Blog Housekeeping: Consolidation, Best Posts

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!

Comments....

Want to offer feedback? Start a civilized discussion? Share a link to this blog entry on Google+ and tag me (+Peter Schweighofer) to comment.