Game Development Part 2: Planning

With our research complete, it is time to prepare.  This is the clam before the storm!  For every project we have company goals and project goals.  A company goal is something all our games try to achieve, while a project goal is something we want to make happen for this game only.  So let's get started!

Anyone know what game this is?

 As an indie game company, the pieces and boards used for our games must come from other games.  At first this seems like a massive handicap, but it ties into our first company goal: make it new and different.  Just because we are using a Memoir '44 board and Axis & Allies pieces doesn't mean that our game cannot feel new and exciting.  This brings us to our second goal: make it cheap.  Our rulebooks are always free, but the pieces and boards never are.  Thus, we feel it should take no more than $50 to buy the needed pieces and boards.  However, we are bargain hunters!  At first glance the materials may seem a lot more expensive than $50, but we will be sure to include where all our playtesting equipment came from (and don't be surprised if we make some of it ourselves!).  Finally, our third goal ties into an old saying: make it simple!  Because these games should be educational we must make sure anyone can learn it very quickly, preferably in under a half hour!

Moving along, we then design a set of goals for the specific project.  For this project, we want to make a miniature-board game, a game that uses miniatures but uses a board game style board (instead of 3D terrain).  Next, it will be based around the number six.  What exactly do we mean by this?  Well, the board will be made up of hexes and the game will use D6 dice.  Overall, six is simply a very nice number that appears all over the gaming industry, making our lives that much easier.  Also, casualties will be very high and morale will be a big issue.  The main focus of The Pacific is the fearsome brutality of the war, so it only makes sense for the casualties to pile up rapidly and the men to get affected (but the Japanese will have rules to lessen the effect of morale).  We are also on a time crunch, so the complete game can take no longer that 2 months.  Even then, a very basic game should be available in only a month.

So now the calm is nearly over, things are about to become very, very interesting.  Until next time folks, take care on those battle fields.

Game Development Part 1: Research

Permission has been granted!  We just got the green light and are ready to start hammering this game out.  So without further ado, here is our research.  The principle resource for this project is the book The Pacific and the HBO miniseries of the same name.  The book and movie cover the intertwined journeys of four U.S. Marines across the Pacific theater of operations.  Their names are Sydney Phillips, Eugene Sledge, Robert Leckie, and John Basoline.  The  major issue these two pieces deal with is the brutality and lack of humanity seen in almost every major operation in the Pacific theater.  But using just one piece for research would be like composing a symphony with just one note.  Thus, we dug deeper.  A good place to start is with Robert Leckie's Helmet for my Pillow and Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed.  Both are personal memoirs that do a good job of showing the savagery of the Pacific theater.  With these pieces under our belt we started to do some general research.  This includes many, many books and for the sake of time we will not list them all.  This gives a solid background and has us ready to move to planning and development!



   

Game Development Part 0: How we develop games

Hello to all and welcome to the first of series on the development of our first game.  In the very first post on our blog I introduced us and our goals.  In this post I will explain our method for developing amazing games.  First off their must be some sort of motivation, in the case of our first game a recent school project provided a much needed boost!  The school project centered around a book, in this case The Pacific.  This leads nicely into the first stage of game development, research.  Since all our games are meant to be educational research is very important.  Sadly, personal accounts of engagements can differ greatly, making this job rather challenging.  However, once we have gathered enough information we are ready to move on to the next stage, planning.  When planning we consider the basics, such as what scale the game shall be, how initiative and moral shall be handled, what dice will be used, how basic actions (shooting, moving) will be handled, and how large forces and playing areas should be to ensure a fun game.  Once all of this has been done we start writing.  This is broken done into several different steps, but they basically focus on developing the game in a logical manner.  Once a complete rule set has completed we release a "first draft" and announce open beta testing.  Beta testing focuses on testing a limited set of rules in rigid scenarios, mainly to help fix obvious issues.  When we have edited and tweaked the rules to fix the obvious problems, the complete rules with a much wider range of scenarios are released and the game enters alpha stage.  Alpha stage will still have minor issues that will be fixed as rapidly as possible, and when the errors have been fixed to a point we feel comfortable with we will announce it as finished.  After that it will be free for all to enjoy!  Stay tuned for more, as we are almost ready to begin development of our first game!

A fresh idea... announcing our first game!

Hello, and welcome to the start of a grand experiment.  We are a miniature game developing team with a goal to develop games that are different.  Remembrance Games is based on the idea that miniature gaming should be used as a form of remembering the heroes of our country and the horrors of war.  This is our founding principle and is exemplified by our motto, "For them it wasn't a game."    All of our games will be free and will have some educational value. Our first game will be based upon the movie and book "The Pacific", and will hopefully be a great start.  Stay tuned for more!