This blog has been ignored for too long. My apologies readers, if any of you are still out there listening. What happened? Well, it’s probably no coincidence that my last post was from late March, just when my attempts to sell my house started getting very involved. But I’m not going to get into that, suffice it to say that I’ve been trying to sell my house for a very long time and it’s not been a pleasant experience. I continue to be hopeful for the future, but I no longer have any expectation of when I might actually escape this quagmire.
Table top gaming has been non-existent for me for a long time, like a lot of hobbies that have been packed into boxes or put on hold until we move. Perhaps that has what has blocked me from posting, as this blog has basically been about table top gaming for a long time. But as the tagline says, this blog is about “whatever else comes to mind”, so it’s time to take a detour into something positive that has been consuming my free time — video game development.
Production of Road of Kings continues at a nice clip. In fact, things have picked up this summer with the introduction of our intern Max. Max is actually my younger brother who is currently pursuing a computer science degree, and wanted to spend his summer working full time on a real project. Thus Dancing Sorcerer was happy to bring him on and he’s already been hard at work for the past couple of weeks fixing bugs and making many of Mike’s more involved event designs a reality.
For three guys working nights and weekends, adding someone who can put full 40 hour weeks into the project has been a real shot in the arm. And it doesn’t hurt that Max is a pretty good writer and DM — his style fits right in with the content we already had.
When will it be done? That’s a tough question to answer. We’ve been working on this project for a little over a year now, and we’d like to wrap this thing up soon. That said, the part time nature of our schedules just doesn’t lead to very rapid production. The good news is that we’ve got pretty much all the unknowns nailed down. The design for the combat screen and characters has been resolved, and we know how many more events we have to author to make the world feel full. Now it’s just a matter of buckling down and creating all that content. There are still many scripts to be written and characters to be drawn, but hopefully the more we make the faster we’ll get at doing so.
Official announcements of the game will always appear first and foremost on our facebook page. Please follow us there (and maybe drop a like our way) if you want the latest news. That said, I’d like to get in the habit of updating this blog, and Road of Kings development seems like good fuel for that fire. So if you’re interested in following the nitty gritty details of indy video game development, keep your eye on this blog for my upcoming posts.
Glad to hear that work on the game is going well! Looking forward to playing it.
That’s great! So glad you brought Max on board.
DUDE! I just noticed that you are using my character sheet on your page background. 🙂
That’s one of my favorite D&D character sheets! Actually, when I was setting up the theme for this blog I just took whatever D&D stuff I had lying on my desk at the time, spread it out, and took a photo. If you look closely you can see that the character sheet is actually for a Thief called “The Man with No Name”, aka Klint, a character from the campaign I was running at the time. I think I shuffled him to the front because his player had drawn a reasonably good portrait in the sketch box. As it turns out, he was the longest lived character in that campaign, and acquired a bit of a reputation for hording all the magic items, though the inventory shown in this picture would suggest it was taken before that started happening.