Welcome (back) to TwistedSpoon Studio! The last couple of weeks have been spent going over common designs and firming up creative details for Festival or Urbestia. This week, we're throwing all that out the window.
Okay, not all of it. But much like last time, this card file doesn't feel like a furry world. It has furry things, it has diversity, it has flavor, but it's just not hitting that note that we're looking for. What are we looking for, anyway?
The point of Vision design is to create a bullseye to direct your efforts for the rest of design. Part of following my design process means that you're also going to follow my mistakes, so here it is: I messed up. I got excited to design and I jumped the gun. That's okay-- there's no better way to learn why things work a certain way, than to do it differently and watch it explode.
Today, we're going to learn from those mistakes and un-explode some things. First, let's take a look at what our intentions were at the beginning:
"...this plane would be a world of beast folk..."
"...a set without humans..."
"...put diversity front and center..."
"...lets players choose how to express themselves..."
These chunks of text come from the introduction to FUR back in the very first article. How did we do? "A world of beast folk"-- Check. Chock o' block full of 'em. "A set without humans"-- Aces, we got that. "Put diversity front and center." Well... There's a lot of diverse stuff, but is it really front and center? Finally, "Let player's choose how to express themselves." I feel like we did a bit better on that one, but still maybe not where I'd like to be.
Next, let's look at our mechanics. In Exploratory design, we outlined four key elements of the fandom:
- Fursonas
- Creative Expression
- Community
- Suiting
With that in mind, we designed tradition as the community mechanic, vivid/vibrant as the creative expression mechanic, and crafting as the suit mechanic. The general idea of fursonas was left to be answered at higher rarities by legendary characters. Out of these, only crafting really feels like it hits the mark. Tradition rewards you for playing lots of creatures, but it doesn't feel like a "community" mechanic; and vibrant seems better at promoting diversity than actual creative expression.
Now, let's turn to the creative. The idea was to use the idea of a convention as the basis for a festival; the 600 AD bent and the macro-level overview is fun to think about, but it doesn't serve the set. Some of that will carry over into the later stages, but a lot of it won't be relevant to the set. The next Worldbuilding article will be much more zoomed in.
There's no rule saying that you can't start over-- a custom set is your own creation, after all. But the temptation to do so can lead you down a path of continuously revamping the same ideas without ever settling on an execution. That's where deadlines come in-- if you have to have it done by a certain time, there's only so many times you can reset. With that in mind, we're not going to start over from scratch-- a lot of what we have does work, after all. What we are going to do, is restructure the set and evaluate which bits of worldbuilding we keep, and which we scrap.
That's all for this week. Next week will feature the final Designer Talk of the year; there will be no Friday article, since it's Christmas Eve, but we'll be back on New Year's with something special, and again on January 7th with the first FUR article post-fresh-start. Until then, I hope you have yourself a merry little Christmas, Kwanza, Yule, Candlenights, and the rest!
See you soon!
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