Observations of the Fox

I knew it was coming soon, if there had been a few more of those weird anomalies where the blog gets thousands of views each day for a week or so, it would have happened last month...if there had been a lull in viewership if probably would have happened next month. But with consistency, it happened today. We reached 1.5 million views, not long before writing my 2500th post (which is still a couple of posts away). That means on average, we're looking at about 600 views per post.  The top viewed few posts actually vary a bit from that.  Map Drawing Tutorial 1 (22.6k views) Map Drawing Tutorial 4 (13.4k views) Map Drawing Tutorial 2 (13k views) Map Drawing Tutorial 3 (12k views) A Guide to Geomorphs (Part 7) (7.3k views)  This is hardly surprising since I saw a bunch of my map tutorials circulating on Pinterest while I was using it.  There are 38.5k views of my Map Tutorials page, so I guess people have found that, and have linked across to other pages on the blog...

A new year brings a chance to work on new projects, or at least bring fresh ideas, while reflecting on what may or may not have worked in the past. (Yes, even though half the country is on fire, Sydney still had fireworks) It also brings the opportunity to think about things that have been learned over the year. Something interesting came to my attention yesterday. In 2019, I had my first year as a teacher. During this time, I mat some great students in a rural community who haven't had the some opportunities that city kids get. Many of these kids have great potential, and many of them are really smart, some of them are gamers. One of the kids who I've come to know pretty well lives on a farm of 150 acres, his parents are often away, problems with government bureaucracy and climate change have led them to not have enough water to irrigate crops, so he has basically been living thirty kilometres out of town with no transport to get into town, looking after the surviving...

Thankyou Yu. Sergeeva for your translation of one of my blog articles into Russian. It's always great to know that my thoughts and writings are being read by people in various parts of the world and that my small contributions might be influencing other parts of the design community. I probably wouldn't have even noticed this ping on my radar except for the experiment I did last month where I didn't make any posts at all on the blog and simply looked at the traffic every couple of days to see what happened. Strangely there was s little bump of traffic from a Russian site, and it didn't look like a porn site so I investigated... it looks like I'm even a hashtag over there , with my entire ' Worldbuilding 101 ' series translated to Russian. This was a little series I'm pretty proud of, so I consider this a great piece of flattery and praise. It makes the whole effort feel worthwhile.

wow...just looked at the numbers, and at the current rate, some time in the next day or so I'll have reached half a million page views for this blog.

In November of 2014, I was happy that I'd reached 200,000 visitors to the blog. It took me 6 years to reach that level, and I was pretty content with the people who were paying attention to the stuff I had to say. Now in April 2016, I've just passed 400,000. A lot of that increased traffic came from my regular series of reviews last year during Game Chef, and the various other game design contests, and on the whole I'm still pretty content with the number of people who pay attention to what I have to say. I'll probably keep posting half-baked design ideas, keep musing on assorted stuff in a range of topics that meander through the territory of my hobbies, maybe offer a few more tutorial runs. It keeps me from getting depressed, and works as a creative outlet in several ways. Thanks for sticking around everybody.

I got excited a few months back, when  +Mark Knights  interviewed me for his series on Australian game designers... ...well, it's time to get excited again. I've just been interviewed by  +Tony Simpson  who runs the website 'LARP Out Loud', which is unsurprisingly about spreading the love of LARP as far as possible. For those who are interested, the interview can be found here. I'm actually pretty excited about this project as a way of telling a different type of story in a LARP context. The only problem I'm seeing at this stage is the fact that I probably need a dozen players to make sure my plans work...and at this stage, there are six players who've said they're coming along.

Thankyou to everyone who read, shared and responded to yesterday's post . Throngh direct comments on the post, G+ responses, and private messages/emails, I've managed to accumulate over 100 articles on the topics of gaming and roleplaying. Now it's a case of distilling my vague direction of inquiry into a series of specific questions to investigate, each of which might contribute toward a larger pattern of understanding. That's generally how research in academia works... If you pick a topic too vast, the scholars say that you are speaking in generalities and vagueness. If you pick a single topic to small, a different group of scholars claim that you are cherry picking your dataset and narrowing everything down to a focus that happens to match your preconceived agenda. So you work piece by piece, feeding off the work of others, and allowing them to feed off yours (the more referenced your work is by others, the more respected it becomes). Once I've knocked over a...

Nothing much today, just wishing everyone the best for this time of year.

I've been doing this now for a few years, and have finally reached 1000 posts. There have been a few good sequences of ideas in that time, and I've released plenty of different games using a variety of game engines. I've reviewed stuff, I've thrown ideas out there, I've provided mapping tutorials, I've explained my methodology of game design and critiqued the design methodologies of others, I've thrown random stuff in here and there just to break things up a bit. I've gone from less than a dozen views on a typical day, to an average of a couple of hundred views. I'm certainly not huge in the grand scheme of things, but enough people are interested in my work to keep me plugging away at it. I've been through bouts of depression, worked at keeping my mind active to avoid it, and have had moments of manic inspiration. As a thankyou to everyone for watching me over the past couple of years, here's a sneak preview of my upcoming children's...

A few people may know that I generated up a Goblin Tarot Deck in late 2011. I ran a crowd funded project to get it up and running, and while it made the necessary money to get funded, I didn't consider how much it would cost to get the decks sent out to people. I didn't want to let down those people who'd given me their money, so I've slowly been processing the orders and the project has almost reached it's conclusion...one more package to go. As a part of these final deliveries I've been putting together some special images, taking extra care on the cold-cast resin boxes, and trying to give people value for their money (even if I've been bad with the timing). Here are some of the sketches that have been sent to the those awesome people who've been patient and have offered so much to me for this project. I just thought I'd share.

It may not be a huge achievement, but in the little world of publishing indie roleplaying games, it's something...and it's something I'm proud of. Tooth and Claw has reached number 2 on the RPGNow Hottest Items listing. Maybe I should start putting a few more things back up on RPGNow.

I noticed last months that I was approaching the 500 post mark with this blog. Certainly something I never thought I'd accomplish. I figured maybe a post a week when I first started it, and for a few months toward the beginning I didn't post much of anything. Even when I started posting regularly, it was only once or twice a week, so I thought that it would take a good five to ten years to reach this point. I've posted about a wide variety of games, and have seen a rise of independent game design thought through to the mainstream of games. Some of this has been noted, while other developments have gone unmentioned. I've developed a few games through interaction with blog readers, some reaching publication, others being abandoned along the way or put aside for future work. I've found some great game designers who've linked to me through this blog and through various forums, I'm still finding new designers with innovative ideas, great artists and passionat...

Well, it's two hours until the end of the month for me. I've written a game. It wasn't quite the game I intended to write, but it links in with the ideas that have been floating around in my head for the past year. I've played the game a few times, I've talked about it, I've heard feedback reports from other people who've played the game and I've modified the game according to the experiences it has provided so far. This blog has seen increased traffic over the course of the month. The degree of increased exposure almost makes me think that there should be a NaGa DeMon every month. I'm pretty fired up about way to present the game, whether that comes in the form of downloadable pocketmod playbooks, or pre-printed dry-erase pocketmod playbooks that could be used over and over. The containers for such things, possible custom USB sticks containing the pdfs necessary to play, or some kind of tin to house the physical components of the game. ...

It's early on day 19. I've barely woken up and I've passed a milestone in my sleep. Paul Thornton has just played Ghost City Raiders with his wife and has provided me with valuable play-test feedback. This sort of thing rarely happens with my games. Especially during the game development phase. This valuable feedback has prompted me to revise and clarify a few parts of the text, but it's good to know that the game is basically sound and plays blindly the way I had hoped it to. Thankyou Paul.