Thursday, December 22, 2005
Carry, Revision 1!
Finally, the revision to Carry is done! Well, kinda. But mostly!
Carry was my entry for the Iron Game Chef 2005 competition. It was a "inner circle" winner, which means it placed in the top 9 of the ~30 (40? I don't remember) entrants, but not in the top 3.
The game is about a squad of soldiers in Vietnam, and how that circumstance brings out all the tensions and issues between and among them. It's based heavily on Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, as well as the movies Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. It's a tightly structured game - you choose a character in the squad, play through all the other characters getting killed, mustered out, etc., and then have an endgame that (should be) a kind of cathartic end-to-all-their-stories, a la My Life With Master. It's not about having big guns.
I'm looking, at this point, for readers and playtesters. I will be demoing the game at Dreamation 2005, in mid-January, and would like to get some outside feedback before then if at all possible.
The revised PDF file is here. It's 22 pages, ~300 Kb.
Some Forge Threads:
[Carry]Burdens
[Carry] Good Playtest, Mediocre Play
Game Chef Threads:
First Post on the Peer Review Thread
Peer Review Response: Carry
Judge Responses
Why am I saying mostly revised? Well...
Questions and comments, on this post and on the game in general, totally welcome.
P.S. - also started an Indie Game Design thread on the Forge, here.
Carry was my entry for the Iron Game Chef 2005 competition. It was a "inner circle" winner, which means it placed in the top 9 of the ~30 (40? I don't remember) entrants, but not in the top 3.
The game is about a squad of soldiers in Vietnam, and how that circumstance brings out all the tensions and issues between and among them. It's based heavily on Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried, as well as the movies Platoon and Full Metal Jacket. It's a tightly structured game - you choose a character in the squad, play through all the other characters getting killed, mustered out, etc., and then have an endgame that (should be) a kind of cathartic end-to-all-their-stories, a la My Life With Master. It's not about having big guns.
I'm looking, at this point, for readers and playtesters. I will be demoing the game at Dreamation 2005, in mid-January, and would like to get some outside feedback before then if at all possible.
The revised PDF file is here. It's 22 pages, ~300 Kb.
Some Forge Threads:
[Carry]Burdens
[Carry] Good Playtest, Mediocre Play
Game Chef Threads:
First Post on the Peer Review Thread
Peer Review Response: Carry
Judge Responses
Why am I saying mostly revised? Well...
- The character, Profile and Approach writeups all need a ton of revision work, but are functional enough for now.
- The Source Material part needs to be done and revised. Basically, I need to take notes while watching Full Metal Jacket and re-reading The Things They Carried.
- Endgame is totally and absolutely fucked. I kind of want to play some and get some outside feedback before trying to un-fuck it, so I don't keep getting twisted in my knots.
Questions and comments, on this post and on the game in general, totally welcome.
P.S. - also started an Indie Game Design thread on the Forge, here.
Wanna buy a game? 