I had this whole idea that it'd be good to condense the whole "make a mouse" section of the Mausritter rules into a mini zine format, so I sank many hours into doing just that.
I'd really enjoyed making my tiny adaptation of Tunnel Goons and I'd been looking for an opportunity to do something similar. The process of analysing the informationa and trying to represent it as clearly as possible with words and images in this super-constrained format makes all my UI / comics / visual communication neurons fire, and the fact that it targets an analogue platform is also very gratifying.
…and it's just as well I enjoy the process because the outcome didn't work out the way I wanted! It looks the part, but when I tried to use it in the game it failed on every possible front:
- my players didn't understand that it was self-contained, and tried to reference the main handbook
- some of my layouts caused confusion
- the children didn't even use it! 10yo used the manual and 7yo needed hand-holding through the whole process anyway
- there were serious transcription errors (not just typos) that I don't think I can be bothered to fix
I'd already published it as an itch.io project and so I've just reverted it to a draft so it's hidden. Bad luck to anyone who downloaded it I guess.
Here are my positive takeaways from the whole process (becasue you know I try to be positive!):
- enjoyed the exercise of making it happen
- learned that I should test things in the field before publishing them
- do simpler things first (execerpt the whole player section!)
- I anticipated some of the problems the players had with it, so it's comforting that my UX instincts were on point!