9.14.26
EVERYTHING TAKES 20 MINUTES: JACK OF ALL TRADES, FINISHER OF NOTHING
earlier this year max and i were on the border of wisconsin, playing flutes and synthesizers for the rumpus soundtrack, and we were done for the day, so we were getting ready to play a game, and i was very excited because it was going to be the first time max had played HORT HOGS: THEY ARE IN TERRIBLE PAIN BUT THIS IS WAR. i had been keeping it SECRET from max up until that point because as rumpus has continued to morph into its final form there have been many fun and interesting ideas that needed to be trimmed away because they were no longer right for the game, and hort hogs is the vessel that often accepts these little cast-off pieces, which seems fitting for a game about giant hot dog mechs. so i was very very excited.
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| MINNESOTA | MINNESOTA |
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| WISCONSIN | WISCONSIN |
"how long do you think it will take to get hort hogs ready" max must have asked, because i told him "i think it will be 20 minutes, which means it'll probably be 40 minutes", and we must have been trying to decide how to divide our time, so maybe we weren't quite done for the day, because max went back to work on one of the songs and i began to cut out hort hogs and tokens. max finished what he was doing and i was cutting out meat anomalies. max went to sleep, and i went to sleep, and i woke up, and i cut out the forests and hills, and we were ready to play! only 20 minutes later!*
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| TUNNEL | |
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| HILL | HOLE |
apparently that was in july! i have written so many blog posts since then, in my heart: here are some of them:
- the name of the 72: magic words and numbers in HORT HOGS: THEY ARE IN TERRIBLE PAIN BUT THIS IS WAR
- let's make an obstacle for RUMPUS
- why can't i finish this giant
- whatever happened to FROGS TOWER?
- i love CINCO PAUS
- vile slime garden yee haw roundup 2026
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| POND |
i think this blog post is vile slime garden yee haw roundup 2026, because that's always what i want to write. it's my favorite kind of post, just roll everything up into a big ball of half-rotten things and say a little bit about each one and heave the whole thing on up into the cosmos. are you ready? in order of "most 20 minutes" to "fewest 20 minutes", we have:
RUMPUS
over the past few months max and i have concentrated all of our beam weapons on Finishing The Rumpus Manual And All Of The Cards in advance of the kickstarter (February 2027!! please sign up to be yelled at in February). the last 10% of a game, the finishing touches, it is so much. every week it seemed like we flew around to 16 different parts of the game and made 32 little changes and then we had to test 64 things to make sure everything still worked. we are done with that now** but we probably aren't done, but now it is very weird for something to break in playtesting and all the paragraphs have been written so it feels like we are done.
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| LET US YELL AT YOU IN FEBRUARY |
i think about rumpus constantly but reading old entries, it doesn't look like i really write about it as much as i think i do. when max and i were writing the kickstarter story it took us awhile to even figure out how long we had been working on it. it's been over 3 years at this point, 4 hours every sunday, the dark morning hours while the mortal world dreams.
RUMPUS LIL GUYS
awhile ago*** we asked tine fieldling to sculpt 12 lil guys for rumpus, based on the art of brett manning, and just look at them and how wonderful they are:
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| WHAT LOVELY LIL GUYS |
WONDERFUL. i have been working on painting them lately and did you know it's fun to paint! fun to just sit there and imagine what the lil guy is doing and why he loves to have red boots! the three i have finished are the troupe i always play when max and i are testing something in tabletop simulator, BONKY, ALIEN, and LONGARMS. behold! and further behold their original illustrations by brett!
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BONKY |
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ALIEN |
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LONGARMS |
because i can't ever just do something, i also have been making little terrains for them to stand on and around. i had a chunk of foam that i used to test the colors for PEACEFUL POOLS and i thought, i will just make a little riser out of it, and then it turned into like a tiny version of PEACEFUL POOLS, which is nice because that board is at DARK FUTURE DUNGEON and i miss it :( since it is only one pool, i named it THE HILL OF THE DREAM POND using the RUMPUS FAIRY HOUSE NAME GENERATOR and i really like how it turned out.
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| FOAM AND GOOP | BIRTHDAY CAKE WATER |
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| FLOCK | FAIRYLAND |
next up is max's troupe, and their color is RED, so they will be appearing with some toadstools that i made with miles (my youngest child). each mini should take me about 20 minutes to paint.
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FOIL AND WIRE | CLAY | MEDIUM MUSH | HUGE MUSH |
FESTIVAL RUMPUS 2
i've been chipping away at getting our second issue of FESTIVAL RUMPUS ready for print. along with hort hogs this is the most layout i have ever done for anything and i am learning a lot. this project and HORT HOGS: THEY ARE IN TERRIBLE PAIN BUT THIS IS WAR have firmly pushed me away from using GIMP for everything and i'm mostly happy about that and only a little bit resentful. this zine is about 70% done; estimated time to completion: 20 minutes.
HORT HOGS: THEY ARE IN TERRIBLE PAIN BUT THIS IS WAR
remember in march when HH:TAITPBTIW001:AMMB2H was almost done?? well now it is almost done. i took some extra time to work on the meat anomaly rules, i revised the standees and tokens (which i hadn't even finished in march), and i am working on illustrating the manual. rumpus is receiving Very Much More of my time right now, mostly due to the difference in scale between Preparing A Box Board Game For Kickstarter That Must Be Manufactured and Making a Zine, but every once in awhile i must draw more scenes from the hot dog apocalypse so it is marching forward.
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| TOC | |
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| MMAALL DATASHEET | EEAALL DATASHEET |
the meat anomaly really slowed me down for awhile. dellon and i wanted the meat anomaly to follow the same rules that the eventual meat anomaly faction would follow for activation and actions, and i am very very happy with the rules we wrote. they were really difficult to automate though - every time we thought we had nailed it down we would find other edge cases where the anomaly would need some discretion. the central one is the COMMUNION action. meat anomalies roll all their meat dice at once, instead of one-at-a-time like hort hogs, and then they can spend a die to "reroll a useless die". but what makes a die useless? a human can decide, oh, i have 3 fives, i am going to reroll my other two dice to try and get another five, and this four is nice but doesn't help me, so it's USELESS, but it's harder to write a concise rule to automate that decision-making. so i tried and tried and then gave up, and made it so the meat anomaly has "priorities" (mainly, assimilate all visible meat) and it's up to the player-with-the-initiative to execute them as they see fit.
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MEATEORITE DIDN'T BRYAN DO SUCH A BEAUTIFUL JOB PAINTING IT? I'M SO SORRY I KEEP CHANGING THE GAME BRYAN, I THINK I'M DONE NOW |
HH:TAITPBTIW001:AMMB2H is about 40 pages, and i've illustrated about 5 of them. i estimate that it will take me about 12 hours to finish the rest of the zine.
IT TURNS OUT
it turns out this was a rumpus and hort hogs post, and that is fitting because it has been a rumpus and hort hogs life. visit us next time while we discuss these topics, and more:
- new bwamps 2
- goblins and chaos warriors
- harlequins and space circles
- are you a bad enough dude to make a mould box
SOYEZ GAGNANT!
- twillbo baddins
*i have been told it was 4 hours later, like an actual 4 hours later, not a spongebob 4 hours later. is that the truth? YOU BE THE JUDGE
**after i wrote this max and i redid line-of-sight and it works so well but i am also feeling that the whole game is growing and changing treacherously when we are not looking at it
***20 minutes ago
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