This is the last blog entry for both my
Hobby Games Recce blog at LiveJournal and Schweig’s Game Design Journal at Blogger; I’m porting everything to a new hybrid blog –
Hobby Games Recce at Blogger – where I plan to continue posting
missives about the adventure gaming hobby and game design every
Tuesday. Bookmark the new Hobby Games Recce blog site for updates;
the old sites will remain, though this will stand as the last entry.
When I split my efforts with the two
blogs almost a year and half ago I’d intended to use the Game
Design Journal as a more personal insight into my creative efforts
rather than the general survey of news and features in the adventure
gaming hobby in Hobby Games Recce. While this broadened my scope, it
restricted me to a general theme each week, one that sometimes oozed
from one blog to the other. It also split my efforts between two
blogging platforms which took time to transition between. Although
the Game Design Journal enabled me to explore some interesting game
design issues, it wasn’t really inspiring the interactive
discussions for which I’d hoped (though the few discussions it did
engender were rewarding).
I garnered several revelations from the
experience. It makes more sense to focus all my blogging efforts in
one place, both for my ability to navigate blogging interfaces and to
direct people to one place for my gaming missives. It offers me the
freedom to cover general adventure gaming hobby issues with
occasional intrusions of personal game design when so inspired,
without the self-imposed, every-other-week restriction on content.
I also realized, reluctantly at first,
that I prefer Blogger as a platform better than LiveJournal. It
didn’t crash as often, gave me more control over the look of the
page (as you’ll see from keeping the Game Design Journal template),
provided more information on my posts (specifically page views and
+1s), and interfaced nicely with my other Google-based applications.
I intend to merge all the old posts
from both blogs onto the Blogger Hobby Games Recce site for easy
reference and to provide a continuous record of my past blogging
exploits. While Blogger made things easy transferring Game Design
Journal entries to the new Hobby Games Recce site, LiveJournal did
not make a similar transition easy at all; so this may take some time
to transfer several years' worth of entries locked up in LiveJournal’s
byzantine interface to the new Hobby Games Recce site on Blogger.
In looking back on the 37-entry run on
Schweig’s Game Design Journal, several posts stand out as ones
of which I’m most proud:
“Admiring Interesting Game Developments” might easily have come under the purview of Hobby
Games Recce; it allowed me to examine two games that recently caught
my eye with some innovative game mechanics.
Posts about my random dungeon
experience tied to my development of Schweig’s Themed Dungeon
Generator included “Thoughts on the Random Dungeon” and
“Revisiting the Random Dungeon with Themes.”
“Charging Off on Another Diversion” allowed me to indulge a sudden inspiration in using
54mm plastic soldier minis in a basic game in which a refreshing
“horde” charges a fixed position of defenders.
“The ‘Pay-What-You-Want’ Experiment” offered my impressions of the sales trend
encouraging customers to offer a “tip” for otherwise free online
material.
“Oracle Game Engine Dice Mechanics” outlined my original die-rolling and reading
mechanics for an upcoming fantasy roleplaying system I’m
developing, based on “The Allure of Dice in Fantasy Games” post
noted below.
My examination of the “D6 System Core Rulebook” garnered the most +1s from readers on Google+.
“The Allure of Dice in Fantasy Games” won the prize for most views.
Schweig’s Game Design Journal has
enjoyed a good run during the past year or so, with some engaging
entries that inspired a few encouraging discussions and a lot of
self-examination. I’m looking forward to exploring more adventure
gaming issues in the newly relocated Hobby Games Recce. Happy gaming!
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