First idea: Comic Scramble. Well, okay, not my first idea. There have been many ideas. Many, many ideas, that have died a thousand inglorious deaths. Not even my first realized idea. My first Kickstarter went relatively well. I met my funding goals, I made a game and delivered it to people, the general response has been quite good. It was all about cooperatively building narratives by playing cards that would add elements to stories. The goal was to have a storyteller that didn’t work like games such as Once Upon A Time. Those games are great, but they rely on the skills of the players to construct a narrative, and I wanted something more approachable, something that an 8-year-old could play with her granddad and have fun with an absurd story. To that end, I think it worked out well.
But this is a different form, and one that’s closer to the archetypal story telling game. Everyone draws random tiles and must create a comic on a large scrabble board. You can build off other people’s comic tiles, like you would with letters placed on a Scrabble board. So, okay, there’s an idea, let’s work on fleshing it out more.
My first step was to imagine the gamut of what tiles could look like. The list was long and continues to grow.
Second step, pull down lots of random clip art from google image search to make tiles.
Step 2.5, trash all the second step 😁.
Really, there’s likely going to be a X.5 step where you trash all or most of the last step, and that’s okay. One of the things I figured out as I started to look at the images is that there’s no thematic consistency. This is a situation where a consistent art style, or something approximate is relatively important.
Some things that I learned:
- Each frame should show action. It doesn’t have to be fast paced, but every cell should advance the nature of the story, and static images of the mountains or an empty forest doesn’t do much for that. Even worse, imagine drawing a bunch of scene tiles and having no means of constructing a narrative!
- Characters should be largely featureless. Stick to stick figures. Features tend to allow you to isolate and focus on some characters more than others, which can be self-limiting when you don’t know what tiles you’re going to have available to you. If half are one character, and half are another, can you really tell the story you want to tell?
- The one exception for that is when you have a close of up a person’s face, when they’re showing some sort of emotion or reaction. But those have no background, so that it looks like you just quickly zoomed in to see a response to the earlier action, or a preamble to the coming action.
- Stick to just one season. An early playtest had a person with some tiles in summer, and others in winter, and they just couldn’t cleanly combine them. Weather variety is okay but keep everything on land (or on sea).
- The center tile needs to be an abstract explosion. That works surprisingly well. It could be a person’s mind being blown, or a planet blowing up, or a dust cloud after someone takes a tumble.
As for Step 3, I’ll save that for another article.
