Finishing Projects
This post is also a shameless plug that Cadastre and RAID Array Mischief are available at my itch page, feel free to pay what you want and let me know what you think!
My new year's resolution for 2026 was to finally buckle down and release some of my games outside of unformatted google documents and emailed PDFs. I had taken a few concepts from initial blog to playable prototype, but I had created an insurmountable mental block between prototype and a document I'd be proud to share. In January, though, I looked back at the handful of game concepts and decided that "RAM" felt like it had the lowest barrier between "level of completion" and "accessibility of concept".
I had psyched myself out about Hellbenders after I stalled out on an adventure design, I had psyched myself out about the prototype that became The Wax Marches because I hadn't gotten it to the table, and I had psyched myself out about the prototype that became Cadastre because my design goals felt unachievable relative to my maturity and confidence. But RAM had been written and playtested, so I just needed to figure out how to make it into a booklet worth reading.
I knew I needed art, and the game concept felt perfect for Sheboygan's favorite son HODAG's art style. I reached out to him and estimated that I wanted 3-4 pieces if he was interested in taking a commission. Thankfully he was, so I sat down and thought about what ideas I wanted illustrated. MISTAKE ONE: Thinking up images before mocking up a layout. This could have been a huge pain in the ass and I was lucky that RAM is a small enough document that I could force images where I wanted them. I provided him some visual cues that I doodled in powerpoint.
I will say, it was a lot of fun to make these little stick figure sketches and collages and I'm glad that I was not tempted to ask an LLM to generate concept cues for me. If anyone has seen the final document, you'll know exactly which illustrations these ideas correspond to.
Once I got the illustrations back from Hodag...they languished in my inbox because I was consumed with Honeybee madness! Despite all of my resolve to finish a project, I was seduced by the novelty of finishing a different game. Granted, I still haven't actually wrestled Wax Marches into layout yet because I still have to exorcise some demons through playtest, but that's where I learned the lesson that it's okay to publish something unfinished! How cool is that! Check out The Wax Marches on itch, it's pay what you want!
Then, it turned out that while I was finishing the rule text for TWM, I was finally struck with inspiration to finish my survey game Cadastre. This was a totally different experience from honeybee madness; I realized that the concept I wanted to explore could be satisfactorily worked as a standalone capsule game instead of an open-ended campaign game like Hellbenders or Wax Marches. I didn't need to write a game that could explore the nuances of PLSS townships and establishing initial points and baselines, I could just tell the story of one border between two angry polities and focus on what makes that interesting to me as a designer.
This gave me the confidence I needed to throw out a lot of the silliness from last winter while refining the valuable elements to something that I could fall in love with. This also felt small enough and self-contained enough to experiment with layout. I carved out the time and mental bandwidth to just work through the Explorer Design Grid System and an outline of what I thought I needed for play. I have subscribed to Fernando Salvaterra's Patreon for a long time, so I decided that I would browse through his amazing stock art collection to flesh out my game book and am extremely proud of the end result.
I have since obtained a long stapler, the binder clips were to force a hard fold
With this all under my belt, I knew it was worth returning to RAM and laying it out. Thankfully, working through Cadastre from scratch gave me the tools I needed to have sort of a "house style" I could repeat for future projects. I'm sure I'll eventually get tired of 10pt Georgia font, but it works well for these little half-letter game books. It was fun to revisit this game after something like eight months and see whether I still loved it or not. I had gotten some great feedback from friends and playtesters that had been sitting in the back of my noggin long enough that my subconscious had mostly resolved it and I just needed to put pen to paper.
I had momentum and enthusiasm from working through some harder projects from conception to completion, so finishing RAM (renamed to RAID Array Mischief because you will not be surprised at the number of games with Random Access in their titles on an indie game platform) felt like a relaxing palate cleanser while I think on some new game concepts. As I'm writing this, I just had a nice lunchtime game of RAM with some friends from the Prismatic Waystation and over the course of an hour we discovered that our PARTY couldn't do anything reliably except for "Position Self Advantageously"; it's always a joy to see how the PARTY memory takes shape.
This has been a satisfying few months of earnest work. I think for the sake of symmetry I'd like to finish Hellbenders this year, or at least a version of it, but I'm proud of what I've gotten done in the first year of this blog. I'm grateful for the support of the indie game community - it's always exciting to see what excites different groups of friends and to receive wisdom and mentorship from people who have been throwing dice in this hobby for a long time.
This isn't just a call to finish your projects, because even when I told myself to finish a specific thing, I had to take a circuitous route through two other games to get there. It's just worth your time to share what excites you with the world.