In one of my recent posts, I was talking about a Fudge RPG project I’ve been silently working on and said:

I foresaw two major problems to producing a decent quality RPG:

First I find Scribus; an open-source Desktop Publishing Tool. Quite complicated and a bit of learning curve, but free. Along with OpenOffice and the Gimp, all the software is there.

For the second, while I can draw, I can’t draw to a professional or high quality level. But then I came across a blog post on design and found numerous photo and illustration sites, where you can buy artwork for use in your projects: sotck.xchng, istockphoto and veer.com (and there is always flickr). Just a quick browse I found pieces I could use. They aren’t on point but would do. If I add my own skill I’m sure I could generate some pieces based on what I found.

So yea it’s actually doable, I mused. (There is actually another issue but I’ll talk about those at the end.)

Then I catch this post from Fred Hicks in my newsreader about actually not publishing and doing your RPG for free. Did Fred Hicks read my mind? Probably not I thought but his advice hit the point. I had considered putting aside a small budget for the project, just enough that I don’t care about making any back. I also read the posts/blogs he linked to in that post. Both were completely relevant to my train of thinking. For me, getting something published was more about a personal milestone or goal than gaining audience or making money (both would be nice but not crucial).

I’m still not convinced but it’s not that important. I still have to do the new version of LH first before I actually need to decide. The content comes first before all that fancy stuff.

I’m certainly not averse to doing it for free. Just take a look at TDOMF my plugin for Wordpress. I’m making a small amount of money on it, not enough to write home about, but it’s a nice feedback. I get bug reports and feature requests every week and I try to respond to all. But that leads me to my last issue that turn me off giving an RPG away for free. With TDOMF, I’m releasing into an existing community who will use it. I have, therefore, an extended “play-testing” user-base that will tell me concisely what’s wrong with it how it works. They are also willing to download upgrades and keep up to date. Releasing a free RPG, there is no community there to release to. It’s a discussion that’s floated around the Irish gaming community for a while. Releasing into a vacuum is the same as copying a file to /dev/null. It goes nowhere and is pointless. Of course, maybe I’m just ignorant of a community out there that would be interested (please inform me!). I’m also acutely aware of the “pluggers”, people who register and logon to forums expecting people to be interested in your project but have no “credibility”. This is something I don’t want to do. I did it for the Irish Gaming Wiki and got slammed down many times. I don’t want to spend time promoting myself and playing the “status game” either. I mentioned in my previous post my “narrow creative bandwidth” and part of that would have to be spent on doing that and everything else would suffer. I’m also aware that the success of free media (RPG being a specific type of media) is dependant on luck and popularity.

Maybe I’ve gotta wait till the Internet starts shouting at me, before I really listen…

My thoughts have been skirting around the idea (note: I’m just rambling here...) that that some of my hobby projects like “COG”, “LH” and TDOMF would benefit hugely from opening them up to input from others. I say “skirting around the idea” because I am not completely comfortable with it. I guess, in a sense, I’m not a particularly open person either (which probably explains a lot about the content of this blog!).

I remember a sad incident from my childhood - while I was in primary school, I wrote a “ghost story”. I took several middle pages from a copy book and taped them together to form a little book. On the last page I had done up this elaborate skeleton drawing and the story was pretty much written around the drawing. Now you can imagine the effort a six year old puts into something like this. I had it my school bag, proud as punch. But after the lunch break, I found that some of the other boys had taken it out, drawn all over it and destroying it in the most mocking way they could. They were waiting for me to find it at which point they started to tease me about it, making fun of my writing.

It’s amazing that I can still conjure that memory when I think about the idea of allowing others in. These days I’m a professional software engineer, working on a good team. I have no problem collaborating and sharing ideas about the project. But when I talk about my personal hobby projects, like TDOMF or LH, I don’t talk. They are mine and I don’t share. I don’t think it’s just a childhood memory that stops me. I think it’s a number of personal reasons. First is self-confidence, opening up a piece of work for others to collaborate in, requires that others want to collaborate with you (anyone remember the GCG website?). The second is, I haven’t met or found anyone online or otherwise I would want to share my projects with. And lastly, they are hobby projects. I’m doing them for myself, at my own pace and for the simple pleasure of working on something. Bringing others into it, means delgating, sharing responsibilities, planning… bleurg!

But also, part of the issue for me, is the mental or artistic ownership of the project. I have a “vision” of what I want and I work towards that. The vision may change or move around but I’m always fairly clear on what I want (which may end up being different to what others want). The best way to express that vision to others (so they know what I want) is to bring it about myself, trying to explain it will lead to miscomunication. It’s certainly the case for TDOMF (which is easier to talk about as it’s software). I want to have certainly features implemented and certain polish to it before I give it a version 1.0. Once it hits there, I may consider looking for help with it. The same goes for LH, my Fudge roleplaying project. I have a vision of what I want and until I get close enough to it, I’m not particularly enamoured of inviting others to help me. Take my Reboot RPG, hopefully it’ll appear in a little while as a PDF. I don’t think I’d mind if others expanded or radically changed it after that.

Yet, COG is another Fudge roleplaying project of mine and the vision I had for that is sort of distributed or modular in a way. I have several ideas and components and I want to make a coherent game out of it. I don’t think I’d have too much of a problem exposing it to others and even trying to do something with it (if people liked what they saw). Maybe that’s the trick to it, to share a distributed vision with a group of people who you respect and work towards it. The only obstacle is, I haven’t met a whole lot of people that I respect in a sense that I would work well with them (or vice versa). (I now think of the small disaster Specky went through).

My own friends who I roleplay with have all done their own pet RPG projects. For one, Dark Obsidian, I submitted some fiction to but I didn’t collaborate with the author on it. My friends all have different tastes, particularly in roleplaying. That’s why we play well together but probably unlikely to work well together because we wouldn’t get over some of the fundamentals of game design.

My other hobbies, drawing and writing really are very much single-person activities except when you want to show them off. Maybe that’s it, I’m closet perfectionist - I don’t want to share my projects until they are perfect (close to my initial vision)!

I was at the gym and I started musing on a story in my head. The gym is one place I do a lot of thinking and imagining while I work out. I played the whole story out, right up to the end. It was a fully concieved story, several main characters, background, mythos and a plot. Then those words appeared. I could see them as the last lines to the novel. I don’t know exactly what prompted it as I normally envision stories in my mind’s eye like movies, not text in a novel. The story I was imagining was certainly about destiny, how once you accept it, it consumes you totally but if you try and fight it or ignore it it will also destroy you. Destiny and fate being something much larger than the small lives of men, their hopes and fears.

I tried to analysed my thought processes that lead to it and I know, in part, the text is actually a warning against religious zealousness, though the story had little of that.

Saw this post from cartographer, where she talks about spoilers and how she is getting more interested in good writing than:

(I know it’s nearly month ago, but I’m only catching up on some posts now).

Of course, she’s talking about Harry Potter, a series I’ve yet to go near. I thought I was just being peculiar in my book-buying habits but there is part of me that, in general, distrusts certain types of series. I’m not just talking about novels, but roleplaying books, TV shows and movies.

Read More…

I’ve been finding it incredibly difficult to find time to do things-I-want-to-do, the things-I-need-to-do and things-I-have-to-do. Many of the things-I-should-do, don’t get done… because I simply forget. This isn’t old age setting in however.

I work and I’m parent. That pretty much sums me up today. Add on top of that that we’ve moved into a new house in the last two to three months.

What this means is that, we’re managing. At home we’re slowly getting rid of the moving boxes. By and by we’ve hired two skips so far, once for the new bathroom and then a bigger one for the new kitchen. But, it looks like we’ll have to hire another one to get rid of all the empty cardboard boxes (and other junk we’ve accumulated in the move)! One room is just boxes at the moment; our other spare room is just a dump for the old carpet. Even our living room is a mess of books in bags waiting to be put on shelves that will appear, soon, on a wall, somewhere in the house.

This all meant that I have no where to code, draw or meditate. What’s worse, I didn’t feel inclined to do any. I could always just clear stuff off the table and start drawing or sit down for a few hours in the living room with my laptop and headphones or even just close the door in the bedroom and take 30 minutes… however it dawned on me that the lack of a workspace was an obstacle to actually pursuing my hobbies outside the priorities of my life. It isn’t the only obstacle however.

Of course, being an engineer, once you understand a problem you can often solve it. So why haven’t I starting coding TDO Mini Forms v0.3 yet or got dug into maps for Reboot (see here and here)?

A workspace is a meant to be physical thing, a space separate from every day life. Somewhere private. But essentially it is just a tool. Required but you don’t necessarily need a private room (unless there are practical considerations such as space to store equipment etc.).

I could easily grab my laptop and start writing (or coding) anywhere! No it is also a mental thing. A workspace allows you separate your life and what you’re about to work on. It simply helps set you up for work. When I was training Shotokan, you would enter class, bow, take your place and start training. You would leave work behind. The workplace simply aids in giving you head-space.

And that is what I am really missing. Head-space. My free-time gets filled up with all things that-must-be-done-now. When I try and make space for me, I just zone out. Tired. Sophie, my wife, gets pretty tired these days, which is understandable, so I end up taking on a little more. My head-space is actually just vegging out in front of the TV, playing my Nintendo DS or Unreal Tournament 2004 on the PC. None require any real particpation on my part. Sure I could write in this period, but it isn’t just a case of my body being unwilling, it is also my mind. I need to feel I can and able to do it, not be dragged down by lethargy.

Which also means it’s a little hard to really chill-out because part of me goes… “you know, you should really finish of that piece, get it done” (where piece is a flat-pack piece of furniture or a piece of code for Wordpress plugin).

I could meditate, but I’d probably just fall asleep!

Anyway, all these to conclude that an abstract or true workspace is also one of time and mood, not just some physical space.