engage thy brain

Originally published at mysticages.com. You can comment here or there.

If you’re looking for webhosting, I’ve reopened RPGShelf.com webhosting. Over the past six months, we’ve switched servers for MysticAges.com, and I wanted to make sure the new webhosting accounts were working smoothly. Not only are they working smoothly, the new server is fast and ready to go. With a $30/year account, you get 700 MB of webspace, 5 Gb of bandwidth monthly, unlimited emails, unlimited domains, unlimited ftp, and more. All of this and you get the popular Control Panel, so you can fiddle with every aspect of the account… and you get Fantastico, which is a whole bunch of great web packages installed by a few clicks of your mouse (blogs, discussion forums, estores, etc.).

If you’re interested, click on over to http://www.rpgshelf.com/.

Plus, you can pick up a copy of Barbarians Versus while you’re at it. Nice, right?

Originally published at mysticages.com. You can comment here or there.

So, one bit of interesting news - Barbarians Versus is now available on LuLu.com as a PDF download. Check out http://www.lulu.com/mysticages for the beginnings of the online store there. I’ll update the BV site with this info later.

On the game design front, I posted a rather quickly put together game of spelling action called… Swords & Spelling. It’s a fantasy roleplaying game. Check it out and tell me what you think. My niece, who is in the 3rd Grade, is getting ready for a spelling bee later this month. I wrote it for her… It’s kind of ridiculous, but I think it would be fun. http://www.rpglaboratory.com/mysticages/swords_spelling_round_one

Originally published at mysticages.com. You can comment here or there.

I noticed a great article from one of the co-founders of Bungie, arguably the greatest computer game development company to have ever existed (although it still sort of exists within Microsoft’s gargantuan mass). Alexander Seropian lays out four indie game commandments, before he begins to tackle elements of video game design. I thought this was a good read and parallels many core principles of the indie rpg movement. Here are the four commandments:

• First Commandment: We shall establish our game’s creative direction.
• Second commandment: We shall own our intellectual property.
• Third commandment: We shall not let a third party determine our success, such as the publisher who’s doing (or not doing) the marketing, or the funding source (likely a publisher) making demands that are not in-line with our goals.
• Fourth Commandment: We shall have a small manageable team. We don’t want 50 employees making one game over three years in house (we want low overhead), and we don’t want to suffer the churn of ramping up and down for projects.

You can read the rest of the article here: http://gamasutra.com/features/20060811/seropian_01.shtml

I shouldn’t be surprised at how these link up with the indie rpg movement, but I am curious if there is a broader “indie” movement taking place. Are these just good ideas, or is this a result of what is happening as creativity, new media, and internet collide? Good stuff to think about at least…