DR Games

I thought a great way of see how this game plays is if I create a video showing a play through. At first I tried to set up the paper and pencil as you would ordinarily play it. It's a game you can just grab and play in a second but as it turned out you just couldn't see the details. So I had a think and came up with the idea of creating a digital version...now let's not get ahead of ourselves here. I do not mean I've coded something here. No, I'm simply moving assets around in Photoshop, which takes longer but I ended up editing the boring bits out, as I moved these images around. It took a while. So I ended up with an hour video. It is longer than the game plays for as I'm explaining the rules as I go but gives a clear view on the mechanisms of the game. The video is below. Let me know what you think and if you have any questions. Cheers guys, Toby. (If it looks small then you can click on it and expand it out. Thanks)

It has been on my mind for a while now as the Corona-virus spreads across the world . What can I offer those who are at home and unable to partake in their usual gaming sessions because of isolation. How can a creative mind help alleviate the stress of boredom and worry? I have seen other roll and write games and thought that might be a great way of giving something to the community to these very ends.    Looking at what I have previously worked on under the DR Games and the hex tile has been a feature. I decide that I would try and use this format, combine it with a number mechanism and inject it with a narrative. This became a scenario that fuel the fire of the story...and Dark Force Incursion was born.   " Y o u r l a n d h a s b e e n i n v a d e d b y a p o w e r f u l D a r k F o r c e . T h e s p e e d o f t h e i n v a s i o n w a s f r i g h t e n i n g , a n d t h e y h a v e t a k e n a l l t h e d e f e n s i v e f o r ...

This post has been written while I have been experiencing my first Kickstarter, as a kind of record of the learning experience, especially as it now appears that the Kickstarter will likely be unsuccessful. So, I am also trying to be self-reflective as I’m still learning and this is by no means a perfect guide as to how to succeed, but I hope to learn my lessons for the next one and that is reflected here. Having created the concept and developed the game rules (as documented in my last blog post) I was faced with probably one of the most important aspects of the project and that was how to present the game to the world.  By this stage I had already made a number of mistakes, some of these I’ll document in the next post and some in this one, but I was solely focused on how this game would look. Obviously, I knew how the tiles would look but how about how the box would appear? What graphics would I use on the box cover and how about infill and flavour art for the Kicks...

Working as a cartographer over the last couple of years has opened me up to lots of worlds. Fantasy realms and sci-fi settings that are story driven, and full of detail, have generally been my domain. This has included dungeons, tombs, settlements and worlds. Within the last category I arrived at creating a series of land hex tiles showing villages, towns and cities, fields, forests and mountains. I was pleased with how they turned out, and how they were received on Twitter, and it was only a small step to cut them out and mount them on card. This resulted in something more substantial, an actual game component that seemed to be demanding rules and additional components. Now this is, I guess, a stage that many people find themselves at. An opportunity presenting itself and where to take it? So I took a step back and over the following few months just let the concept grow in my mind. One thing I knew was I wasn’t keen on creating a complex game. I am personally interested in simple...