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Crosspost from chat thread: Just put out my weapon generator/picker, Humblebird's Modest Armory.  It's a departure from my usual style of exploring the fantastic corners of an enormous design space, which is why the Armory is Modest. I wanted a better way to pick various weird polearms than "browse the AD&D 1e list and end up taking the halberd anyway because it has the best stats" and there didn't seem to be one, so I made one myself. Along the way I learned a lot about medieval gunpowder weapons, which are very much included, and even if you don't buy it I want everyone to know that samurai used handheld rocket launchers. Next in the pipeline, I've got a cartoon villain plot generator (originally inspired by Pokemon plots but since expanded a bit), and on the back burner I've got a dream generator and fantasy industrial chemistry generator simmering.
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Jan 4, 2020 21:31
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 17:45 |
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Hedningen posted:If you can’t tell, I’m really not confident in my abilities as a writer or artist despite the work I’ve put in, so for actually-properly-releasing-stuff people: how do you get over that? It’s not criticism that’s the issue, as one of my volunteer editors is good at harsh-yet-effective criticism, but just a kind of block like “no one could ever possibly enjoy this, so why bother releasing anything?” For my first one (Humblebird's Lost Cities Generator), the whole project really just happened by accident and kept escalating. Started out just daydreaming about Atlantis, then I started taking notes, then I wound up with usable tables, then I decided to try making a PDF, then I learned more about making PDFs and made a point of making it not look like dogshit, then I polished it a bit more and by that point I had something that looked halfway professional. At that point, I figured there wasn't anything to lose by trying to sell it. Second project (Humblebird's Infinite Monsters), gotta agree with "spite" here. Any time I started worrying about flaws I might have missed or didn't have the energy to fix, I just had to remind myself that it'd be competing with "you summon a fungus demon with adhesive teats and gossamer fangs, that's it, that's the monster." For every project, just talking about it with friends is a good way to remind yourself that you're creating something of value. With my generators I have to admit it's relatively easy, because I can do a "playtest" by myself in some 15 minutes and then report the results ("hey imagine this monster: a walking clawfoot bathtub with a giant catfish in it, the bathtub can spray water from its showerhead and the catfish has prehensile barbels.") If you're designing a multiplayer game, playtesting it with a couple friends and then talking about the playtest with other people around can help you see for yourself that people appreciate your work and that you're creating something of value. Speaking of not getting hung up on flaws, remember that you can update PDFs even after publishing. You can fix typos, revise rules after more thorough playtesting, or implement new PDF features and nobody will care that it used to be less good before.
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Jan 6, 2020 02:05
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Agent Rush posted:This might be kind of a broad question, but does anyone have advice for using a pen name or handle? Or would it just be better to use my legal name for anything I'm trying to sell? I've had precisely one issue with using "Humblebird Publications" as a pseudonym on DTRPG, and that's that responding to customer comments gives out your Firstname Lastinitial. Other than that, it's been smooth sailing. Actually picking the name and logo involved a lot of spitballing, and I went with Humblebird Publications because 1) it wasn't taken, 2) I liked the idea of the logo framing text with a hummingbird's long tongue, and 3) I think the idea of hummingbirds living in underground warrens like bumblebees is funny. So yeah, my suggestion is to come up with something you find funny but which isn't obviously trying to be a joke. --- Anybody else ever find yourselves making more content just to give yourself more flexibility in layout? My villain scheme generator started with one page of tables, then I made an alternate set of smaller "serious" tables, which I couldn't justify putting on their own page, but they wouldn't fit on the first page, and putting it on the same page as explanatory text ruined the flow for either the serious or cartoony plots. I ended up making two pages of villain generator tables in the meantime, and now I've got 1) Cartoony Schemes, 2) Serious Schemes and part of Villain Design, 3) the rest of Villain Design, plus a modest amount of negative space on each page to move stuff around as needed.
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Feb 15, 2020 22:50
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