Or preparation as play.

This post was inspired by long set-up times eating into time-crunched play time for busy adults.

As a young adult with minimal time commitment I had no problem spending hours preparing for a gaming session among friends. And there was little concern for an hour or two spent setting up a wargaming afternoon. But in adulthood these time commitments quickly eat-in to or completely consume any time that would otherwise be spent having fun, gaming with your friends.

Certain games are suited more to the preparation side of things than the improvisation side.

David Brevik, one of the original developers of Diablo has released the original pitch document. Check it out!

Listening to Roguelike Radio, I heard the creator of Dungeonmans talk about designing levels to teach gameplay concepts.

Arne over at Android Arts codified a taxonomy of proportion types in character design. I’ve kept track of a few examples I’ve come across to share with you below.

An introductory FATE Accelerated Edition (FAE) adventure in the spirit of Ghostbusters International

Here are some notes brainstorming an application to support hexcrawl campaigns in the spirit of the West Marches.

This is a snapshot of a living document. I will continue working on it in a gist.

Here’s a handy resource that I will be sure to use in the future: game-icons.net.

The site has thousands of icons available under a CC by 3.0 license. I am not a lawyer, but by my read this means you can reuse, redistribute, and remix the icons provided you give appropriate credit, indicate if changes were made, and provide a link to the license.

Check the site out and tweet me if you use or have used the icons in your game.

I made a sample character so players would get a handle for the FATE system. I’m using FATE Accelerated to run a Ghostbusters International-inspired game.

A while back, I wrote a post about unit testing in Unity. In this post, I’ll go through a useful pattern to mock GameObjects in unit tests.

Closing the year with a quote from Picasso:

Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.

—Pablo Picasso