oops I looked back..

so now I have looked back on the experiment or writing an RPG straight ahead with no real plan. Honestly, it worked pretty good.

The inspiration 

A lot of older RPGs contain rules inconsistencies (or things straight up forgotten from one chapter to the next). I was inspired by reviewers of old games like the "System Mastery" podcast who felt like the authors just never read their own rules.

The Results 

I worked on this game a little bit each day for 3 months. Even though I was making it up as I went, it seems like I didn't really forget much of what came before. As experiments go, I don't think 5 really re-created the situation that gave rise to those inconsistent RPGs of the past. Rather, it's more likely they suffered from poor editing or organization over a much longer development period. Not to mention they usually have a much higher word count than my project.

If I had a lot more to write I would likely have lost track of the beginning. Knowing my self imposed limitation certainly lead me to create a game with minimal rules and terminology to remember. Still, I don't think I would have been able to make something even this complete in 3 months without the novelty and constraints of this experiment.

My Learnings 

As a hobbyist game designer, I have read and listened to a lot of information on the subject. Despite many professional designers saying things like "just go make things", I find the thoughts about playtesting, layout, publishing, printing, etc. are often keeping me from getting anywhere with my game ideas. I've had a few successes using game jams to force myself to make something, but this project felt better to work on and to write about here in devlogs.

I have a lot of limitations keeping me from doing the things a professional game publisher would need to do, and a lot of ideas for game designs. I think I may have finally got the lesson that I need to lean into just making unfinished games for myself.

Never Look Back to the Future

The future is uncertain. I have started commenting the game document with things I would edit. If you're reading this I invite you to comment whatever you like. Whether I complete these edits or not depends on how my brain feels. I'm learning a bit about layout and this might be just the text I want to try making a nice pdf for. Your interest would certainly push me in that direction so comment if you can.

Either way I feel pretty good about making more things on Itch in the future during my train commute.