New Forum

[Chad]

Fear the Boot Game Designers Guild

Sent: Thu Jan 10, 2019 4:28 pm
From: zircher
Recipient: Chad
With the eventual shutdown of G+ and the closing of the FtB Game Design group there, I'd like to open up a sub-board here on the forums to host video game and table top game design conversations. Like the G+ group, it would be a place to discuss tips, design ideas, offer/seek help, post news, and current projects. While the forum does have a video game section for players, I would like to see a creator's guild for users to share and learn about tools, art pipelines, programming, etc.

This is generally going to be Zircher's thing as I don't do any video game dev.

[zircher]

Thanks for the prompt action! This section of the forum is for video and table top game designers and those that want to learn. So, it will be a mish-mash of news, AMAs, sharing of ideas, people looking for proofing/feedback, and the like. It's inspired by the Fear the Boot Game Designer group that was on G+. But, with G+ shutting its public doors, I'd like to bring those discussions back here.

For those that don't know me, I'm a computer programmer that dabbles in video game design, 3d graphics, table top/RPG game design, web apps, and more. I literally started as a game designer before I was a role playing gamer. Back in the late 70's, my brother and I heard about D&D and were so excited (and poor) that we created our own d66 powered dungeon crawler.

On the video game front, I've used Unity, GameMaker/GMS, Dark Basic Pro, three.js, javascript/HTML5, and I'm currently getting up to speed on Godot. On the table top side, I'm the creator of The Trouble with Rose, It's not my Future, Rewind: Temporal Tales, It's not my Fortune! (not on DTRPG yet), and Four Houses in Amber. I'm also a big fan of the solo RPG community, so I specifically like to make random tools and tables to help players with that creative spark.

[harborpirate]

I'm really glad this has found a new home.

[Leoff]

Great! There are two board games I'm working on, myself. For Wisdom, I'm at the point where I have to get cards made up to try it out properly; but the rules fit on a single page, so it isn't that complex. For the cards, it's down to a bunch of scanning and cut-and-paste (the part where I get lost). And I love reading about other people's games.

[zircher]

A shameless plug about a shameless plug, here on the FtB we have a small group of Big Red Couch fans. While BRC can be classified as entertainment (and quite good fun at a that.) It is also a great podcast for creative thinking. The BRC crew takes a topic from their mystery box and then presents multiple game ideas based on it. They even take audience contributions and have done guest spots. If you like that kind of design puzzle/challenge, it's worth checking out.
https://www.feartheboot.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=27&t=19333

[zircher]

As if I don't have enough on my plate, I'm providing technical assistance to a fellow that wants to add a bunch of Mass Effect ships to the Empty Epsilon bridge simulator. http://daid.github.io/EmptyEpsilon/

It turns out that there is a big Homeworld mod that did all the file extraction from the game itself and the first phase is just a matter of converting files from that into a format that EE can digest. After that, it will be a matter of creating EE ship templates (a lua file that contains resources and game info) and then build ME specific scenarios using those imported ships. So, if you like Artemis, but wanted to play in the ME universe, that might well be a thing in the future.

[zircher]

With the FtB Game Design group on G+ shutting down next week, I'll see about scavenging any valuable links. I think most of them were time sensitive such as software sales and free book offers. I'll keep an eye out on Packt for any new freebies.

[zircher]

Since this isn't project or tools related, we'll pretend the new forum thread is also the news forum thread.

Here's an interesting article over on Game Dev...
9-tips-on-making-an-indie-game-from-a-solo-developer

TL;DR? Don't quit your day job, but don't quit on your dream either.