On One-Page Projects and Contests
Hello! This is sort of a post-scriptum on my last few project, one of which I published yesterday: a 1v1 one-page print-and-play hybrid gamebook/boardgame called Crossroads Duelists.
So, about three weeks ago (in my ongoing search for some kind of break into some game publishing sphere) I came across the 1 Page Gamebook Contest hosted for the Bologna Play Game Festival that will start on the 22nd of May.
Me being me, having experience with having to fit one too many ideas on a single page from my Fiverr days, and having just then launched my previous game (RPW) I though - why not entering the contest and flex some creative designing skills? ("the monkey paw's finger curls")
So I did. Since my drawing skills are very moderate, I strayed away from more visual gamebooks and went straight for gameplay experimentalism. The optional theme of the contest is "Women at a Crossroad" and from the beginning I had the image of folding the paper to create something other than a boring "reading the whole page" experience.
For me half of the fun in a gamebook is the tactile action of flipping the pages to reach the next crossroad (or, in a digital one, waiting to press that button that will bring me to the next tab). That transitional and superfluous activity really is a fundamental part of the experience, and where a lot of the sauce of a well written book is hidden. My goal was to replicate that experience with the limitation of a singular face of a page.
The image that came first to mind was that of a paper fortune teller, a game I played as a kids and remember my female classmates being particularly enamoured with. That could create a different tactile experience from just reading a one page comic and still allow for at least two tiers of path diversions and 8 final outcomes. / For the longest time I couldn't really figure out a theme for it though, and this led me to the second idea I had, which eventually became Crossroads Duellists: "Combat Heroes" meets "Battleship".
The concept was to have two players tail one another in a maze, while facing one another in real life. To adapt the theme of the contest I made the characters explicitly female in the Italian version, and gender neutral in the English version (and, additionally, these two characters should sound familiars to fans of the first Darkest Dungeon). The idea of folding the paper to hide the action of the adversary on the other side came natural, and so the whole formatting: exclusive rules on either sides, but communal mechanics. It eventually became a little more complex with each round of playtesting (invisibility and the reloading being mechanics that are overall optional, but make the game much more fun and tactical).
The two characters are essentially foils, they are perfectly balanced but have a different alternate winning requirement, sort of a "pacifist route". The way this works is that players either communicate, trusting one another, to end the game in a null, or they betray the effort of the other in achieving the peaceful ending, therefore hopefully making the encounter that much more tense (even before all the shooting begins).
I honestly think, as far as concept go, I might have hit some gold here. There is still a lot of unexpressed potential and the game is pretty modular as it is (if you draw your own labyrinth).
I ended up also producing and submitting that first paper fortune teller idea, and I yet don't know if either games will actually be accepted to compete. Fingers crossed, but since Crossroads Duellists definitely exceeds the commonly agreed definition of "gamebook", and it is a "Gamebook Contest" after all, I can see this going either way.
Sigh, so much for experimentation.
If you've read this far, let me know through a comment or email if you'd like a version of Crossroads Duellists with a gridded but otherwise "blanked" maze, so that you can draw your own :)
Other than that, thank you for reading! Ciao ciao.