Ave Imperator – Design Journal – 01 – Historical Accuracy

I wanted historical accuracy to be important to this game; as such I did a fair amount of reading on the period and the reality of gladiators and their life. However the more I learned about the reality of how things were the more I realised that changes would need to be made. There’s no point clinging to historical accuracy when it gets in the way of fun or in some cases the basic premise of the game. Continue reading…

Games I am making

Just over a year ago I started my MSc in Interactive Digital Media in Trinity. My goal was to use the course, which was advertised as “intense” and had interesting looking interactive narrative and game design modules to a) update my skillset and b) serve as a launching pad into getting a job doing narrative or design for games. A year later and I can certainly confirm that of all the things the course was “intense” was certainly not one of them. I also realised, after doing some research into it that working in the reality of working in the AAA games industry was rather disheartening. Continue reading…

Collected and Copied

The kickstarter for Werewolf: The Apocalypse 20th Anniversary Edition is live. Also weridly expensive, even for the pdf. This game is more or less the platonic ideal of a “cool game but the players need to read the book” and we all know that players never read the fucking book. If I was rich I’d be tempted to pledge at the level where I get the cover made of metal, but Im not, so I wont. If I recall correctly in the only long term game of W:tA I ever ran the PC’s killed a vampiric Dermot Ahern before breaking into the high security secret base beneath the town hall. I clearly didnt realise how visionary I was at the time – http://kck.st/P8aP0E

Weird. If I hadnt bought that printer (so I can print out class notes for my vile students as well as my erotic Monk fanfic) I would almost certainly have purhcased the hardcopy version of the new Werewolf the Apocalypse. I have more or less two fullsize bookshelves full of rpg’s I largely only read. But not anymore apparently. Growing up? What a pile of bollocks.