sh*t or get off the pot: game dump (overview, 20th may)

Three new stinkers added to the pot!

Yesterday, I worked in a frenzy; writing, formatting, it all came so easy. Not so much today. I've slowed up on focusing on the formatting (as much as I do love to experiment with aesthetics), and I think that slowing made my ideas drip slower too. I really just splattered out some barely formed thoughts. They can't all be good: you've got to get the shitters out of your system before you can strike gold!

Before I get into the rundown of games, look at this! The text symbols in  Alone in the Laboratory changed when I downloaded it and there is something dastardly and unsettling about the version that appears in the final document. Seriously, ew, look at this man:

Last night and this afternoon, I have created and posted easily my laziest additions to date:

I Could've Made That is less of a game and more me standing on my soapbox and screaming orders at strangers on the internet. It's a (not so gentle) invitation to actually spend time with modern art before writing it off. Yeah, sometimes modern art is dumb, but maybe it's supposed to be dumb: some people barely look and don't think. It's an aggressive meditation on what art is (and could be). 

Chaos Chess is an idea I had in the moment, half scribbled down, got bored, and abandoned. I've captured the concept and may go back to it (probably not), but I think it's playable as it is. It's a framework to sit on top of a normal game of chess to make it (you guessed it) more chaotic, and potentially unplayable. We love unplayable games here.

Alone in the Laboratory is a only semi-acceptable game (that definitely is a game) that's I've written over the past twenty-four hours. It is a hack of Alone Among the Stars (as if it needed yet another hack) about a scientist who is making groundbreaking discoveries about the human body, the universe, and the impossible. It's really stripped down, stylistically and in terms of instructions. It's a vague guide and I think players will have to take the initiative and build on the inspiration of the card pulls in order to get the most out of the scenario. But isn't that true of every game?

These weren't great, but it's still flexing my writing muscle, and that's the point of the jam. Another 'rule' of the jam (let's be honest, I'm playing fast and lose with the rules: everything is only supposed to be a single page!) is not to recycle mechanics, which is proving a bigger challenge than I expected. It's showing me my style and preferences, which is good, but I'm going to keep exploring and try to write even more than the ten game goal over the next two weeks.