I’m already extremely negative!

Hi everyone! How’s it going?

Look! Cartoodle has a cover!

I am very excited by this!

Cartoodle is designed to help adults (and everyone else) play pretend like little kids. The back cover is based on our first playtest, which hangs above above my desk. Thanks to Ethan, Caleb, Josh, Liam, Joel, and everyone else who’s playtested Cartoodle!

Here’s a board from some actual kids. And I wasn’t even there for this one! How cool!!!

Since I’m currently making the final proof for Cartoodle, I’d say this is Part One of The Making of: Cartoodle!

Part One of The Making of: Cartoodle!

Compared to most role-playing games (RPGs), Cartoodle is really weird. It throws out a lot of foundational expectations most RPGs have: characters owned by individual players, a pre-determined setting, a dungeon master, combat mechanics, splash art, settler colonialism…

Before I even knew it was going to be called Cartoodle, my question was: Can I make a game that a) is totally free of all the things I don’t like about the games that have come before, b) focuses on emergent narrative and friendship in a way other games only dream of, c) be accessible, and d) also be fun?

The design process wasn’t necessarily as straightforward as I thought it would be. Since I was trying to undo so many seemingly universal aspects of role-playing games, I couldn’t tackle all of them at once. Here’s my first prototype, AND WHAT IF YOU LOSE?

Graphic design is my passion (as long as it takes place in Google Slides). This post is already kind of long so I’ll go in depth on this another time!

Also, our game of Wanderhome came to an epic conclusion! Here’s the final map, featuring the Tower of the Lizard Wizard!

One of my favorite professors in college told us, “Writing begets more writing.” In other words, when you feel stuck, just get started, and the ideas will come. I repeat this to myself often, so thanks Professor Knight for the advice! After feeling like I’ve been spinning my wheels since finishing the design of Cartoodle, I’m finally almost ready to put a prototype for MIGHTY MICE TACTICS (this will be called something else) in front of people! This is very exciting for me! MMT is going to be about a fantasy mouse society. But like, really about it, you know?

My question for myself at the core of MMT is, “How do I make this as much about a fantasy mouse society as possible?” This starts with the core die mechanic, where each mouse is represented by a six-sided die (one Mouse Power or MP) and challenges represented by multiple six-sided dice (two or more MP) or by twenty-sided dice (Snake Power or SP). So, one mouse could escape a snake when the dice are rolled against each other (1d6 vs 1d20), but probably won’t. But what about two added together (2d6 vs 1d20)? Or three (3d6 vs 1d20)? Or four (4d6 vs 1d20)? I think this is going to be a lot of fun, but I won’t really know until it makes first contact with players.

Playing around with d6s and d20s also helped me come up with two fun dice games, Mucklebones and Pick! The names are subject to change, but I’ll probably be sharing more about these when I write up the rules. The idea is that these are both fictional games played by the mice that you’ll be able to play in real life!

Back to some regular programming

Here are some pictures from around our neighborhood.

This makes two pictures of A Sign By The Beach With Stickers On It. These pictures are shot and edited using my iPhone’s camera app! Take that, Adobe!

Here’s an ink drawing from the dashboard, featuring new blue ink loaded into a “disposable” brush pen. You can see how over time the blue starts to revert to black, the original color of the pen’s ink cartridge. Maybe sometime I’ll do a little segment on pencromancy, the art of bringing pens back from the dead.

And here’s a hangout drawing from lunch later that day. These are always fun but can get kind of tricky when I’m drawing such a large number of people I don’t know very well in a short amount of time (while waiting for the food to arrive).

Okay that’s it for now! See you next week!

Bonus Manga!

My friend Joel and I are now fourteen weeks into our One Piece book club (70 volumes total), and one of our weekly segments is finding memes made for that week’s section. I was surprised to see quite a large number of One Piece memes using SpongeBob images.

And finally, a SpongeBob meme that is actually One Piece.

Ah… a classic face… the panels below read in the order of right to left.