Rosette Diceless Companion Now Available

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Author archives: Melissa

The Art of Rosette Diceless Typesetting

The Art of Rosette Diceless Typesetting

Our upcoming roleplaying sourcebook Rosette Diceless is in its final typesetting and compilation phases! Images, ornaments, and fonts are chosen and largely placed. We want to share some of that process with you, including a major tech struggle.

Rosette Diceless is setting-free, although it includes some suggestions on world building, as well as optional character abilities in science fiction or fantasy settings. Not being tied to a particular setting meant that we had fairly free reign in choosing our style for the book.

Developing this book is happening on a miniscule budget, however, so when we decided on an aesthetic for the book, it took into consideration assets that were public domain, had liberal copyrights, or were very low cost.

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Rosette Dramatic LARP Is Now Rosette Diceless

Rosette Dramatic LARP Is Now Rosette Diceless

As we move forward in finishing our next project, we've decided to change its name to match how it's serving best in playtesting: Rosette Dramatic LARP is now Rosette Diceless!

Rosette Diceless is a roleplaying system that focuses on collaborative storytelling and consent-based conflict resolution. You can roleplay everything from complex combat to intricate political debate with the same set of simple, quick-playing rules.

Motivations

There are two big reasons: the realities of the system, and marketing.

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"The Majesty of Colors" Teasers

"The Majesty of Colors" Teasers

"(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors" is coming out in just a few days. We're nervous and excited and trepidatious and many other things you might find in a thesaurus related to "nervous". We don't release games very often, so this feels big.

One of the things we've aimed to do with the remastering of "The Majesty of Colors" is not to just give players the game from 2008 in a new technology, but to give folks the game they remember playing, which is probably a little different from the reality of the Flash game.

We've talked about some of the major improvements we've made to the game, but the smaller enhancements have mostly been left to our social media posts. Here's a compilation of some of the recent gifs we've posted:

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Unity 5.6.3 Issues with Color Spaces and Texture Formats

Unity 5.6.3 Issues with Color Spaces and Texture Formats

One step in our polish phase of remastering "(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors" was to make sure all devices are consistently showing the game with the correct colors. If you aren't a developer (or not one of multiplatform games), you might be surprised at how differently devices can display a game. We ran into an interesting issue in that process.

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DevOps in Game Dev: ChatOps for Real With Lita and Dialogflow

DevOps in Game Dev: ChatOps for Real With Lita and Dialogflow

This is the fifth part in a series on applying devops principles and practices to game development. You can read the first post in the series, and see the entire series under the devops in game dev tag.

In our post on what the devops philosophy is, we wrote about revisiting workflow annoyances periodically. Sometimes you get more time and/or money. Sometimes you learn of an easy way to solve a problem.

There's something that got a lot easier for us recently: chatops.

"Chatops" is a trendy word for a subset of devops that focuses on streamlining work using extensible chatbots (e.g., Lita, Hubot, and Errbot) in team communication tools (e.g., Slack, HipChat, etc.). We use Lita on Slack, so I'll stick with those as concrete examples.

As a simple-but-nice examples, you might ask Lita to run an automated build for you, and it will connect to Jenkins and run the build you ask for. You don't need to leave Slack open a tab, log into Jenkins, find the job you need, and run it.

Something really important that well-implemented chatops provides is the ability to add context-appropriate information to conversations that are already happening.

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What's Happening on Exploit: Zero Day These Days?

What's Happening on Exploit: Zero Day These Days?

We've been heads down on remastering "(I Fell in Love with) The Majesty of Colors" the last few months (along with getting Rosette Dramatic LARP to a stopping point). We wrote about our realizations on project multitasking earlier this year, so we've tried to focus down as much as is reasonable.

That means that the in-flight game most left alone is Exploit: Zero Day, our cyberthriller puzzle game.

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IndieGameStand (and Desura)

IndieGameStand (and Desura)

In a slow tale spanning the last four months, the IndieGameStand site (one of the places we sold Ossuary) closed parts down for maintenance, then went down completely for maintenance, and then its domain name stopped working entirely. Somewhere in there, its SSL certificate expired as well. The twitter account is silent and all of the preview images for their articles are broken, giving it the look of a column of blank gravestones.

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