Teutonic Blogging

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Some­body grabs you by your squishy end and draws you out of the comfy sticky goo that you were sub­merged in. You wind your­selves in fear of being crushed. You vaguely see a few worms, wind­ing them­selves in the fin­gers of sur­pris­ingly unre­mark­able humans. You must your­self be such a worm, cap­tive between the fin­gers of another human, or Norm. The Norm wears gog­gles and over-sized gloves. Of course, you don’t know what that is, now. But you will soon under­stand. He smiles at you. Con­tinue read­ing →

Arti­cle source: http://pihalbe.org/blogentry/2013–05-24-my-unnamed-game-chef-project-introtext-960

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This year’s Game Chef ana­log game design com­pe­ti­tion is already halfway through and I thought it could be inter­est­ing to share some of my expe­ri­ences with it and the cur­rent sta­tus of my design in this episode. A lot of this is quite pre­lim­i­nary, but the basic foun­da­tions are likely to stand until the end of the competition.

I have no hopes of win­ning, but I will cer­tainly sub­mit my game and hope­fully find the time to develop it fur­ther after the com­pe­ti­tion. We had a playtest, last night, and every­body had fun with the con­cept. Also, the rules (as far as we got test­ing them) seemed to make sense and enrich play. So, I do not need to scrap those entirely. Con­tinue read­ing →

Arti­cle source: http://pihalbe.org/audio/2013–05-23-picast-game-chef-2013-middesign-959

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This year’s Game Chef com­pe­ti­tion has just started. Its theme and four inge­di­ents have been unveiled today. And — sur­pris­ingly enough — they are not words but rather pic­tures. This will com­pli­cate my brain­storm­ing ses­sion, but is a nice devi­a­tion from other contests.

The con­test runs from May 17th and 26th 2013, which is the time you have to pro­duce a fully playable (and read­able!) ana­log game of sorts. I encour­age you to take part, if you can spare some hours this com­ing week. Con­tinue read­ing →

Arti­cle source: http://pihalbe.org/blogentry/2013–05-17-game-chef-2013-has-started-957

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I totally for­got to men­tion this … any­where … at all.

I Octo­ber there was a con­test over at the RPGGeek for 24-hour RPGs. I decided to accept the chal­lenge and in turn pro­duced my sec­ond con­test RPG ever.

This is its name:

Us, our set­tle­ment, the AI and the quan­tum infor­ma­tion field, here, at the end of the world

(Postrocky, I know.) Con­tinue read­ing →

Arti­cle source: http://pihalbe.org/blogentry/2012–11-18-24h-rpg-contest-rpggeek-us-our-settlement-ai-and-quantum-information-field-here

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This is the sec­ond (and the only one in Eng­lish lan­guage) of three inter­views I recorded at the SPIEL 2012 exhi­bi­tion in Essen.

I talked to Christof­fer Krämer who is one of the many cre­ative heads behind Swedish game pub­lisher Gigan­toskop. He talks about how they go about their cre­ative process, the inter­nal com­pe­ti­tions they make for design­ing new games, why they put their focus on games with strong themes, how ideas are cheap and why it’s best to talk about your game and not be afraid that any­body will steal your idea. Con­tinue read­ing →

Arti­cle source: http://pihalbe.org/audio/2012–11-14-picast-spiel-2012-christoffer-kr-mer-gigantoskop-911

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Hey every­one,

I am pleased to inform you that I com­pleted (for now) build­ing an RPG pitch data­base web­site. It goes by the most imag­i­na­tive title of RPG Pitches.

It was inspired by me col­lect­ing a long list of pitches of games in pri­vate for a reg­u­lar one-shot game night. I would like to make this use­ful for everyone.

The con­cept of the site is sim­ple, depend­ing on what you want:

Find a pitch for my game to make it inter­est­ing to my players

Go on the web­site, select your game/system in the main view (it’s a drop­down menu) or visit the Sys­tems page to scroll through the full list.

You can select by lan­guage (cur­rently only Ger­man and Eng­lish) and by pitch type to quickly fil­ter the list of avail­able pitches. By default, they are sorted by rat­ing, to make things eas­ier for you. Con­tinue read­ing →

Arti­cle source: http://pihalbe.org/blogentry/2012–08-07-rpg-pitches-goes-live-882