Good Day Ludological Friends,
Today we have for you a special episode of The Hypothesis podcast. If you haven’t listened to them yet, here are links to episodes 1, 2 and 3. New episodes ship on the last Wednesday of each month (so expect episode 4 on July 31st). We will also record a live episode of The Hypothesis at Gen Con 2024. If you’re attending, join us on Sunday morning.
As you may or may not know, I have designed and published a handful of roleplaying games over the past couple of decades. Typically, I work on a game behind closed doors, sharing only with playtesters as necessary and rarely making any public announcements about my intent. Sometimes this process lasts for more than a decade before I’m ready to share a game publicly. Many times, games I’ve worked up never make out from the closed doors at all. Therefore, this special episode of The Hypothesis represents something that I rarely do—I’m sharing with you an in-progress game design.
The mission of Ludological Alchemy is to share wisdom and knowledge about game design. But all of our theorizing can only take us so far, so I figured I should practice what I preach. The game I present is not complete and playable only with effort from the Director. Therefore, the primary value of this exercise is seeing the steps of the process and hearing Christopher’s feedback, and how we talk about the process. We will continue to provide our paid subscribers access to the prototypes of the game as we develop it.
Now, as Christopher says, let’s get under the hood!
First Design Doc
I was feeling a bit crushed and creatively jammed up over the winter and, as a result, I couldn’t make anything work. To lift myself out of my rut, I thought I could give myself a little winter assignment: Design a 1-page RPG based on the film Mad Max. I began the exercise on February 1st at 1:26 PM. I came up with the following notes:
