Quest Received

It’s been a while. It really has, so let’s do what we do here and pull back the curtain just a wee bit to get a look at the goings on behind the proverbial scenes here at Star Frog Games. SFG is, and has always been an independent studio. Currently, there is just me. I do all the things. Literally. In the near future that may very well change, but for now, it’s just me. Also, one of the goals for SFG has always been to support the developers (like me) financially, so that we can do this all of the time.

But, we’re not there yet, which means that I, your intrepid indie game developer, has a day job. A few months back, I got a fresh new day job, partially based on my experience here. Since coder + project manager + designer = Systems Analyst. So far, it’s been a little over a month, but I’m rather enjoying the work, and I occasionally get the feelings I get here of being a Clever Boy(tm). But it has somethings working against this. First of all, it actually requires that I be mentally cognizant, so showing up after burning the midnight oils and being a zombie isn’t really what I’m going for. Second, it’s rather further away and now I have to commute. These 2 facts mean that I no longer have the night hours available in the quantities that I had previously, which explains the lack of posts. Since if I have hours to work, I’m going to work instead of writing about the work I didn’t do.

But, there is another odd side effect of the commute due to how my brain works. You see, I find solutions by talking myself through them. Either in writing (like this) or literally out loud like a crazy person when I’m by myself. Which means that I, get about 1-1/2 hours per day to do system and design work. The lack of free hours means that Paper Zeppelin is falling way behind the schedule I worked out in the summer. But the iterations for Dungeon Quest: Adventure has blazed by with a downright alarming alacrity.

A quick list of things that I’ve changed/modified/invented in regards to Dungeon Quest: Adventure. Any and all of which will probably get a Designer Notes at some point.

  • Designed Archetypes for every color combination.
  • Defined different Play Patterns
  • Designed a bunch of Cards
  • Created methods of building environment and event cards.
  • Changed Ally Number to Challenge Rating for Enemies
  • Reconfigured the entire Front Row / Back Row combat paradigm.
  • Changed the Turn Order.

…and probably a bunch of extra ones that I don’t remember and just added.

With the other time to work, well, the Card File is at around 90% completed for Player Cards, and I have a skeleton built out for Enemies. Of particular note, the first pass for Green is totally finished, and I’m rather happy with it. It needs playtesting, but in the end with a game like this, everything needs playtesting forever, and once it is released there will inevitably be something that pops up and I’ll says, “Oh, huh. Needed more playtesting.”

Once I have the rest of the Player Card File built out I’ll do a massive Tabletopia update and make the PDFs available here. I’m excited for it.


A few weeks ago I got bored and wanted a new T-Shirt. So I went ahead and made one for the Das Capital Merch shop. 100% of people that own this shirt love this shirt, and 100% of those people are wearing it right now. Statistics are, as always, stupid.

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