MARKED Devlog #2 | Where I've been, and a blog update

In which we talk about DINoWriMo, cursed kids, playtesting, and the art of locking in.

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Hi everyone! It's been a while. I never officially announced this anywhere, but I had been trying to put up blog posts once every 2 weeks. This wasn't for any marketing or SEO reasons, it was just a way to keep me writing consistently after graduation.

Working on MARKED (or, as it's still referred to in my documents, "Ghost Game") was at that point still a small side project that I wasn't actively working on aside from quick bouts of inspiration.

Then DINoWriMo came along. For those familiar with NaNoWriMo, the concept is roughly the same, except it isn't run by the worst people you know. I decided to take the time and community support offered by the DIN (Discord for Interactive Narrative) to focus on finishing up a playtestable version of MARKED. The goal for a regular NaNoWriMo is 50,000 words. Most of my TTRPGs sit around 25,000 words, at full length. There is a disparity here, but my goal was never really to complete a full WriMo. I just wanted an excuse (and encouragement) to lock in.

The tabs that make up the working google doc for MARKED

Over the month of november, I racked up just about 22,000 words on the game. This includes character sheets and mechanics for ALL 7 playable characters and their included curses, 5 town locations, the rituals for beginning and ending the game, basic rules and mechanics thoroughly defined for both the decks and the web, and some guidelines for the player playing the Wastehound.

There are plenty of things I didn't manage to finish, too: character sheets and spark tables for the Wastehound types, guidelines and spark tables for individual scenes, prompts for starting web relationships, GOOD web relationships in the first place??

The trick with writing 22,000 words in a month is that many of them are not good words. The trick about that is that any words are better than no words. The more I wrote for MARKED, the more I became certain that playtesting and editing would be desperately needed.

To that end, I plan to start playtesting this month or early in the new year! I think there's a lot of good stuff contained in the current version of MARKED, and I'm very excited to see where I completely missed things. Playtests will be held locally in NYC, since I currently don't have a good method of running the two-deck system online, but if you know me and you're local, give me a shout!

I'm also hoping to get back to making these blog posts. More devlogs will be coming your way, covering the developments in the game made over the past month of work. Stay tuned!