Operation: Front Yard, Week Three

Operation: Front Yard now enters its third week. This time around I managed to clear the weeds out of about a third of our front yard proper. This was a lot more work than the site strip that I cleared out last weekend because the weeds were more deeply rooted and had formed quite a mesh of herbiage webbing across the ground. Last week's method of saturating the ground did help, but mostly on the edges of the yard. Toward the center, going was tough.

Next weekend I'm planning to clear through to our Ecachia tree, then the week after that I'm going to finish the front yard.

We did receive our Mock Strawberry seeds toward the end of last week. They're about the tiniest things I ever saw, which I suppose makes sense given what Unmocked Strawberry seeds look like. Kimberly was going to plant them yesterday, but she was too tired, but then she ended up spending 30 or 60 minutes pulling little blooming green weedlets from the strip I cleared last week. So, less incipient weeds, but no plantings.

She said she was going to do the planting today, else I'll do it this evening after work if it isn't already done. I want to get our little strawberries going so that we can get them strong & planted in the yard before rainy season comes up and brings all the weeds back.

We'll see how this whole growing from seeds things works; I have grave doubts that a plant could ever grow from something so tiny.

CCG: Declined!

Just got a letter declining my CCG design. The publisher mentioned a few quirks in the gameplay, but said that their main concerns were theming, that it didn't entirely fit with the licensed property. I sort of agree with one of the theming complaints, though I think it was partially (not entirely) an issue of my not explaining it well enough, and mostly disagree with the other. But, being the publishers for this license, they're innately right.

They're still looking for designs, so I could revamp this one, but it would require tossing out one of my most central systems and figuring out how to reposition the whole game, and I don't have the energy for that right now, with how tiring the last few weeks I have been. I'm going to probably touch some bases to see if there is anyone interested in doing this as a generic SF game, and beyond that write some articles on the whole process if the publisher doesn't object.

But, it's largely on the back burner now, and I now have an interesting and relatively complete game system in my back pocket, which is more than I could have said two months ago.

I don't need any "I'm sorry"s or anthing like that. As I wrote at GenCon, when I saw who some of my competition was I largely gave up hope of selling this game in this form. It looks like even that competition didn't submit anything stunning, and the game was declined mainly on its own merits, but still, it's what I expected.

Getting real attention and some thorough testing is more than most people would expect from a first game design submission.