Game Design and the Single Parent

I'm just watching the internet flow by, like you do, and something struck me. There are a lot of people doing a lot of really cool things. This is awesome, and I hope to join the awesome stuff parade when Geasa comes out. However, it got me think about designing as a single parent.

I may only officially be a single parent recently, and that is a rather loose term to use since Monkey's mother still is involved with her life and is where she spends most of her sleep time, but I have been bearing the load of parent hood for over a year now and it made me think about how that impacts how I design games. I do think that it has slowed me down a bit. This only makes sense because that's what parenthood is. You take what you want to do and find a way to wrap it around the vast tracts of time, energy and space that your children demand. It's just that its amazing how much of the time you spend without them is spent on recovering. You kind of got to force yourself to push past that barrier in order to do things like blog, or write a game. This only increases the amount of time you need to recover afterwards. I know that there are days that I sleep about twelve hours bbecause the rest of the week was spent working on two to three hours at most.

There are also these things called conventions. This is where a lot of the networking, personal advertising happens. They are kind of important to go to if you want to do this in any type of seriousness. Things get a lot more expensive when you have to feed another mouth. You can starve yourself if it comes down to it, but when your kid is hungry your going to make sure that they are fed.

That is enough of this, maybe I'll write more when things occur to me.

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Party Games

One of the things that I haven't been too good at is coming up with party games. You know the type, the one that deals with words or phrases or some such thing. The kind of games that you bring out when there are a large number of people and a certain level of alcohol. Yeah, those types of games.

Not to say that these games aren't bad. I love those types of games. One of the homeschooling moms brings in Taboo all the time. I grew up playing Boggle, and Charades, and Pictionary. These games are a lot of fun. They just aren't the types of games that spring to my mind when I start designing games. Then, at Gencon, we were just talking at dinner and making jokes, like any table of friends would do, and all of a sudden a party game sprang out of it.

Now I find myself trying to come up with the rules for this game and its harder than I thought. The problem, unlike the more standard hobby games that I tend to make, is that the game itself is rather simple, and I'm worried that people will get bored with it too easily. Now, instead of cutting overly complicated rules and ideas, I find myself trying to make them up. It is an interesting problem to have for once.

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Sitting around at Gencon

This is a shot of me sitting down waiting for people to come out of the dealer's room. It has been a long day. I got to run a game of Geasa that went off really well. I shouldn't really be surprised that this happens anymore. It's happened every time that I've run the game. They have all been amazingly fun and creative. They mave made me love running rpg events again, which was getting harder and harder to do each time O went out and felt like I was pulling my own teeth to get any enthusiam for anything I've created recently.

I'll do a proper write up later of the game. However, so I don't forget, I have to write down a quote from the con.

"I'd play that!" -- Darrin Watts

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The long drive.

So were making our way to Gencon. It is about an eight hour drive, plus any border stuff you might encounter. Unless you forget your passports. Then you have to turn around and drive an hour back to get them. Ryan, pictured here, was not to thrilled.

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On my way to gen con.

I'm actually pretty excited about Gen Con this year. I get to run two games of Geasa, along with the standard Cybergen games that I usually run. What is even better is that all the games are pretty full. We even have a game that is totally full, 100% full. It's one of the games of Geasa. Especially since I feel that none of the descriptions for any of the games was really good. They were some of the shortest I had ever given. Maybe that is what I should do in the future.

At any rate I'll see you all at Gen Con! I can be found on the schedule or at the Smirk and Dagger booth helping out.

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