The Endless Frustrations of Writing a Game

I am writing a game book, I've been plugging away at it for almost 2 years now and before that it's concepts sat shelved for 3 years by the original creator. I took these concepts from him to write the book because it was either I'd do it, or it would never be done. I firmly believe that this will be the best system out there in terms of quick play and realism, it does everything I want a game to do and I believe the gaming community and the world at large deserves to have access to something like that.

I now have the writings to a point where the game is actually playable, the system usable and the rules for the most part are consistent. I have a real game here, but having the writings is a far cry from having a book that's publishable. I might have a game but I don't have a product, and until I have a product I'm bound by a non-disclosure agreement so I can't share the details of the thing I've slaved away on for so long. I hate non-disclosure agreements.

I'm allowed to send the game out to others who I might bring under the magical NDA umbrella, but it's hard finding people. The people I find who might be interested and whom I think could offer valuable feedback are the same people who are busy as frak.

What I need is one other person who's as invested in seeing this game come out as I am, one person who feels the way I do, that this game is awesome and would honestly tell me if every single new section I write is worthy of this game or not.

Unfortunately, no such luck yet.

You may all ridicule me for being an emo bitch now. (Both of you.)

RPG Projects I'm Working On

My operating system is cluttered with windows this morning of the various projects I have on the go. Which means it's a good day so far, I love having too much to do, especially when it's to do with role-playing.

I recently took up some guest blogging for the Core Mechanic which is starting to make me enthusiastic. Johnathan the blog owner is a very bright guy and is managing the blog really well. This is great for me because I'm the sort who (obviously) doesn't care to do much blog management, so this lets me just concentrate on the writing and networking aspects which is what I enjoy. I can see my writing relationship with TCM being very fruitful.

This weekend I also decided that I needed to start moving ahead with playtesting Hardkore, so I took some time to work out a rough campaign outline in a setting I'm developing specifically for the Hardkore system and started reaching out to a few players to join and help me playtest. As usual everyone is quite busy, but I'm tenacious and won't take no for an answer. I'm currently putting together a playtest package for the players so that they have an updated copy of the rules in addition to any setting specific information I feel they need. It's a pretty big package, out of curiosity I opened it into MS Word so I could do a word count. Without any formatting the material is over 25,000 words and 75 pages. Wow, I've been busy.

Currently I'm working on inputting all that into an Adobe Indesign book so that the playtest document is a bit more readable. I'll hopefully have most of that done by the end of the day, right now I'm transferring over all the gun stats.

One of the things I really love about Hardkore is the attention to detail Dixon had when working on the firearms. Currently we have over 40 different firearms with comprehensive stats, our stats are so comprehensive that we actually include different stat lines for different types of ammunition that can be loaded in the gun. Not just slug rounds vs buckshot either, like the difference between a full metal jacket round and a jacketed hollow point round. All this matters because our damage system is the most realistic of any game out there. Thats where I think our niche will be actually. In gamers who want to customize and play out scenarios of war in a tabletop RP environment rather than a first-person shooter video game.

Anyhow that's a bit of an update, so I'll get back to work.