Production journals for various games and experiments by Brendan Allen (and those under his handle, bibliomancer).
Link to a playable early draft of the Tiny Toy Theatre Imagination Kit I'm not surprised that I've failed to keep a rigorous schedule for these production journal posts -- despite having completed a few digital projects at this point, process writing is still not a practice that comes easily to me. Still, an effort is better than nothing, and this blog's experiment is certainly an improvement from…
The newest roadblock that I find myself bonking my head against for the Tiny Toy Theatre Project is perhaps one of the most frustrating, as it feels like the whole project hinges upon figuring this bit out. I envision the completed toy theatre deck as having two primary stages: First, the player navigates hypermedia-enabled versions of a Pollock's Toy Theatre catalogue in order to pick the various…
Since my last post, I've been making increasingly steady progress on the Decker prototype. It's good to see, looking back, that my impulse to lean into Twine as a mapping tool paid off. Understanding the shape of the project allowed me to focus on more granular aspects of the process without losing sense of where those aspects would specifically slot into the work. Today I'm going to outline one…
This part of a project is usually the most frustrating hurdle for me to get over -- when I don't yet have a clearly-defined systematic workflow for my process. I still find myself doing a fair bit of vacant clicking around in a way that I know is very inefficient, which, in turn, is hard to stomach when I know I've got a firm deadline of late April to get the Toy Theatre Kit in at least basic…
The past couple weeks have been slow going on this project, but I've been picking away at building more familiarity with Decker, especially in terms of learning how I'll allow players to choose particular characters/sets/materials and save those choices for their final product. It's not a very complex process, but I was overthinking it while simultaneously familiarizing myself with Lil, the Decker…
First, a quick note on the project title. After working through a proposal draft yesterday, I've got one I like (nothing like an external deadline to give me sudden clarity). And so, I present the production journal for: The Tiny Toy Theatre Imagination Kit It's tiny , as all of this expansive papercraft art is going to get all skrunched into dithered Decker screens. And considering the likely…
It's perhaps the coldest day that I've yet experienced in Toronto, but at the moment I'm bundled up inside, watching a cat thoroughly enjoy our space heater, and working out some of the language I'd like to use in describing a new project I'm working on. (This is the project, these are those words.) In the fiveish years that I've been making little videogames with intentionally constrained game…