In mid July, Oath crossed a major development milestone: design lock. This means that all of the core systems are no longer subject to any change. I still have some work on the solo game ahead of me and want to take the cards through another round of editing, but the game is getting very close to being fully done.

At Leder Games we spend a lot of time thinking about form factor and presentation, this diary is focused on finally sharing all that effort with you! Fort may technically be a "smaller" game for us but you'll notice we still pulled out all the stops.

We’ve spent the last few weeks discussing Forts development process. focusing mainly on the mechanics, rules and usability. This week it’s time to discuss theme and art! So without further ado...

When developing Fort, I think the icon system and layout were easily the most important parts of my job. Having played SPQF, I knew the mechanical structure of the game was already rock solid, but as I shared the game with others it became clear that the icons and layout often tripped new players up. Because they were spending so much time trying to parse their cards, they had less time to think about the actual gameplay.

Yesterday, Leder Games withdrew from participation in Origins Online. We made this choice for two reasons. First, we wanted to make it clear that there was no room for silence on matters of inclusion and police brutality.

Last week, Grant talked about the creation of SPQF as well as his goals for the design as a whole. Today, I'll mainly talk about my relationship with card games, why I have such a passion for them, and how that translated into the development of SPQF into Fort.

To find the origins of Fort, we must excavate the tattered marble of antiquity. Though in this case it wasn’t marble, but wood. Still, a squirrel in a toga is close enough, and better than no toga at all. At least it is for this historical comparison to make any sense. Before Fort, there was SPQF.

Today we're releasing the second public print-and-play kit for Oath, and it seemed like a good time to bring everyone up to speed on the game's development since I wrote to you last in January. I also wanted to take this opportunity talk a little about game development generally and my own personal practices.

Throughout the campaign, I've received dozens of requests (mostly polite) for me to write about how Oath plays as a solo game and with two players. This is something that I would have loved to talk about earlier, but it's always felt too early to really dig into how the bot works. But, recently the design has started to settle down and it seemed like a good time to share it's general shape.