SCREECH!
My game’s development has come to a complete and sudden halt.
That said, this isn’t my fault. Okay, it is, because I suck, but also not. Allow me to explain.
You see, I have been working on a “Powered by the Apocalypse” game, based on the outline laid out in “Simple World” by Joe Mcdaldno. I had a setting in mind, based on a game I developed decades ago, which I thought would be a good candidate for updating. In fact, I got quite a way into initial development, when I ran into a pretty big obstacle:
It’s already been done.
No, not exactly like my game, but there are more than one game that is similar enough to what I was developing to make my creation rather… derivative. Even though I wrote my game back in the mid-Nineties. Since I wasn’t able to actually publish my game back then (self-publishing wasn’t very easy to do until recently), no one would believe that I had done this first.
So, back to the drawing board, I guess.
Now then, I am aware that people make similar games all the time, especially in the “Powered by the Apocalypse” family of games. For example, “No Country For Old Kobolds”, “For The Dungeon!”, and “Wicked Ones” all run on the same concept: You play monsters in a dungeon, that fight off Adventurers, raid villages, and such. NCFOK and FTD are both PbtA games, where WO uses the related “Forged in the Dark” engine. Regardless, they are all very similar conceptually, but quite different in actuality.
I didn’t want my game to be seen as “Just Another [Insert Game here]”, though, so I’m starting over. Well, not from scratch, because I still have the bones to work with. I’m just starting over with the setting and concepts. The engine remains, as well as much of what I had done to flesh it out.
Anyway, I need to write on my game more. I should probably go do that.
