Dev Pile: Dev Pile 2025 Wrapup

As the year ends I try to take some time tro reflect on all the things I did in that time. This means that yes, there are a few posts these last few days that have been about looking at my work overall of the year, and maybe an attempt to encourage you to check out some free stuff to read that I think you’ll enjoy, but not here. No, the purpose of Dev Pile is to be a reflective process of – well, the point of Dev Pile is going to be one of the things this post is about in the whole of it, so perhaps I’m getting ahead of myself.

The original purpose of Dev Pile was to be something that I could integrate into my writing schedule that demanded an immediacy and ongoing engagement that also helped me to demonstrate how often and how regularly I was making games. I wanted to paper the record, and show that I wasn’t just theorising about games but the many different forms the work took. There are some good things about this process and some bad things, and I’d like to talk about them.

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Dev Pile: Revising Crowdfund This!

Last week, I suggested that I had gotten better as a designer, and this week I’d like to present to you an example of the process I’m going to go through for addressing and improving one of my earlier designs. The design I selected is a sore point for me because the game is fun to play and I’ve never had it fail with people I love, but I always feel like I’m handing out a bad game. It’s at the point where I don’t sell the game at full price any more.

The game is Crowdfund This!.

Also, this was primarily spoken aloud and then transcribed because my head hurts and my hand hurts so I apologise if I spell things in an American way. Hopefully I come back and fix that.

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Dev Pile: Well AM I Better At Making Games?

When talking about reflection on your own process and your own work, there’s a foundational challenge: where you are when you do that reflection. Any person is going to be affected by the situation they’re in. That’s just the nature of existing in a reality full of interactions. Not a lot of room to not be connected to things as a timeless spaceless mind outside of reality, which is obviously what we’d want if we wanted to be truly objective in our analysis of ourselves.

Because of this, reflection on complicated things often needs a system to give you something to handle. I’ve talked about this in the context of reflecting on big life events and personal development — like asking, “Am I a good partner?” or “Am I a good person?” which are both well beyond my scope. I instead used the example of reflecting on improving at playing Magic: The Gathering, which I will make clear, neither makes me a good person or a good partner. In fact there was a point that I in fact did the opposite. At the time, described how one could hypothetically apply this same set of tools to imagine the question: “Am I, Talen Lee, any better at making games?”

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Dev Pile: Improvement

How do you get better at things?

How do you get better at things that are really complex?

How do you get better at things that are really complex and your emotions get in the way?

Content Warning: This is going to involve talking about a process of making things, but it’s also going to involve talking about Magic: The Gathering, but you don’t need to understand the game to follow me.

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Dev Pile: Vampiric Update

Two weeks ago I wrote about how the Vampire class in 4th edition D&D sucks. That was an exercise in demonstrating the boundaries of a design goal, in which I laid out that I wanted a design that fit with the function of the existing Vampire and could operate in a way that doesn’t displace existing design. I then, because that article was already 1500 words, figured that I should tackle what that actually looks like later.

This post is not going to show you like, properly formatted 4th edition mechanical material, because that’s kinda wordy and it’s a pain in the arse to format and I don’t think it’s inherently interesting to you unless you’re actually here for Vampire material. Don’t worry, though, there will be a place for it soon™. Instead, this post is going to be about describing the kinds of things I actually have done and then a discussion of how to iterate on this kind of design with minimal playtesting.

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https://press.invincible.ink/dev-pile-2025-48-vampiric-update/

#DevPile2025 #DnD4e

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 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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Dev Pile: Finite Space

Gunna talk about material limits

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Dev Pile: Blood And Bones

Starting next week, I will be in a classroom with a bunch of students talking about ideation and experimentation. That’s going to involve some generative tools and showing them ways that they can use those tools to launch off ideas. My plan is to take them the skeleton of Moonshiners and show them the way that these tools can be used to generate the templates of card faces. Then, when I have those concept assets generated, I can show them the steps I go through to take those ideas and make them into my own.

The aim here is to demonstrate the use of these tools as a kind of word calculator. I use Excel to do math for me, and I use it to generate random things. I use texture libraries and public domain art, I know that there is a value to having convenient things to prime the pump, to set up a template.

Anyway, because I have Moonshiners in a skeletal form, and I want to use that class exercise to demonstrate the process on that skeleton, what I’m going to do this week is talk a bit about progress on Bloodwork.

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Dev Pile: Starter Kit

Making dev piles is a new experience for the blog in that they are explicitly deliberately timely. Where most of the work on this blog is thrown weeks, sometimes months in advance if it doesn’t fit neatly in a single spot, I am trying to make sure I write any given Dev Pile article covering the ‘week before’ the article goes up. This is a new kind of work for me, and it’s necessitated working ahead.

The week this article is being ‘written in’ is the week after Cancon. I had a plan for this week: I was going to spend the week writing an article developing the game dev I did, at cancon, in the dull periods at the table between the sales. Thing is, this year, that did not happen – Cancon was pretty much completely constant, so much so that the first day I didn’t even notice I never pulled out my notebook and what notes did get taken during the whole event were surface, or sketching out some minor ideas.

Therefore instead of a single intense focus here, this is going to be something of a hello and hey, here’s how to get started article about game making, tools, and prototyping.

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