January 2021 – CKIXD

Nothing visible to show for work this morning. But I did ponder the turn sequence a bit more, as well as more analysis of what physical components are required to play out the climax of the game. This doesn’t actually include the tracker I designed yesterday, because in the simplest prototype I can imagine, I should just assume that all the tracks are at their ends.

The main thing I accomplished this morning is figuring out where to describe the challenges that allow the players to win the game:

The challenge to seal the source is on whatever sealing item the agents may attempt to use.
The challenge to incinerate the source is on the source item.
The challenge to appease the ghost is on the apparition’s page in the ghost booklet.

The main thing that I need but don’t yet have is a deck of cards for the ghost to play on its turn. This will look suspiciously like a villain deck from Sentinels of the Multiverse. So that’s really what I need to focus on next.

I have been working intermittently on a game about ghost hunters for a few years now. At the last Protospiel Online I was starting to get tired of working on Villanostra so I thought I’d get back to Haunt Control Inc.

I haven’t really made very good progress. I’m just trying to make the smallest possible prototype for testing the climax of the game. But I sit and stare and the screen and nothing much comes out. Fortunately, I’ve been here before, and I know some things that help.

Start writing a log of my progress each day. (Hence this post.)
Start assembling physical components.

I kind of cheated on #2 today. I need a status tracker for the new prototype, and I started sketching it on an index card. But frankly that’s pretty tedious, trying to get three tracks on the card that are the right size to move a token along. In addition, I’ve been learning to use Figma at work, so I used it to create the tracker above. I don’t know that it was much less tedious, but it did help me practice using that tool, and it will be much easier to change the tracker when I want to do so.

Another odd thing about this project is that I’m starting to develop an odd sense of pronoia about it. There have been a few small coincidences: things that keep me thinking about the ghost hunting theme, for example.

Stumbling across Lonesome Ghosts, a Disney short I used to watch. (And finally being able to watch the whole thing!)
The theme to Ghostbusters coming up in my Pandora feed.

It’s nice to think that something in the universe outside my own head wants me to work on this. I see no reason not to indulge it!