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We're quickly approaching completion on our GM-less roleplaying system Rosette Diceless. We're so close, in fact, that we'd like to show off an excerpt from the book! While the contents still might change, this sample should be very close to the design and contents of the final book.
Below, you ...
Written by on in Development.
Often, the most effective ways to communicate a work's tone are also the most subtle adjustments. In digital games, creators too often put off or overlook background sounds, even though they immediately set a mood.
Our roleplaying game sourcebook Rosette Diceless doesn't come with a soundtrack, but books have a ...
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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.
...Written by on in Development.
"(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:
...Written by on in Development.
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.
...Written by on in Development.
When Gregory released "(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors" in 2008, the video game world was rather different. Flash games were big. No smartphones supported Flash, but that was fine; the iPhone App Store only had 10,000 apps, with the best-selling being a peaceful thing called ...
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If you've played Ossuary, you might have noticed the scrolling text on the bottom of the menu screen notifying you of updates, sales, and sometimes new releases. This is our little Update system.
...Written by on in Development.
We find live-action roleplaying (or LARP) the most fun when the rules work to support interesting characters and dramatic interactions. We designed Rosette Dramatic LARP to allow for this with simple rules that adapt to any sort of storyline or character action. This results in play experiences that showcase the players' creativity and flexible cooperation without disproportionately focusing on combat or any other aspect of storytelling.
To show how this works in practice, here's a summary of a recent plot done via the Rosette LARP rules. Everything in this story was guided by the game's conflict system to keep things flowing dramatically.
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We've written that after the copyediting process of Rosette Dramatic LARP, we'd start typesetting using a document processing system called ConTeXt.
What is typesetting and why are we using something other than Google Docs or Microsoft Word to do it?
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As we finish up our remastering of "(I Fell in Love With) The Majesty of Colors," we've settled on our list of enhancements we're making in this version. Beyond making the game work on modern devices, here are the major changes you'll get when you purchase the new version:
