Wait… What?
Yeah, I do game design. I have about 10 game ideas in mind, one that can be skinned for different genres. They are all tabletop games at this point, though they could be ported to something like Table Top Simulator.
I also go to a few game conventions each year. Gen Con is the biggest and most consistent one, but on occasion I’m at others. My game design company is Games Over Coffee and you can find out about what I have going on over there.
How I Got Started
When I was a wee little kid….no, not entirely.
I started doing game development when a friend and I were trying to play a German game (no, I won’t share the name) that was very broken. Granted, neither of us knew German, but the translators didn’t help that fact at all. So we took what we had gathered and decided that we would try and fix it.
That didn’t go well.
So we did the only thing we could think of. We decided to start from scratch. And that went pretty well for a while. We got to the point where it was playable, easy to teach, but at that point we had a parting of ideas on where it should go. He had recently started professional work and didn’t have time or interest anymore, so he said that I could have it.
I continued to work on it, refining it and making it more workable. I put it in the genre that I thought would be marketable and kept working on it. At this point in 2019, it’s finished except for the artwork.
Over the years, other game ideas came to me, so I noted them and worked on at least a rough idea of what I wanted those to become when I had time. There’s now a list of them waiting for me to focus on them.
And that’s how I got into game design.
My Gaming History
Sure, we played games when I was a kid, but they were your typical Monopoly, Payday, Stretego, and other similar games. Then I stopped playing them for years….and years….and years.
Around the age of 16 I became interested in RPGs. Some friends had Twilight 2000, I found Paranoid, and then there was Dungeons & Dragons. I played a few of those but we couldn’t seem to get a game going that lasted…although Twilight 2000 was popular with my group of friends.
After high school, I took a few years off and then went to college, and there I played some more. Magic: the Gathering was just becoming a thing, but I couldn’t really get into it at the start. Eventually I did and that was fun.
While playing M:tG with some friends, we were discussing other games and I put together a D&D group. We played 3rd edition and then 3.5. When they revealed that they were completely changing the game for 4th edition, we opted to stay and that’s when Pathfinder was revealed. We waited for the Beta release to be available and then migrated to that and ultimately to the final edition. That group lasted for about 10 years.
Then I took some time off, life circumstances changed, and I started playing tabletop games at the local coffee shop. I expanded my exposure to different games, got into deck builders (Dominion in particular), and found the social aspect with games to be fun.
After a few years, I tried to get another Pathfinder group going. However, it was hard to get a consistent group and that died out. About a year after that I started working on the game design stuff.