layout of entries?

So, I don’t know anything about WordPress, but would it be possible to do something with the layout so that the text displays using more than a third of my screen? I’m not sure what the group’s average screen resolution is, but it looks like our current template is designed for 800 x 600 — and then on top of that the post text is only two thirds of the available area. It makes posts really really long (especially since I like to read big text) and it bothers the design-guy in me when I have like 400+ pixels of empty space to the right of the actual page content (seriously it’s like half the page!) Surely there must be some templates that are at least a bit wider, even if not everyone can be assumed to be running at 1280 x 1024? I’d fiddle myself but I am clueless about the software, as mentioned, and of course I don’t want to mess up other folks’ displays if it turns out I’m in the minority in being bothered by this.

Daniel.

[Decommissioned] Introduction

I’m going to begin with the birth of Decommissioned (D-Com) as a concept for me.

I live in a port city, a city in the US with a large Naval port. Recently, a very large ship, one that had been in the Naval fleet for decades, was about to be put away forever.

This ship housed thousands of sailors. These sailors had thousands of family members who depended on them. While the sailors would still have jobs in the Navy, few of them would still be here.

The local news stations had story after story. The people here wanted to know. where do we go from here? What happens to the houses, the money coming in, the businesses built on these thousands of people who are leaving, the schools, the people?

So this was the impetus for the title of the game: Decommissioned.

Now for a bit of a confession: I had been thinking about D-Com before Game Chef. I’d committed nothing to paper, but the kernel was there. I’d been percolating on a sci-fi game about robots created with expiration dates and what they do about it. The original version had robots who were Decommissioned after a long campaign of fighting, were put in stasis and gathered up onto a freighter and were being flown to a place to be destroyed. Then, these robots crash landed on a planet and woke up and figured out they were not long for this universe. That was as far as I got.

But it was strong enough in my mind that I wanted to rework it. I wanted a forum where I could posit ideas and get advice from knowledgeable designers, but I was afraid of The Forge. Game Chef came along and I took a chance.

As for hacking D-Com into Game Chef, I integrated Sacred instead of a thing I was calling Touchstone in my mind and I went with the corporate drone analogy. Plus I created a dice mechanic which didn’t garner much love (or earn it since it wasn’t a set of mechanics created to showcase the story just the first mechanic I could imagine).

So where am I now?

The kernel is still valid in my mind. The Game Chef ingredients weren’t integrated well into the game, as my reviewers astutely noted.

One suggestion that I found interesting was taking the “characters dying” aspect of D-Com and recasting it into the idea of gods dying.

More to come later.

Transform and Roll Out!

Our fellow GC2007 alumni from Team Unicron have set up their own kitchen, HQ Unicron! They were nice enough to link to us so I set up a new set of links just for them (and whatever other group blogs come out of Game Chef).

Go visit that planet-consuming monstrosity!

[Fade] Introduction and Status Report

Fade is a game about secret agents who can create and alter memories, in a science fiction setting where violence is obsolete.

If you are interested, the game chef edition is available for download. Any feedback will be greatly appreciated.

Currently it’s in the “digest all the feedback from Game Chef” phase. I’ll be gradually revising it over the next few weeks. After that I’m aiming to run a short playtest with my regular group.

[Doloris] State of the Game

Doloris, as the blurb goes, is set in the year 2100, when Cyberpunk Catholics are forced to fight Rosicrucian oppression. The game asks players to choose whether to help others in this world or help themselves in the next. Overall, Doloris is a game about faith, free will, and consequences.

Mechanically, Doloris is a traditional GM + players game about traveling around a labyrinth, which represents a both a personal spiritual journey and the external tensions of the story. Movement on the labyrinth dictates success or failure in both a single action and the entire story. In general, choosing to succeed in the short term hurts you in the long term. A story ends when the center of the labyrinth is reached. The players are driven towards the center, and the conclusion of the story by a system controled Adversary. The Adversary also triggers in game events which the GM must introduce.

The Game Chef draft is available on the current drafts page.

[TWD] Introduction

Since we’re going to be working on our games-in-progress, I thought it might be a good idea to introduce the game I’m currently working on. (After all, not everyone was following the Game Chef competition with bated breath!)

I entered The Weavers’ Daughters, a historical urban fantasy game about the daughters of minor Norse godlings, post-Ragnarok, trying to make their way in the complex, changing, quickly-modernizing world of 1792. In fact, here’s my blurb about the game:

The year is 1792, a thousand years after the gods died – but their daughters still walk the halls of Versailles, the battlefields of Turkey, the forests of the American frontier and the slums of London. As Vorvia, daughters of the Norns, you are cursed and blessed with visions of the future. In exile from your homeland, can you find a way to reconcile your ancient powers and sacred duties with the demands of a complex, chaotic, contemporary world?

You can download the game on our current drafts page. If you haven’t read it before, I’d love to get feedback on it here! For those curious what I’m planning to do next, read on …..

Team Omega! Go!

Coming out of Game Chef 2007 with the pedal to the floor, Team Omega creates fine delicacies in their own culinary workshop, the nefarious Omega Kitchen! Create cuisinart Voltron! I’ll form the right hand! Extend Hyper-Cleaver! Commence chopping action!