Ostravia’s been forging ahead, so I figure I should give people an idea of what to expect in terms of it and my other projects. Obviously, since it is now my honors thesis, it’s grown to be both much larger (no longer merely serving as the testing ground for ABACUS but instead becoming its own full-grown game), and a lot more personally important, so it’s sort of rearranged my schedule.
Category: Project Update
Project Update: The Political Structure of Ostravia
The hierarchal structure of Ostravia is based off German feudalism, which is in part because that’s not so far off of the Polish system but also because Ostravia’s political realities reflect a pitifully weak monarchy with princes that really vie for most of the power. For the sake of Ostravia, there are three major principalities within the boundaries of the royal kingdom of Ostravia. This is somewhat subject to change as the project draws on, but it serves as a foundation for characters and their social personae, motivations, and background.
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Project Update: Ostravia (Lots of Housekeeping)
Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to do a whole lot on Ostravia this week. I’ve been pretty busy with a lot of stuff, and I’ve mostly come down to getting correspondence about doing it as an honors thesis and stuff like that, and not so much to the actual work on Ostravia itself. Still, I’ve had some progress.
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Project Update: FAULT: Free, Advanced, Unambiguous Licensing (for the) Tabletop
Ostravia’s something that I’ve been working on for a while now, and while I plan for it to be relatively freely released, it’s also something that I want to look at from the perspective of someone who is severely dissatisfied with the way that licensing works. FAULT is my answer to a couple major problems, and attempts to freely and openly satisfy the various intricacies of copyright law.
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Project Update: Ostravia Progress October 2013
I figure that since I’m getting increasingly detailed on Ostravia (and I keep posting about it again and again), I should give people some idea of where I am. I’ll be keeping it pretty simple this month, because I’m quite honestly not at the point where anything is set in stone, or even particularly thick paper, but there are a few things that I can keep working from and developing.
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Project Update: Designing ABACUS’s Event Philosophy
ABACUS is built to be an ultralight system that allows for a high degree of detail and flexibility. Put simply, it attempts to do everything for everyone without becoming too much of a burden, in part due to modularity and a universal design principle that focuses on parallelism and an easy to understand structure inspired by grammar and linguistics.
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Project Update: Ostravia and Social Combat
Ostravia is a game set in 1202 near the geographical intersection of Poland, Hungary, and Bohemia/Moravia (modern day Czech Republic), and as such it has to consider several political structures, namely the fact that there really is a fair degree of social stratification in European society at this time. While it makes no claims to be incredibly solidly researched, Ostravia does care a fair degree about providing an authentic feel, and some of that is managing the social environment as such. Continue reading “Project Update: Ostravia and Social Combat”
Introducing Ostravia
Ostravia is the new official title for the ABACUS’s system upcoming Gothic fantasy game. It’s meant to be both an Orchestra-lite and an examination of how ABACUS can be tweaked to fulfill a variety of roles, and being a grim Gothic fantasy set in the times of the Fourth Crusade, it’s got a lot of interest to historians and scholars that a lot of fantasy games don’t have, namely that it is also an examination of the social and political structures of early 13th century Europe. Continue reading “Introducing Ostravia”
Project Update: A Brief History of Educational Video Games
I have a pretty significant thing to put out there this week. For one of my classes I’ve been working on a Moodle e-class on the topic of video games and education, and it’s finally ready. I’d write more about it, but it pretty much will speak for itself. It’s not entirely finished yet (the core presentation I’ll be giving in class is, but about 20% of the secondary content is not), but it will be later today. You can find it through the following link: http://historyofvideogamesineducation.homoeoteleuton.com
Using the guest access feature will show all the content for the course.
Project Update: So You Want To Play’s Progress
Right now, I’m working on So You Want To Play, a nine-part course on running a tabletop roleplaying game intended for complete novices to the hobby. One of my major goals is to try to condense as much of my experience and passion as possible into a small, online package that delivers a substantial amount of value and serves as a jumping off point for others to get into a hobby that I really enjoy. Continue reading “Project Update: So You Want To Play’s Progress”