Tales of the Rampant Coyote

Adventures in Indie Gaming!

Frayed Knights: Dungeon Creation Rules, Part 3

Posted by Rampant Coyote on November 12, 2013

Time for another installment of the Frayed Knights dungeon creation “rules.” These began life as part of a design document (design principles), both to keep myself oriented as I’m developing content, and for those who may be assisting me. I copy (most) of them here so that you can know more about where Frayed Knights […]


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Frayed Knights: Dungeon Creation Rules, Part 2

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 25, 2013

After our bit discussing general guiding principles for creating adventures in Frayed Knights, I’m now knee-deep in discussing detailed rules (well, okay, still guidelines) that I use for map-building. While not hard-and-fast, they do have explicit requirements that we’re trying to follow. While I wrote this document for the benefit of people helping me with […]


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Frayed Knights: Dungeon Creation Rules, Part 1

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 18, 2013

At one point, I decided to document the things that I thought made up the “secret sauce” (not much of a secret now, is it?) that I thought gave Frayed Knights its flavor. I also wanted to make a checklist for quality and help certain other people I’ve contracted to help make content for the […]


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RPG Design: Expendable!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 17, 2013

One of the issues that I face when playing any RPG – computer, dice & paper, whatever – is my tendency to hoard expendable items. Expendable items (AKA consumables) are those things that can get “used up.” Potions, magic items with charges, scrolls, etc. Often, at the end of a game, my level 60 character […]


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Frayed Knights: Dungeon Design Principles, Part 6

Posted by Rampant Coyote on October 3, 2013

With this installment, we now come to the end of my “general guidelines” for designing adventure areas for Frayed Knights. After this, we move onto specifics, like “dungeons should have at least X of Y” and stuff like that. For those who may not recall, this series is expanded excerpts from the design document for […]


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Bundle-In-A-Box RPGs – Last Chance

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 30, 2013

If you’ve waited, this is your last chance to grab the big indie RPG Bundle-In-A-Box. It’s over tomorrow. Seriously. 13 Indie RPGs if you exceed the average price. Plus bonus content. And you help charity. And you help a bunch of struggling indies. It’s got win-win written all over it. As I’ve seen people talk […]


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Massive Indie RPG Pay-What-You-Want Bundle Available Now!

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 17, 2013

Since before computer games even existed as an industry, the computer role-playing game genre has been heavily influenced by the “indies.” We didn’t know them as indies back then – we didn’t even refer to the games as “role-playing games” at that point – but there were individuals and small teams working on their own […]


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Frayed Knights: Dungeon Design Principles , Part 5

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 13, 2013

Did I mention that my design document for Frayed Knights outlining guidelines and principles for designing adventures got kinda big? No? Well, it did. . This is a multi-part series describing my level-design guidelines, taken from the design document for Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath. I drew upon my experience as a gamer, a […]


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Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon Gets a Licensekeyectomy

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 12, 2013

Just when you thought it was safe to go into the dungeon again… Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon has been updated to version 1.06. Incidentally, there was never a version 1.05.  If you have something labeled 1.05, it didn’t come from Rampant Games. I just completely skipped that version to avoid confusion. So what […]


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Frayed Knights: Dungeon Design Principles, Part 4

Posted by Rampant Coyote on September 5, 2013

Once more, I’m cribbing from a design document for Frayed Knights. This is a multi-part series describing my level-design guidelines.  You can read part 1 here, part 2 here, and part 3 here. What happened was this: Since I’m working with a few extra people on dungeon design this time around, I codified some of […]


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Frayed Knights: Dungeon Design Principles, Part 3

Posted by Rampant Coyote on August 7, 2013

This is a multi-part series describing my level-design guidelines for Frayed Knights.  You can read part 1 here, and part 2 here. These are just a series of guidelines I actually put to (virtual paper) for designing adventures for the Frayed Knights series.  While they primarily apply to Frayed Knights, I think most of them […]


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Matt Chat 203 – Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 30, 2013

For this week’s Matt Chat, professor and video game historian Matt Barton gives Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon a solid play-through and some opinions on the game, and also makes an announcement: He is working with me on some dungeon designs for Frayed Knights 2: The Khan of Wrath! Based on his getting bitten […]


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Frayed Knights: Dungeon Design Principles, Part 2

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 22, 2013

This is a multi-part series describing my level-design guidelines for Frayed Knights.  You can read part 1 here. Many of these guidelines have been with me for a long time. They evolved even when I was designing dungeons on paper for friends to play through. They were certainly inspired by the early dice-and-paper RPG books […]


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Frayed Knights: Dungeon Design Principles, Part 1

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 15, 2013

During the development of Frayed Knights: The Skull of S’makh-Daon, I evolved a set of informal philosophies or guidelines towards making adventuring areas (which I’ll just call “dungeons”, though some were outdoors). For the sequel, I actually wrote many of these guidelines down. At the risk of revealing a developing “secret formula” (hah!), but in […]


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Frayed Knights 2: How to Save the World (State)

Posted by Rampant Coyote on July 5, 2013

For today’s Frayed Knights discussion, I’m actually going to get a little general, and talk about a topic common to virtually all modern computer and console role-playing games: saving the world! Or, rather, saving the state of the world, and dealing with persistent data. It’s pretty basic stuff, and I’m not going to delve too […]


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Frayed Knights Update: How’s Unity 3D Working Out?

Posted by Rampant Coyote on June 13, 2013

I got a great suggestion a few weeks ago for a Frayed Knights Dev Diary thingy about my experiences working with Unity 3D. Brilliant idea! The only trick is, I’m not really sure how to answer it. My first reaction is, “Huh? I’m using Unity? Oh, yeah, I guess I am.” It doesn’t sound like […]


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