Really having fun with this so far. And yes, I realize the video quality on these is not where it needs to be yet.
All posts by mgb
New Prototype!
Started messing about with this last night, I’m calling it “Paint By Monsters” for the moment.
A Brief Followup on the CMF Conceptualization Application
As I mentioned previously, I tried my hand at filling out a CMF application more or less “for real” this year. There were a couple of things, as I mentioned on Twitter, that threw me for a loop, and since I actually got some feedback from the lovely helpful folks at CMF, I figured I’d share:
- The “Material to be Delivered for this Application” section does, as I suspected, refer to the end result/output from the project. For Conceptualization – particularly if the project is intended to proceed to Prototyping or a production program – that would almost certainly be a proof of concept and perhaps some supporting documentation around market and creative strategies
- As I also suspected, having no paid team members committed to the project is going to be a serious drawback for an application for funding. The response I got also indicated that they recommend you pay yourself as well as other team members, so that’s good to know, I s’pose. Not like I DON’T want money, just seems somewhat counterproductive to getting the most out of the investment. I suspect that my situation is at least somewhat abnormal in the overall audience for these programs, however.
- They recommended to me that I look for at least a “soft commit” from other folks, and also suggested that if those folks aren’t able to fulfill that commitment after a successful application it would be ok to proceed with someone else filling that role. So that’s actually really good to know.
Anyway, I thought those were worth sharing. I’ve also started to do some foundational research for Powered A(r)mour, but that’s still in very early stages, so not much to talk about just yet.
CMF Application (Conceptualization) – Follow Along With Me!
If you’re a Canadian media maker, you probably know about the Canada Media Fund, a pretty great institution and one which causes some folks from other parts of the world to express their undisguised envy.
I found the application process quite intimidating at first, but having been through most of it, I’m at least somewhat more comfortable. I figured maybe folks might appreciate a slightly simplified treatment of the process.
What makes the CMF so great?
Let’s assume, for a moment, that you don’t know about the CMF, or perhaps you’ve heard of it but you’ve never really looked into it in any detail.
“What makes the CMF programs so great?” is one of the first questions I asked when I started looking at funding. There are a few different answers, ranging from “they’re pretty unique in their setup” to “FREE MONEY!”, but the really important thing for someone focused on funding a game in development is the specific way they approach funding.
The CMF, see, isn’t like a regular investor. They don’t buy equity in your company. They don’t offer you a long-term loan. They directly invest in the project under development, and they recoup their investment when and if that project starts to receive revenue. But that’s not all!
They also have a time limit on how long they lay claim to those revenues. With CMF you’re never in danger of having some dude show up at your door with a sledgehammer and an unsettling familiarity with the anatomy of the human knee. After several years, if they have not yet recouped their investment, they basically relinquish their claim to further residuals.
All of that sounds amazing to me, so I should put the one big caveat down for balance: The one thing they don’t do is provide 100% funding. Different programs, projects, and yearly cohorts will have different conditions, but in 2022 CMF limits their investment to roughly 75% of expenses, including labour and assets. They also have total investment caps, which tend for the early-stage programs to run well short of the full “runway” budget for a game,
So this isn’t years-of-runway money. But it’s a substantial stake with generous terms, and every Canadian media creative should at least have some familiarity with the program.
Choosing a Program
Now let’s imagine that you’re going to ask them for money someday soon. Like, say, September 6th.
You’re very quickly going to notice there’s a bit of a problem: They have a lot of programs. Which ones even apply to what you’re making?
The big divide is between more “traditional” media, mostly covered under the Convergent stream, and “new” media, which is the focus of the Experimental stream.
If, like me, you’re a game maker, you will thus want to focus most of your energies on the Experimental Stream. There are still a bunch of programs to consider, but this cuts out more than half of the information CMF provides in its very ample documentation.
The key programs for 2022-23 in the Experimental Stream are:
- Conceptualization
- Prototyping
- Production, which is now broken down into two separate programs
- Commercial Projects
- Innovation & Experimentation
- Accelerator Partnership
If you’re just starting out with CMF and/or a new studio, it’s likely that you’ll want to focus on one of the first two.
Conceptualization is targeted at extremely early-stage projects which don’t yet even have a working demo. The funding cap ($15,000) and pool for this program are fairly limited, and a significant portion of the pool is reserved for Diverse Community applicants. If your team meets one or more of the DC category criteria this should be helpful, but otherwise you’ll want to get your application in early, as the program is first-come, first-served. Conceptualization is also usually framed as a way to get your project ready for a more significant investment via the Prototyping program.
Prototyping is meant to help companies build a full-scale working demo of their project. This won’t be a full game, most likely, but it should be enough to attract attention from other investors. There are still diversity targets to consider – there’s an evaluation matrix that takes into account most of the same factors as Conceptualization – but the pool of money available is a little more forgiving, and the funding cap is much higher ($250,000 [but remember – 75%!]).
I mean, also, it’s. probably just a good idea all around to work with diverse groups, but I say that as an Old Cisstraight(ish) White Guy Working Alone, so I’m not about to give anyone a hard time about it. Just trying to help you present your team and/or project to the CMF in the best possible light!
Applying to the Conceptualization Program (2022-23)
My intention this year is to apply to the Conceptualization program. I have a few different projects on the back burner, and it would be great to be able to be able to offer folks some money to start making art and composing sound for one of them. The funding in this program is limited to $15,000 (remember, this means I’m on the hook for other funding up to $5,000), so it won’t be a LOT of either, but it will be a start.
Theoretically I could make everything myself – theoretically – but I wouldn’t be even slightly comfortable sharing the results with the public. I’d much rather work with other folks, folks who bring great skills in those areas, and I’d be very happy to see them paid for their work.
The timing is tight at this point – as I hinted above, the Conceptualization opening date for this year is September 6th:
Also, before you even start filling things out, you need to sign up for PERSONA-ID. The TL;DR of it is, Persona-ID allows you to disclose possibly sensitive details of your team’s personal lives and identity in a way that protects their privacy. This seems, to me (admittedly a relatively naïve soul in the area) to be a reasonably elegant solution to the problem of wanting to incentivize diverse creators without putting them at risk unnecessarily.
You can find out which of your team members need a PERSONA-ID account by checking the “Who should participate in PERSONA-ID?” and “Can other roles or key personnel sign-up to PERSONA-ID?” sections on the main PERSONA-ID reference page.
Once you have your id(s), there are a few basic things that you should check with respect to your project.
- The project needs to be Canadian, which means the majority of the team is Canadian, most of the spending is in Canada, and creative control resides in Canada.
- You’re ready to incorporate. You don’t actually have to incorporate to apply – this is a common misconception, apparently – but you do have to incorporate to sign an agreement.
- You’re working on something that’s recognizably a game and that’s intended to eventually reach the market.
These are brief distillations of some key considerations from the full Conceptualization Program Guidelines. If you decide to go ahead with an application, you should definitely spend some time reviewing the program guidelines.
Beyond the basic eligibility criteria above, there are other factors that can play into an application’s success or failure – graphic content is a big one – but these folks work with media creators all the time, so there’s some flexibility there, and those considerations are evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind.
Application Documents
You could be forgiven if you got tripped up here for way too long. I know I did. The first mention of documents on the Conceptualization Program page is the hot-pink-highlighted Guidelines and References section. Here you’ll find a link to the Conceptualization Program Guidelines mentioned previously as well as the download link for Reference Documents. The Reference Documents download is a zip file containing two appendices and a number of important-sounding-but-definitely-not-an-application-form PDFs.
It took me way too long to realize that if you move down the page to the very next section you’ll find the blue-highlighted Application Documents. Here you’ll find another download link. This one also downloads a zip file, and it’s in this zip file that you’ll find the three key PDFs:
- List of Required Documents
- Budget (template)
- Declaration of the Corporation’s Canadian status, and its Shareholders and Directors
Again, don’t panic about #3 just yet. In fact, don’t even panic about #2 just yet. Focus completely on that first PDF, because it will tell you all about the application itself, and in particular what you actually need to write and submit to apply for funding. There are several items listed here, and for 2022, these are as follows:
- Team Description (1 page)
- CVs (<= 3 pages each)
- Concept Description (<= 3 pages)
- History (1 page)
- Budget (template provided)
- Financing commitment letters or agreements
Let’s remind ourselves, first, that #6 is to be expected since CMF doesn’t do 100% funding. #5, as mentioned, is part of this zipped package.
#1, Team Description, has a fairly rigid structure, and we’ll get back to it in a sec.
The others, however, are relatively free-form. You’ll want to actually read through the descriptions, but you’ll notice that there really isn’t much guidance provided. Some of the Reference Documents may help here, but in reality these documents are an opportunity – your team should work to come up with the best possible version of each document using clear, evocative language.
You may even benefit from hiring someone to review your documents or even to help write them. Don’t look at me, I’m new to this too. But I understand there are folks who can help. Check your local gamedev community!
Now let’s return to document #1 in the list, the Team Description. This is one of the places (along with the budget) where you need to make sure you include any and all factors that might qualify your team for consideration under the Diversity Criteria.
Critically, you need to make sure anyone who is in one of the roles listed on the PERSONA-ID page has signed up and that their ID is included in this document and in the budget. You also need to make certain the people and IDs listed here and in the budget match.
When filling in the application in the Telefilm Canada Dialogue system, you’ll notice that there are several places to list folks as well. I’m not completely clear, yet, why the application page isn’t an acceptable Team Description, but I suspect the Team Description gives a chance to “sell” your team a little more than the Key Personnel and Directors and Shareholders sections of the application.
To be honest, it’s a little frustrating and nerve-wracking to have to cross-check three places (TD, Budget, application), but, again, this program is pretty generous, so the hoops seem worth it.
For me, though, the team description is likely to be something like:
Mike Murphy-Burton is the founder and sole developer behind Perfect Minute Games, a game development studio in St. John’s, NL. Since the founding of the company, Mike has worked with numerous independent developers on a variety of projects, including Disastrophe, a ROBLOX game released by Orange Slip Studios in 2019.
He is the Director and Senior Programmer for Powered A(r)mour.
It’s not exactly impressive, I guess? I’m not sure how to evaluate that. But it gets the point across. Part of the goal here is to find the best version of things to present to the folks at CMF, but that still means presenting reality.
Plus, I’ve been assured by folks at CMF that they do, in fact, consider projects from humble teams, so I’ll try to remain optimistic as long as I can.
Now that I’ve written the Team Description, I feel like I should at least take a first crack at the Concept Description as well.
Powered A(r)mour is a playful take on romance, shop management, and tactical RPG gameplay.
The game puts the player in the role of the owner and operator of a mechanic shop specializing in the pseudonymous powered armour suits. In the course of running the shop, players are tasked with hiring mechanics and attracting clientele, and helping the two groups navigate relationships between mechanic, pilot…and armour!
Powered A(r)mour’s romance elements attempt to tackle subject matter around gender and sexual orientation through a science fictional lens. Using such a lens has been suggested to provide a level of distance that allows people to avoid habitual or socially programmed responses to uncomfortable ideas. By presenting relationships through the shop mechanics rather than the player’s own character, the game ensures another level of distance. Using this framing also allows the player to watch multiple relationships of different types to develop, progress, and conclude throughout the game.
By immersing the player in a setting where relationships impact other gameplay elements, Powered A(r)mour tries to encourage players to invest in and explore aspects of identity that may not be part of their everyday experience.
Conclusion
So, that’s the process, more or less. There’s an application inside Telefilm Canada’s Dialogue system that you’ll need to fill out, as I mentioned, but it’s mostly information you’ll already have at hand.
I’d love to hear about who else is working on an application and for what, as well as whether you thought this guide was helpful.
Good luck!
Powered A(r)mour, or How I Spent My Morning This Vacation Day
I’ve put up a page for Powered A(r)mour, which is about as close as I get to making a project “official” these days.
I still don’t know exactly what the game will be, or whether the idea will work, but I’ve had a few folks in my social media circles agree to talk to me about some of the trickier subject matter I’d like to include.
Plus, I made a Pinterest board, so you know it’s srz bzns as the (now very old) kids say.
Mechanisms Print & Play Plus a Giveaway!
As part of the process of developing the game that has become Mechanisms, I built a bunch of prototypes. There’s the Tabletop Simulator mod, and a couple of versions on Screentop.gg, and I’m partway through a Tabletop Playground version for Protospiel Online.
But it’s never really a tabletop game until you have cards and chonky bits in your grubby little hands, is it? So I made a Print and Play, which has now had enough printing and playing done that I’m comfortable showing it to you. I recommend the 77mm components, but the 60mm ones are there if you have a small table or just prefer smaller cards and tiles in general.
A good friend of mine is even helping me test setting up a Cricut design so that I don’t have to cut 199 components out by hand every time (You don’t either, by the way – the P&P is organized so you can just cut out what you need as you need it) (but it’s still a lot of cutting).
In addition to the P&P version, I went ahead and laid out and ordered copies from two online game prototyping services – The Game Crafter and AdMagic’s Print and Play. I’m very interested to see how the two compare, but at the end of the day I don’t think I’ll need both on hand.
It occurred to me today that maybe someone might want one, even if it’s just to start the wood furnace (kidding – please don’t burn my baby!). So I’ve decided that once I have had a chance to look both of them over, I’ll give one of the two away, as a small thank you to you folks who’ve supported me as I’ve been figuring out this design.
I expect I’ll have the two copies in hand sometime in June, after which I’ll draw for a winner. Depending on interest levels, I might even scrounge up a few other goodies to give out as consolation prizes.
If you’re interested, join the Perfect Minute Games Discord server and react to the giveaway announcement (in the pinned posts in #mechanisms-beta) for a chance to win!
Meet Mechanisms!
I’ve been designing a tabletop game for a while now, and with Protospiel Online coming up (https://protospiel.online/prototype-games/april-2022/mechanisms-entry-1921/ ), I’ve been focused on making sure I have ways to play the game.
Tonight marks one of the big ones – I’ve started to get a few requests for a way to play the game in person. I tried out The Game Crafter and Print and Play Studio, but for a one-off printing both spots want over $150CAD, which I’ll be ok with – it’s my baby after all – but I don’t want to suggest it as an option to friends and family.
Enter the Print and Play – this is an option that many games use prior to publishing, whether it be licensed or crowdfunded. And, of course, I had to try it myself…
So that’s it. If you’re interested in trying it out, feel free to send me an email or message me on Twitter.
Hobbyism and a new game
I’ve backed off from taking PMG too seriously these days, as I don’t have time for all the things I want to do, and taking things less seriously is one way of coping. My goal is to keep creating games under the Perfect Minute banner, but without the pressure to make money. I think that’s doable.
With that in mind, I’ve started fiddling with an idea I’ve had for a pen and paper roleplaying game. This isn’t related to the Card RPG (at least not yet). Where that project is about finding a genuinely interesting and novel (to me) diceless and possibly GMless system that can be used for quick RPG-lite style play, this one is much more rooted in older games I’ve played and loved for one reason or another.
The new thing is more setting-focused, for one thing. One of my first experiences at the table, the best part of 30 years ago now, was a longish campaign in the Rifts setting. Rifts is a funny beast; its setting, in particular, is impossible to pigeonhole, combining as it does super-tech and mecha and Nazis and gods and magic and dragons and entirely too many other things. It famously discards any notion of balance between player characters in favour of OH MY GOD DID YOU SEE WHAT I CAN DO? It does this kind of stuff well, at least at the level of setting.
But. Rifts also has some really massive holes in it. Some are mechanical, and they’re simple enough to paper over for an individual game, maybe even a full campaign. If you’re willing to deal with the cut and paste books and some of the…difficult…writing, and and and. Or If you buy the Savage Rifts books.
And if you’re not, say, a member of a First Nation. Or a kid from Africa. Or basically any non-white person.
But I digress.
I’ve been thinking about what my take on a Kitchen Sink setting like Rifts would be for years. I’ve had individual notions about what a “real” mecha suit might look like, and I’m seeing it show up in media over time. I’ve played with different incarnations of mashup settings and mechanics.
But the seed of something good finally clicked for me recently when I posed myself the question What Do I Like About High Magic and High Tech?
I’m an avid reader of science fiction, and so I have a really strong notion of what I want the tech half of that to look like. At its core, the tech of the new thing is rooted in the works of folks like Greg Egan and Charlie Stross. They write almost unimaginable futures that challenge the concept of selfhood in the face of immortality. They frequently push the limits of your imagination as a reader; I can’t even imagine what it’s like to live inside their heads. How could I not use them as the starting point for my vision of Highest Possible Technology?
For magic, on the other hand, there was only ever one candidate for my core inspiration. See, shortly after that first game of Rifts, a bunch of us started fooling with White Wolf’s World of Darkness games. Our “main” DM started with Vampire, and then our “off” DM got into Werewolf, and then I bought Mage: the Ascension, and it changed how I think of magic and just about everything else.
Mage, particularly the Ascension incarnation, isn’t really a roleplaying game per se. It’s more of a whole-brain metaphysical workout regimen. The notion of magic it purveys is rooted in the concept that belief makes reality, which sounds like something Tony Robbins might say, but it’s a deeply powerful idea in roleplaying terms. The game hit me at the height of my adolescent powers while I was on a whiplash trajectory of life changes, and instead of calming me down it kicked me up about four notches. I can never be anything but grateful for its influence.
So that’s the seed: Taking my lead from Rifts’ gonzo, go-for-broke mashupisms, I’m going to try to design a game where magic that directly incarnates reality interacts with tech that pushes the limits of possibility. I’ve already started tweaking that mix, throwing in a few doses of my own creative energy and stuffing the whole works into a “bright forest” universe (like a Dark Forest, but less murderey). We’ll see where it takes me.
It’s called Demiurges, at least for now. I hear that Kult uses that word as a pretty key part of its setting, but, you know. It’s a word. I like the sound of it. It means what I need it to mean. So. Demiurges. Watch this space for more details.
If you’re interested in being more involved, you can sign up for the mailing list that I just created.
Learning Highlight: Entrepreneurship in Game Development
I’ve been spending a lot of my time in the last couple of months thinking about how I might move Perfect Minute Games from the “advanced hobbyist” phase it’s in to more of a professional entity. One of the big questions that comes up in that process is how to bootstrap a company. If you have some money available, that’s a big help, but if you don’t, or even if you’re just not careful enough with what you do have, then it’s a steep hill to climb.
If you don’t already know him, Jason Della Rocca is one of the founders of Execution Labs. He gave a talk at GDC 2017 about Advanced Entrepreneurship, and the more I watch it the more value I get from it.
In particular, I’ve started really focusing on his idea of “scaffolding” your games, so that you plan your company’s games so that you can leverage the work from the current game to build the next one and the one after that.
For me, Beat Farmer fits into a series of games that all fall under the broad umbrella of music-driven games. Ideally the games that follow will build out and up in terms of scope and complexity and richness of the whole experience, and get some system and financial support from the fruits of the preceding games.
I’d really recommend watching this talk more than once. I watched it a while ago, and again today, and I expect to watch it at least once more. Some things are just like that – you need to go away and think and build your own ideas a bit, then come back and see what still resonates for you. Writing is like that, as is game design. If you, like me, are not a bizdevver first, you can still try this approach and maybe learn enough to make it work.
Design Prototyping: Card RPG
Perfect Minute Games is primarily focused on video games, but one of the fun secrets about game design is that paper is always an option for prototyping mechanics. And if you can prototype on paper, you can implement the whole thing on paper.
(Well, sort of. I found out quickly that there are hard limits on how much paper prototyping you can do with a game like Contension without also building the dynamic experience in code!)
The new project, then: It’s a card game. Specifically, it’s a card game taking design notes from RPG-adjacent boardgames like Gloomhaven, Pathfinder Adventures, and Descent; from light RPGs like Fiasco and Thornwatch; from heavier but non-traditional RPGs like Fantasy Flight Games’ excellent Star Wars and Genesys systems and from the Fate RPG; and, finally, from some really interesting indie RPGs like Phoenix: Dawn Command, Ten Candles, and Tavern Tales.
The initial iteration of the game is focused on simple, purely card-driven mechanics and is playable as a regular game akin to Munchkin and other Expandable Card Games. I have, in parallel, been fleshing out an expansion that adds roleplaying elements.
As I’m not an artist, it all looks pretty terrible right now, especially given that there’s no built-in “setting” or “theme”. Please keep that in mind(!) when I’m a little further along and post some shots of the game and “cards” in action.
I haven’t decided whether I’ll establish a theme or setting to “ship” with the core game. At the moment, as with most of my initial designs, it’s mechanics-driven, and I think I can create something compelling without the need to tie it to a single setting.
I’d much rather have expansions (or “splats”, as some folks call ’em) that contribute their own unique mechanics and style sitting on top of the core game. But a lot of the interesting work for projects like this comes down to creating the worlds that players inhabit. So we’ll see.