Roll Player Origins

Let me formally introduce you to my next project.  The game is called Roll Player.  It's a dice drafting game that focuses on the creation of a tabletop RPG character.  I've been working on it since last fall.  I am SUPER excited about it, but I've been keeping a lot of the development of the game under wraps.  It's been a while since I blogged so I decided to share a little about how the game started.

I was attending the Fall Protospiel event in Madison.  During Protopiel, game designers play each others' games and provide feedback. It's always a good time and it's fun to see so many friends working on great games.  

Bullfrogs was slowing down, in terms of what I could do to push the production along, and I was starting to ask myself "What's next?"  I didn't have a clear answer.  I attended Protospiel looking for something interesting to publish, since I didn't have something of my own that was super exciting.

Roll Player cover illustration from John Ariosa

I played a ton of prototypes that weekend.  A few of them were interesting enough to follow up on after the convention, but while I was there, I was shown a cool little 16 card RPG game from a friend of mine, James Ryan, and his boy.  The character creation process for his game was basically just drawing two double-sided cards and picking which side of each to play with.  It had me thinking about the character creation process in RPGs like D&D or Shadowrun, or Vampire from when I played a lot of RPGs.  It also had me thinking about the hours I spend agonizing over stats and abilities when I'm creating my character in video games like Fallout,  Skyrim, or Baulders Gate.  It hit me that moment "What if I made a game out of the character creation process?"  No quests.  No monsters. Just making a cool character.

I felt like I had caught lightening a in a jar.  True inspiration.  A spark. 

I was playing a basic version of it in my head before the end of the day.  I was leaning on all the RPG "stuff" I knew from playing those kinds of games in high school and college, adding in as much computer RPG creation details to add as I could muster.

- Character Sheets? Check.
- Dice? Check.  
- Attributes/Abilities?  Check.
- Weapons and Armor?  Check.
- Traits and Skills? Check.

I had a working prototype in a day or two.  I playtested it many times on my own over the next couple weeks.  After two weeks, I attended Gamehole Con in Madison, a boardgame and tabletop rpg convention.  I was ready to hold my first playtest with other players.  

I've been playtesting and making changes almost every day.  It's a much bigger project than Bullfrogs, so it's pushing me to learn/manage more and difficult things than the last project.  

Off on another wild adventure. :)