by Flyboy Connor

I have been designing and creating games for the last 40 years, mostly video games, but also some RPGs and board games. All as a hobby. I have released a few of them to the internet (since the internet became a thing in the 1990s), always for free. Sometimes they became big successes with millions of downloads, other times I got no more than a few hundred downloads. Some I released under my own name, others under a pseudonym. I don't really care about the number of players, I enjoy the creative process.

Of the video games I created, I do the playtesting by myself. I am a good enough programmer to trust my own testing. RPGs and board games I created I playtest with friends. The RPGs I created usually are within an existing system (in my case, D&D 5E, as I know that system well enough). I am not too interested in creating RPG systems. In my view, an RPG is about the story and not about the system, so I want to focus on story -- and if it is using an existing system, it is easier to get people to play it.

I tend to work on a game no more than a year. I strive to complete games that I start working on. I know that if the process will take more than a year, most likely I will never finish it. I set realistic goals, and once a game is finished, I may tweak it a little for a few months but then let it go. I know, from experience, that I am never completely satisfied with the result, and that the longer I tweak it, the more details I find that irritate me. But I am not going to redo big things once the game is finished; I rather take lessons learned to heart and apply them to another game.

Nowadays it is very common that people start creating a game and then release an early version. Then they release one or two more versions, with growing intervals, and finally let the game die. The reason is, I think (based on my experience) that initial enthusiasm tends to be high, but it is hard to keep one's interest up. Creating a game is work, and a lot of that work is menial. Like most things in life, creativity makes up only a few percent of the process. And the further one gets in the creation process, the balance between creativity and work leans increasingly over to work.

I do two things to offset the risk of losing interest in a game: the first, as I already mentioned, is limiting the length of the process to a maximum of one year. The second is that I do not define a game completely before I start creating it. I leave many details for the implementation phase, because I know that once I have filled in the final details, my interest begins to wane rapidly, so by that time I want to be so far in process that I am willing to finish it. Even if I do not intend to release a game (which certainly may happen, as the result is not always good enough to release), I want to finish it.

by David Ells

Billionaire Allen G. Hassenfeld, Former CEO of Hasbro and Whose Family Founded the Iconic Toy Maker, Dies at 76

by jsteidl

The random space encounters start on p.70 of my 5P core rules. it's called the Starship Travel Events Table.

A new episode has been added to the database: Arc 13 Ep 3: CoCo Corner PART 1

A new episode has been added to the database: One-Shots and Miscellanea 13: Going Down

A new episode has been added to the database: Dust World RPG: Neon City - Episode 44: Memory of the Temple

A new episode has been added to the database: Episode 28 (S3E28)

A new episode has been added to the database: Dragonbane 8 -- Mummies and Daddies

A new episode has been added to the database: Call of Cthulhu: Masks of Nyarlathotep 14

A new episode has been added to the database: Trinyvale X Strahd - Ep. 3: Ismark the Lesser

by jasri

jasri previously rolled d392 = 354 (And the dungeon had) rooms, all 10x10 feet.

A new episode has been added to the database: Stonewatch – Dragon Empire Prep Session 29