September 12th: submission of abstract

So, a couple of weeks ago a friend Rob sent me a few takes of the video voice over. He did a few different styles and asked me to pick one for him to research and perfect. The styles were: old style BBC voice, hard man voice, Jeremy Clarkson imitation, and Hollywood action movie trailer voice (and an antipodean voice-over full of cussing).
Anyway, I went with hard man and used the first take, adding some images. The video isn't exactly going to win awards but Rob did a great job on the voice.

I then submitted the project to Kickstarter and waited. Next day, it was approved and I launched it! I then cooked dinner, ate dinner, bathed 2.5 year old and put him to bed. My phone was on silent, so I had no idea that there were several "new backer" emails awaiting me! All from people that I've never met and will probably never meet. I've backed projects on Kickstarter from people that I'll never meet, but it's quite a different experience being the backee. In a really good way.

August 24th: Game Theory & Displacement Vectors

Last weekend I competed in the British Transplant Games, held in Sheffield. Not many people know about these games (I didn't until I'd had a kidney transplant); they are held each year at a different UK venue and include track & field, team sports and individual sports. I entered the tennis (silver medal!), 5 a side soccer/football (gold medal!), 100m (last!), and 200m (not last!).

Anyway the whole point of the games is to raise awareness of both the benefits of transplants and the need for more donors. Several people die each day while waiting for a transplant. I was fortunate enough to have family who were willing and able to give me a kidney, but not everyone is so lucky.

I met a lot of people with a lot of different stories, some who are still going strong decades after transplants and others whose transplanted organs are beginning to fail or are having other health problems.

I enjoy the community aspect of the games, but for me the transplant has enabled me to get back to normality, though I have twice-daily anti-rejection medication to serve as a reminder.

Where was I? Oh yes, Vehicle Vendetta will be live soon! Right now I'm in Liverpool. Back to London on Monday.

August 1st: S. I. Units

Omg it's August!
Whilst naming this post, I realised that the date part of the post titles for July were, frankly, substandard.
Anyway, I've got to get a move on. Chat soon.
Todd

16th July: event horizon

All that's left to do for the Kickstarter project is the video. I need to spend about three sessions of five hours each at a computer to do them but time like that is at a premium. It seems that life has become so condensed that it is becoming increasingly difficult for any packets of time to escape. Well, I can't detect any such packets anyway; perhaps I need better instruments. Time will tell.

9th July 2013: wave particle duality

Last week I set up and used a simultaneous equation to calculate how many draw cards there should be and how many vehicles & upgrades should allow extra cards to be drawn. Who said maths has no use in the real world? Although, since this game isn't yet published, it could be argued that it still isn't in the real world.
I shall bore many students, colleagues and passersby with this anecdote. And now you.

May 2013: particle accelerator

I have no idea why I started using nuclear physics as a theme for my titles in this blog; it's becoming increasingly difficult to find suitable titles. Case in point: I used the word "particle" because it has "art" in it. I mean come on, really?

Anyway.
I had, once again, reduced, reused and recycled the game down. I'd started doing the artwork for the cards and quickly remembered that my illustrative skills suck. I tried finding images that fitted what I wanted, which I would then outline and modify using g.i.m.p. and then delete the initial layer. For individual images the results were ok, but the process was very time consuming. In addition, there was no consistency amongst the resulting images and no discernible style except "lack of". So, I enlisted the help of a friend, artist and graphic designer. Maybe I'll name and shame him next month, but for now let's call him C.

I told C about the game and gave him some card titles and taglines. Soon after, he sent me some sketches of ideas for them. Before this point I thought that I was clear in my mind about the style that I was after and the type of illustrations that would work. C's sketches blew all of that out of the water.
He had absolutely nailed the spirit of the game and produced some illustrations and ideas that I would never have thought of.

Many skype sessions and emails later, we had several finished cards of different types as templates for the rest of the game.
I was well chuffed, as they say. 

April 2013: control rods

April's fool (yours truly) soon came to realise that he'd made no real progress toward completing a game, so again I went back to the simplified game*. I also checked out printers that could do playing cards and found that playing cards aren't just shiny pieces of printed cardboard. I also found out that not many printing places actually print proper playing cards. As far as I can tell, my closest playing card makers are in Surrey, and I'm pretty sure that they are just agents because I found exactly the same blurb on several other printer websites.
Exactly the same.
Exactly.
Not even changed a bit.
Exactly the same.

*Several months later I would write a blog, during which I would go from 3rd person to 1st person in the same breath. However, he doesn't realise that pointing it out doesn't make it acceptable nor does it make it amusing for anyone but himself; if anything, it just makes the blog entry longer and even less likely to be read in full.

March 2013: uncontrolled fission

So, the decks had been cleared. I had reduced the ideas down to one game with simplified rules and gameplay. I found an excellent program called nandeck; it required learning a markup script but I've used LaTex before, so it wasn't too much of a big deal. I didn't even start trying to make a deck using open office or libre office or their proprietary equivalents; I think that office suites are better at templates now but as the old saying goes: frustration, thy name is wysiwyg. Anyway, I had the text elements (title, tagline and rule) for about 50 cards and things were looking good. I was focused on just one game and the game was progressing well.Because things were going so smoothly, and I had a game with mechanics that I thought were workable, each time I thought of a genre, I would start creating the textual elements for cards in that genre. I soon ended up with a lot of good starts to games, but none near completion. Hence, the game that I was supposed to be working on found itself marginalised in favour of it's spinoffs. Much like certain movie and tv show franchises today. Ahem.

February 2013: gravitational collapse

A lot of the rules that I had devised required further rules. Those rules required exceptions for special cases and modifications, which in turn spawned new rules, and so on. The unwieldy rules and gameplay got discarded, leaving behind a few simple rules;  this was exactly what was needed to create an engaging game that was easy to learn. A pity that things soon got out of hand again ...

January 2013: supernova

A lot of activity and a lot of ideas this month. The throwaway game became an actual game that I liked and the rules and card ideas rapidly expanded; a few of the ideas were actually workable (most were ridiculous). There was a real supernova of ideas, but we all know what happens to supernovae...

Late 2012: accretion disk

October.
I thought of creating a game app. The game was stupid (I like stupid) but I quickly realised that it was pretty much a silly version of pick-a-path books. An app of that would really be nothing more than a bunch of hyperlinked pages. Adding sound and images would have made the app size too large. The idea of an app got shelved.

November.
Going back to tabletop games, I started off trying to create what I thought was a pretty clever game. I had a lot of good ideas, a lot of ideas that were worth developing, and a lot of bad ideas (and that's being euphemistic). This "game for gamers" soon became too convoluted so I shelved it. I then began to think of something simple (mechanically and thematically) that I could create, with the goal of transferring this mechanic to the original "masterpiece".

December.
The throwaway game that I started working on actually became quite enjoyable to work on. I also started working on a space version of the game.
In addition, I started working on a card game about a television show, which I can't yet name. Ooh, get me, aren't I enigmatic! Rest assured though: as soon as my game gets rejected, I will name the show.

Te Waka Games Ltd.

I'm Todd, I've been playing games since I was old enough to hold and release objects to see what would happen to them. For me, that's almost four decades.
I've also done some other stuff, like deliver milk, work in cafes and restaurants, make window wipers, wipe windows, move furniture, mould plastic, lecture mathematics, etc: all the regular stuff.

Why Te Waka Games?
I've been a consumer of games for quite some time, so it's only fair that I also become a producer.
This will be the story of that adventure. I hope that it's more than just a single encounter.