#lysen-co — Public Fediverse posts

Dev Pile: Not Showing My Cards

It’s important to have a plan.

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https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-2025-42-not-showing-my-cards/

#lysenCo #moonshiners

Dev Pile: Reflecting on Your Big Stupid Mistakes You Bozo

The Game Development I do is deliberately done with an eye towards reflective behaviour. I try to make things and then think about what I was thinking about when I made them. The purpose is to try and find why I made the decisions I made and what value that has to you, a person I am now sharing it with, as a form of encouragement, as a guide to what to do, and also, as entertainment. Right? It’s fun to read what designers think.

Well, I hope it is.

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https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-2025-38-reflecting-on-your-big-stupid-mistakes-you-bozo/

#lysenCo

Dev Pile: Lysen Co Diary update

Hey, remember that case study on Lysen Co? Turns out that you don’t get everything right on the first draft and what I’ve been working on this week has largely been stuff about addressing holes and expanding what’s missing from that. This is going to be some repeated text from previous posts, but this is also trying to expand the plain language explainer. Bit of a long one here!

This is all stuff that’s been partially made and will be given a header. Since this is meant to be a document for printing and not a webpage, there’s going to be some weirdness like ‘(cite)’ and URLs in-line text.

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https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-2025-35-lysen-co-diary-update/

#lysenCo

Dev Pile: Moonshiners Faces

The aim for this week is to construct the digital components that are necessary for making a printable prototype of Moonshiners. The aim is to have something so that in about a week I can print-out and play with a version with other humans that let me see how the basic ideas work out.

Content Warning: This post is going to feature Image Generator material. I made it using a free website called Dezgo, and it’s done to have example objects. I didn’t pay anyone for these images.

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https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-2025-33-moonshiners-faces/

#lysenCo #moonshiners

Dev Pile: Contemplating The Crush Depth

Something I’m trying to do with the ongoing diarising of game development is to consider games in terms not just of a narrative thread of X to Y to Z, but rather in terms of the pieces that go in. I want to open the box of the game and pull out everything that’s in there, but also crucially, pull out what’s not in there.

‘That sounds like nonsense,’ yes but don’t worry, we’ll get there.

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https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-2025-30-contemplating-the-crush-depth/

#lysenCo #moonshiners

Dev Pile: Playing with Numbers

Right now, as I speak, I am a little ill. Since it’s hard to think I figured I’d take the time to talk about some subject material in game development I consider to be pretty easy to grapple with and useful to bear in mind. In this case, it’s the specific importance of some basic ways numbers work.

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https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-2025-29-playing-with-numbers/

#lysenCo

Dev Pile: How Did I Make Lysen Co?, Part 5

This is the last piece of reflective writing on making Lysen Co. This is the plain text writing that will be formalised into academic language and given proper citations to become a case study in my PhD.

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Dev Pile: How Did I Make Lysen Co?, Part 4

Hey here’s more of the plain-text case study of Lysen Co.

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https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-2025-26/

#lysenCo

Dev Pile: How Did I Make Lysen Co?, Part 3

This is some more text from the case study for Lysen Co; this is the plain language description of the text that, once I’ve got it all out in the case study document, I can go through and fancy up and attach citations to.

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https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-2025-25-thick-description-for-lysen-co/

#lysenCo

Dev Pile: How Did I Make Lysen Co?, Part 2

Hey here’s more plain texting for my Lysen Co case study. It’s late and I’m sleepy.

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https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-2025-24-how-did-i-make-lysen-co-part-2/

#lysenCo

Dev Pile: How Did I Make Lysen Co?, Part 1

Hey, you know how I’m doing that PhD on game making? Well, part of that is providing an accounting of my work creating games, as case studies. Today, I spent a lot of time working on writing that up for the first of the games, Lysen Co. This is before it becomes academic text, in the structure of academic writing (which involves a lot of specific rephrasing and checking for repeated nouns).

And uhhhh yeah. Hey! Here, you can read it in this more plain language mode.

The following is a raw text accounting of step 1 of my Case Studies before I clean it up and turn it into academic language with its citations and such.

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https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-2025-23-how-did-i-make-lysen-co/

#lysenCo

Dev Pile: Reflection on the Botch

Sorry, folks, calling something of an easy mode on this one. See, this week has featured some vet visits and an election and some general bad times for sleep so I’m taking an easy route here and going to talk about a game that’s not part of the ongoing Moonshiners and Bloodwork game designs.

I’m gunna talk about revising The Botch for a new era.

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https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-2025-20/

#cardGames #devPile #gameMaking #lysenCo #moonshiners #theBotch

Dev Pile: Moonshiner Prototyping Diary 2

How big is a deck of cards?

This question is a game design quandrary that always comes back to ‘how big do you need it to be?’

Right now I am grappling with the material considerations of the game Moonshiners. This is what I call the ‘stuffness’ and I’ve been holding off on it until I could get my hands on a standard box from our tabletop material printing service (Launch Tabletop) for a larger game. What I got is this cool box for our game Cafe Romantica:

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Dev Pile: Make And Use Templates

Templates are good. If you’re doing anything graphically, and you’re not the kind of sticky-brained fine-detailed picky parrot of a person who wants absolute control over all elements and have the skill to actually execute on that, self-educating in a way that makes you both an expert and willing to tell people you’re an expert (hi Fox), then you should use a template. I do, for almost everything I do.

It doesn’t just stop at grabbing templates from the sites I use to make the things I make. Gamecrafter gives you printing templates, for example, as does our current ongoing concern with Launch Tabletop, where they will show you a blank thing that indicates where you can’t put material. That’s a template to indicate your bounds, though, that’s not the same thing as a template to indicate your targets, and that’s when the time comes to educate yourself by engaging with the field.

Okay, here’s two points: Build A Reference Pool and Build Your Toolbox.

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