Observations of the Fox

I've been meaning to get to this, but it just hasn't happened. Life has been too busy...but here goes, the first seven. I'm going to approach these prompts from the direction of my game design work with Vulpinoid Studios... 1. First Like most game designers, my first attempts were modifications of the systems I loved to play. I hacked, I cobbled together bits and pieces from different systems, and I threw away the bits I didn't like. I thought they were awesome, but they were probaby awful. They were basically a shiny mix of dazzling surface, with no decent solid core.  The first game I designed from scratch was called Platinum Storm, it was also the first game I sold copies of at conventions. It ran off a percentile system, becase I thought they were great at the time. It was based on a pseudo-Japanese Empire, because I loved samurai and ninja. Of course, as a typical white guy in the early 1990s, most of my understanding of Japanese culture came from elus...

There is currently a poll to determine the name of the Egyptian underworld scroll game I'm working on. Originally I was going with the name "Duat", but I decided to look at other underworld names, or words associated with the Egyptian underworld. I encountered "Amenti" as an alternate underworld title, and "Maat" connected with the judgement of the soul. Between these and others, that gave too many choices and left me with option paralysis. If you'd like to add your input, you can visit the poll here... ...or you could just add a comment here on the blog. As I write this, "Amenti" is in the lead. (I also considered using "Papyrus" as a font for this project, but thought that it wouldn't be fair even to use that font in a hipster ironic sense).

I had created up a deck of cards for players to draw from as their characters sought to make their way toward the Fields of Aaru, but certain elements of the cards didn't quite feel right. I wasn't sure what was missing about them, or what was off, but something just didn't gel with the ideas I had for the wider game. I think this may have simply been due to too many component mechanisms, not knowing fully how they interacted with one another, but instinctively knowing that certain gears in the overall machine didn't mesh. Drawing out the map has helped. As an example, I had a "Sandstorm" card. If this card was drawn when arriving at a location, all of the paths between locations (except for the one just arrived on) would be blocked by the storm...basically turning this location into a dead end and requiring a character to find a different path to continue their journey. Once the map had been drawn up, I realised that this really wasn't going to work. ...

The core element of the scroll game, not surprisingly is the scroll. I've been trying to think of a good layout for the scroll and this has required drawing up a range of options. At this stage, I'm tending toward a layout like this... ...but note that this is not the final image, and the scroll will be styled to look far more like a piece of Egyptian antiquity. The point I'm trying to make here is the way the scroll is divided into 7 segments with 3 sections each. Scattered locations exist along the two sides of the river, and there are a few locations which are a bit more difficult to reach (marked with the white dots). As a reward for visiting these less accessible locations, a bonus treasure would be made available. The basic mechanism of the game has the characters starting at the river delta and working their way upstream (though I might need to do a bit more historical research here...it might be more culturally appropriate to have the characters trave...

At the beginning of the year I was toying with revisiting the concept of a game on a scroll. I looked at it first a few years ago, and in the meantime "Fall of Magic" has been released and has received all sorts of accolades. I've let it slide again, while I've been working on my series of paintings, but in the last couple of days I've been thinking about it again. A fairly simple game, where the players portray recently dead Egyptians in the ancient world...cooperatively trying to reach the Fields of Aaru by passing through a series of gates protected by the sentinels of the underworld, and trying to keep a step ahead of the hordes of Anubis. As players progress through the game their characters explore the events of their life, and the moments that might allow them to pass into the afterlife, or face oblivion. At the moment I'm working with a bunch of idea components that I know have worked in the past, and they generally seem to fit together as a co...

(This post probably won't make a lot of sense without reading the previous one ) Knowing that our 2 player game will last on average 32 turns, the 3 player game 24 turns, 4 player game 21 turns and 5 player game 18 turns, we need to know how quickly to open up the game for exploration potential. This applies to almost any RPG scenario, but it's often something that a lot of designers just don't think about. At the start of play I like to have a limited range of potential for exploration and character development, at this point the game is more about establishing the ouevre. Then as the game progresses we see more opportunity to explore the world in a way that makes sense with what we already know. As play comes to it's conclusion, more choices end up leading to a climax. You could look at this by saying that we have a few choices at the beginning, more in the middle, and less at the end, but I think of it differently. The range of choices is always decreasing, rig...

I've been thinking about this "scroll game" concept, where the characters work their way up the scroll through exploration, but the bottom of the scroll gradually winds up to represent some threat that gradually approaches. At this stage I'm toying with the idea of Egyptian souls making a journey across the lands of the dead, trying to reach a chance at a just judgment at the hands of Osiris, before the hordes of Anubis swarm across them and obliterate their souls completely. There will be several paths to take, basically divided into the left bank, the right bank and the river, and there will be obstacles to face along the way each of which will reveal something about the character's life before they died and began that journey. As the story unfolds we learn more about the characters, and their chances of passing judgement (if they make it that far), we also gain traits that might vary the speed of the scroll unwinding toward judgement, or vary the speed of the...