06/25/21: Where do I go from here?
I’m feeling two things, this week: first, working on Blood of Meridian feels like a constant tempo of two steps forward and one step back and, second, I’m just not sure at this point whether BoM is going to be anything more than it currently is.
Two steps forward, one step back is still progress but it feels like the returns are diminishing. I’m doing a longer playtest with friends and it’s going well but, as they rightly pointed out, the game doesn’t do a much to push our character’s together and we want to see the relationships that we setup during character creation in action. Simultaneously, the characters are intended to be extremely competent and that, along with their complicated family relationships, pushes them to avoid each other. My two solutions are that, one, we should have set up some npc family members to both push against and ally with and, two, maybe there need to be factions within the family to pull some of them together. And both of those things put us back to the beginning with playtesting which is one of the reason playtesting is hard. Often, the players just want to play the game and if I’m constantly changing it, that’s tough.
As for Blood of Meridian in its current state, it mostly does what I set out to do and I’m feeling a little tired of it. Which mostly means, I think, maybe taking a break and working on something else for a bit to recharge. Also, this is the point where I think I may have to reassess the project. It’s doing mostly what I intended but if what I intended is creating suboptimal play, then maybe it’s time to take what I’ve learned and move on to a different project.