Up Next: Melancholy Kaiju

It looks like it's worked out that the next game I'll be putting out is Melancholy Kaiju. I've been blathering about it a lot, but it's a game about giant monsters who are kinda sad trying to make their way in everyday life. I came up with the title ages ago, inspired by designer vinyl toys I'd seen in places like the Super 7 shop in San Francisco, but it was relatively recently that I figured out what kind of game I wanted to make with the idea and how. In playtesting it lived up to the name to the point where I added rules for a happy epilogue to help avoid letting it become too depressing. The mechanics were heavily inspired by Ben Lehman's game Hot Guys Making Out, and in essence it's an exercise in shared storytelling/narration, where you take turns playing cards, which provide guidelines for the kinds of things you can narrate.

I finally sat down and started seriously reading The Non-Designer's Design Book by Robin Williams (the designer, not the comedian), and Melancholy Kaiju is going to be the first of my projects to apply what I've been learning from it. I've wound up having a lot of projects that need some basic layout, but for which I can't justify the expense of hiring a professional designer (much as I'd love to get Clay to work on every little random thing for me), so it'll be extremely helpful to be able to do more and better layout stuff myself. Even doing the layout in Word I've been able to make some major improvements by applying the lessons from the book, and I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in that sort of thing.

I also decided to get a subscription to The Noun Project's Pro level, which includes their really excellent app for OS X that lets you search for icons and drag and drop directly into documents. I've used them via the Creative Commons license (like a lot), but the paid version, especially with the app, is that much easier to work with.

I got my friend Thinh Pham (whose work you may recognize from Mascot-tan and the pieces he did for Uresia) to do up a set of 6 sample kaiju for the game. I gave him minimal guidance (basically that I wanted to include a giant office lady and a giant lizard), and handed him a book on Ultra Kaiju (the kaiju from Ultraman). I'm really happy with the results, and it's been fun to take his designs and put together appropriately silly character writeups. I've attached his sketches, so you can see Beatzilla (part giant lizard, part Bluetooth speaker), The Amazing Colossal Office Lady (Ueno-san to you), Parfaitrah, Hole Punch Man, MUKO (Massive Unidentified Kawaii Organism), and King Emo.