game on The Game Crafter when I have all the art done and the game is ready to be released.

I did a slight redesign of the City Cards to help players visualize what merchandise is available to be bought and sold.  The dark upward arrows indicate the Cargo they are producing.  The Cargo without an upward arrow have 2 small arrows under the price to indicate witch Cargo the city is currently buying.  These are quick prints, so it might be a bit faint to see in this picture.  I have also temporarily changed the Cargo icons to cubes while I work on the new Art Icons.  You may notice that Silk has changed to blue (it was pink) and Wood has changed from to green (it was brown).

Here is a shot of all the cards I have reprinted over the weekend.  That is every card in every deck changed!  This was in addition to designing the new Bounty and Lost Cargo cards after the Event Deck got the overhaul.

I was hopping to play a game this weekend, but considering that I was sick and still got so many changes made, I don't feel to bad about not playing.  Maybe I will schedule something for this week if I have the time from work.