Dev Diary #1, the first few months

Hello. My name’s Snow.

It’s currently 8:22 AM eastern time.

And I’m 17,500 words deep into the first draft of this new game.

game design diary in tweets

I haven’t updated this blog/newsletter in about a month. This is my flare cresting the tops of snow-covered trees deep in unmapped wilderness to say that I am alive. Don’t come rescue me.

Every morning I wake up, brew coffee, stare at my phone for like thirty minutes, and then look at the google doc, which has remained open on at least one screen since the beginning of May, and write another section from my outline (my skin is itching because I’m writing this instead).

Shout out to my lovely partners and friends who have kept me sane and tethered to this plane by spending quality time with me most days after I remove my fingers from the keyboard to let them devour my flesh like the faux-EVAs that feast on Asuka in End of Evangelion.

Project Prism is something that has been nested in my mind since Songbirds Blue was in a finished state. As these eggs often do, it mutated past the original conception and for that I am terrified.

I spoke to Nova a few days ago as they received their copy of Songbirds Red, and I jokingly said, “if you like that, you’re gonna love what I’m cooking next.”

They replied with an eye emoji.

“The next thing is like the final form of red and blue I’m hoping.”

“Purple,” they said, surely joking but hitting the spot where the egg used to rest. Purple was the conception originally. A book that put everything together, added more gifts/curses, more downtime activities, more everything. But no, that’s not quite right anymore.

“Even more colors,” I said. “An entire prism.”

I remember a few months ago I was staring at four separate documents unable to proceed with any of them. They were a menagerie of ideas that were stretching across influences in my body. There was the prism notes, a document of not-even-bullet-pointed factoids, ideas, and musings for what I wanted it to be. Next to that, the .dungeon project I was working on which started with a questionnaire and would rework the game to be more in line with PbtA principles. Nestled even further in was a document titled “dunmesh idea,” which was scrawled during a moment of stoned clarity while watching dungeon meshi for the fifth time. And lastly, one titled “d100 adventure idea,” which came from a similar moment of stoned clarity while watching Yugioh season 0.

These documents sat there staring at me. Mocking me. I was unable to make any progress on them and felt blocked. I could feel the block in my head, like a series of drifting logs and tangled roots slid too perfectly into a gap and got caught. It’s not often the block is so easy to pinpoint, but this one was happening because Songbirds Red, Blue, and Green were so very important to me. I knew (and know now) that whatever was to follow them had to live up to *my* standards. The little perfectionist in my head had his fucking gun out and was swirling madly in the little office space that makes up my brain, threatening to do something stupid if shit didn’t go exactly as it needed.

So, I set up a kill-shot across from the office.

Laser pointed straight at that perfectionist. A special bullet just for the occasion.

“It’s not songbirds,” I said to myself. And took the shot. Glass exploded, blood sprayed. The perfectionist wheeled around in a way that made the dancers weep. When the body hit the ground, I was sure we did it. “Got it in one.”

But no. The perfectionist is, well, perfect. Even at dying.

“Bullshit,” she spat. The wound should have been fatal, but was only a graze. So I loaded another bullet and fired without warning. I knew I had to nip this and nip it quick.

I opened a FIFTH google doc, fresh, blank, clean, and wrote “Virtual Dungeon Girl” at the top.

BANG! Kill shot. Blood everywhere. An artistic expression of self-massacre.

The perfectionist would reform after a few days. She never stays dead for long. But at that moment she was gone. The blockage removed. I got out of my own fucking way. The words came and came hard. Just by reframing it in my head as something not-songbirds, the baggage and legacy of that game in my mind was vanquished and I busted through all of character creation in a few days.

Doing that got me to the bonfire. A checkpoint of safety in this otherwise hostile architecture.

Now the perfectionist is on my side. She sees the vision. She’s wearing the chef’s hat and tweeting out “we’re so back” and “call me gordon ramsay the way I’m cooking!” And I’m praying to all of the Elder Scroll gods that she stays that way.

I don’t know if this is true to any of you, but often times when I’m in the drafting of a project, I reach a point where the trappings of TTRPGs gets in the way. There are things that we, as designers, sort of expect to need in a book. Whether these are things we think we need, or things we think other people need. Y’know, those lamp posts we plant to make sure people “get it.”

In past projects, I’d get hung up on this little hurdles. “Oh, I need this section or that bit of explanation.” And then I’d stare at the blank page completey bored and unable to give enough of a care to write anything. After enough poking and prodding from the perfectionist, the writing would get done. But I wouldn’t enjoy it and would later look back at it with disdain for what I did to my poor baby. What the perfectionist pushed for.

Every single time I’ve found myself getting caught up now? I’ve kept my snipers on the roof across the way. This is new tech, write this down. I keep them up there so that whenever *that shit* happens? BOOM! Gone. Evaporated. Pink mist.

I ran into a point where I was doing a “magic” section, cause, y’know, a dungeon adventure game has to have a magic section. But I was so uninterested with copy/pasting the magic system from Blue/Red. It didn’t feel right. No one in the office could explain why. Even the perfectionist was not enjoying it. She held up the work until we could figure it out.

So, I just cut that shit out. No more magic. Or, at least, no more spell casters.

I DM’d Emma and was like, “what if psychonauts instead of mages?”

She replied with the eyes emoji.

So I erased the spell caster class and wrote Psychonaut. Completely avoided that blockage. Hit the perfectionist in the head with a down-range round. It was so easy to just delete the spell system tinkering I was doing and move on to the next sections, which flowed smooth.

Every single step of this drafting process has been like that. Listening to my body. Letting the snags happen and immediately trimming branches. Pruning. Letting the thing grow in new, guided directions.

I think this draft currently sits at 70% completion, with maybe 17,500 more words to write. Maybe more. But all the ideas are there, the outline is strong. Nothing is there that shouldn’t be there. Nothing is there that makes me bored. Nothing is there that needs removed (at least not yet).

I’m very excited to share it with you. I’m very excited to run playtests on the discord.

Get ready.

Prism takeover.

Soon.

Until then,

• Snow