Sinister Design SwagShop Update
The Sinister Design SwagShop has received an update, with lots of new products and some drastic price cuts. (Everything in the shop is now being sold at close to cost!) Check it out!
Archive for July, 2011
Using Details to Craft a Coherent Game World
The RPG is an inherently inelegant creature. It is something of a Frankenstein monster, a suite of different gameplay systems stitched together into a shambling chimera. Character creation, simulated markets, item management, navigation, combat, stealth, dialog, puzzles, class and skill trees–as a developer, it is difficult enough simply to make…
Reasons to Support Indie RPGs Cont’d.
2K Marin, the developer working on the X-Com series reboot, has become the latest big studio to take a turn at trashing classic turn-based games:
Gearing up for the next big update
Soon–within the next few weeks–I’m going to release an updated version of Telepath RPG: Servants of God. Starting with that update, the game is going to be distributed exclusively as an AIR installer, meaning that it can be installed and played on any computer that runs Windows, Mac or Linux.…
12 ways to improve turn-based RPG combat systems
In my last opinion piece, I provoked a certain subsection of the world of RPG enthusiasts by slaughtering a particularly sacred cow: the D&D-style combat system. A surprising number of people wrote in agreeing with me. Predictably, however, others responded in one of two ways: (1) “So you think a…
The battle system I wish RPGs would stop using
Dungeons and Dragons, son of Chainmail, is the great granddaddy of the modern role-playing game. Its importance cannot be overstated: not only was it revolutionary for its time, it has also directly inspired many of the early computer RPGs on which the genre is now based. Because of D&D’s power…
