Development Diary

[indiekid]

Getting back in the game. Travel writing to follow soon I hope https://masterofolympus.wordpress.com/2024/01/20/diary-58-the-sponge/

[Jubal]

The night heron photo is nice I saw a lot of them in Tbilisi last summer, they're fun birds.

Re the Aztec/Mexican leg, I've got a whole book on Teotihuacan that I've never gotten round to reading, I should really get to that sometime. A brief look online suggests that the Toltecs were too chronologically late to have built Teotihuacan, though - that might be an older interpretation that's now been superseded.

[indiekid]

That will be an interesting read, and would give you a good understanding of the entire region at that time. I thought of going into the mysteries of the city's founders in the article, but in the interest of brevity I settled for a (?) next to the first mention of them!

[Jubal]

Yeah, not enough time for every historical deep-dive one wants to put into an article

[indiekid]

A bit more travel and my new-found talent for "squeezing" https://masterofolympus.wordpress.com/2024/03/19/diary-59-something-nandeck-this-way-comes/

[indiekid]

Some more adventures at the UK Games Expo, with musings on its actual size https://masterofolympus.wordpress.com/2024/06/03/diary-60-games-forever/

[indiekid]

In the Northeast of England, where there be dragons https://masterofolympus.wordpress.com/2024/07/22/diary-61-the-avocado-dragon/

[Jubal]

The tiny dragon looking after the huge avocado made me think of cuckoos (which famously lay their much bigger eggs and babies in smaller birds' nests and make the smaller birds do the actual raising of them, usually including the baby cuckoo eating the actual babies of whatever poor avian is being their surrogate parent).

The questions of what would do that to a dragon, or in what circumstances a dragon might adopt the same strategy, are interesting and perhaps concerning ones

[indiekid]

I agree and I find it funny that Tony had no idea what a can of worms he was opening with his simple statement! Also the fact that the avocado's skin is dark and leathery

[Jubal]

Maybe Millennials are actually so into avocadoes because we're secretly all trying to hatch dragon armies?

[indiekid]

Another crazy journey by bike and train https://masterofolympus.wordpress.com/2024/09/09/diary-62-yearning/

[Jubal]

I think there's a lot of real skill to running games with & for children, and that thing of trying to keep everything running without dismantling the game totally due to frustrations is really important.

On another note we can, alas, tell that Tolkien was not a D&D fan by simple chronological order: the first D&D boxed set was published in 1974, the year after he died. The reverse is very much true - a bunch of stuff we now think of as "normal" in fantasy is just Tolkien piped through D&D's interpretation of his work (sometimes interpretations he probably didn't intend, e.g. the orc/goblin distinction in modern fantasy).

[indiekid]

Yes I had my tongue a little in my cheek when I wrote that. As it has been in the subsequent comments I've added to the article

[indiekid]

Two playtesting zones https://masterofolympus.wordpress.com/2024/09/30/diary-63-both-ends-of-the-rainbow/

[indiekid]

I was interviewed by Joe Shimwell from What If Games - lots of waxing lyrical about playtesting https://www.whatifgames.co.uk/beyond-playtesting-a-conversation-with-richard-aka-the-indiekid/