So there's the little lady who's been keeping me away from this blog.Never fear, though, my design work has continued. In February, I participated in Nathan Paoletta's BibliOdyssey RPG Design Challenge, designing "In Frankenstein's Wake," a hybrid RPG-board game that is intended to be pick-up-and-play. Think competitive graverobbing and wooing of patrons in the quest to create life from dead flesh. And low and behold, the game went and won the Most Playable category and will be playtested by Nathan and company up at Storygames Boston. Color me excited!
This year's Game Chef competition is also moving towards its close as peer judging goes on. I designed a children's game set in ancient Persia called "Children of the Magi," which uses the players' memory as the conflict resolution mechanic. My daughter is, of course, much too young to playtest the game for me, but the future possibility of introducing her to role-playing was my inspiration in designing the game.
In both contests, I went in with a design agenda in mind apart from the constraints of the contest itself. For BibliOdyssey I wanted to see if I could design a game that required no advance prep, no character creation or collaborative setting creation, and could be played in a single sitting. I see a lot of room for such games in the marketplace as gamers become increasingly busy and unable to commit time for prep or continuing campaigns. I'm very pleased with the design and it may well move to the top of my development stack once The Committee is completed and published (more on that effort next post).
My goals were similar for Game Chef - I wanted to design a kids game regardless of the ingredients. I struggled mightily with this design and wrapping my head around the functions of the text (to be read and used by the adult running the game) and the play experience of the children. I think once my daughter is older I'll have a much better insight into how to design for kids, but for now I was left reading educational Web sites and hoping for the best. I'm hoping to find some families willing to playtest the game for me and help me develop it for eventual publication. There aren't nearly enough role-playing games for kids out there, something I think is vital if we want to keep the hobby going strong.
So life is good, the baby is cute, and my design work is moving forward. And now my blog is updated, too.
Cheers,
Eric
