Rampant Games New Year’s Resolutions

Posted by Rampant Coyote on December 31, 2010

‘Tis the season to make New Year’s Resolutions, goals you plan achieve in the coming 12 months, which you will probably keep at least until January 3rd or so.

Most of mine would probably bore you all – they go into the usual categories (Lose weight, educate myself, improve my health – though I have more specific goals in mind than that).

Most of my goals for Rampant Games would also probably bore you to tears (or maybe tip my hand too much, but I’m not doing anything that incredible…), but I thought I’d go ahead and go public on the biggest goal of them all:

#1: Release Frayed Knights in 2011!

Okay, that probably isn’t enough of a stretch, as at this point it is pretty likely already. To make it a little tougher, I’m really pushing to have it out in the first half of 2011. Ideally April, but that gives me a little bit of a buffer.

Some others on my list:

Get Frayed Knights #2 to alpha by the end of 2011. This is a very aggressive goal. Since the core codebase isnt’ going to be changing a ton between games, we’ll be able to concentrate more on content, so this is remotely feasible *if* I manage to get FK 1 out in the first half of the year.

Fix my friggin’ website. There’s something that’s crapped up on Chrome, and I think Firefox on non-Windows machines (looks fine in Firefox for me, but I’m always running it under Windows). Can any of you web-gurus tell me exactly what I’m doing wrong? Lemme know, please, at jayb at this site.

Reorganize my Role-Playing Game Section. It’s overflowing. The design and code I wrote to support adding new games was fine up until about 24 games or so. I’m at about double that, now. The current design randomizes the order of the games every time you view the page, which is cool, but dumping dozens and dozens of games and artwork (no matter how small) on a single page is not great.

Add affiliate products on a more regular basis. At least once a month. This one is tough, because when I’m in hardcore dev mode, I barely want to spare the cycles to blog, let alone play a new game and spend a couple hours setting it up and testing it. But it supports the indie community (especially RPG makers), and helps keep the lights on around here.

Have an “indie RPG News Roundup” at least once a month. Again. If nothing else, it helps me stay informed (often by people telling me all the news I missed after I post one).

So there you go. There are a couple others, but they are either boring internal things or things I don’t want to tip my hand about quite yet (not that they are massive or world-changing or anything… but they are still under development and subject to change).

Got any suggestions? As the site’s really supposed to be about what you want – I just have to guess at it – what would you like to see? What would you like to see more of? Less of? New? Different?

Thanks!

And while I’m at it:

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY!

Filed Under: Frayed Knights, Rampant Games - Comments: 8 Comments to Read

Acrin1 said,

I have a long running game project of my own that I intend to bring to a close in 2011 so best of luck with Frayed Knights.

I’ve been reading the blog for several months now. I’ve been thinking seriously about creating my own original CRPG next year (in my spare time of course) and the site has been a great source of ideas for that as well as pointing me to games I would otherwise have overlooked.

Personally I’m particularly interested in older style CRPGs and games (80s and 90s) as well as game development but I think there is currently a good mix of the old and new on the site. A monthly roundup of news would be good.

Thanks for all the effort you put into keeping the site and blog going and Happy New Year.
Rampant Coyote said,

You are way welcome, and good luck! If I have any advice at all, it would be, “Keep it simple.” I thought I was keeping it simple, and I should have gone for about 3x simpler. But ah, well.
McTeddy said,

You know… every time I make one of those new years resolutions I end up failing miserably and making a fool of myself… So… This year…

#1 I am not going to finish any projects.

#2 I WILL NOT play any Indy titles.

#3 I am going to accomplish nothing and end up in the same position next year.

Just watch me fail these ones… please…
skavenhorde said,

Finish Frayed Knights before messing around with the website or get some help with adding games 😉 If I get sidetracked when I’m working on something then it’s really hard to get started again.

That’s just me though. I can’t have too many irons in the fire and multi-tasking was always beyond me.

As for my New Years Resolution I’ve decided to start a blog. I’ve been heavily inspired by what CRPAddict is doing. I don’t plan to do what he is doing, but something similar across all genres and platforms that I’ve played in the past.

I hope that helps me save some money this year 😀
Didacsoy said,

Happy new year! I’m sure FK will be amazing… just take as long as you need. FYI the site looks good on Firefox on the Mac.
erratio said,

Random thought about the indie news roundup: if you don’t have enough spare time/attention to always do the research yourself, maybe actively crowdsource it a bit more?
Rampant Coyote said,

I’ve asked in the past, and do get some email updates from time to time, but I’ve done a poor job of it. But you are right, erratio – that really needs to happen. I’ll start with the next one, and see if folks can help out a bit more (and if I can get myself a bit more organized for it).
Calibrator said,

Happy New Year to everyone, too!

I’ve also a suggestion for your upcoming crunch time: 😉

Sometimes there is a “gap” between blog posts and the crowd probably awaits your next one.
Then the new post is online and it’s often a good or even great one. A lively discussion usually follows and the comments are regularly as worthwhile to read as the original posting.
But then you sometimes get on a “posting streak” with two, three or more additional posts in quick succession, sometimes several on the same day.

Maybe it’s a wrong impression but I often think that the (comparatively small) crowd moves on to the newer or newest posting and the interesting discussion we had has ended *prematurely*.

It’s a purely subjective impression but what I want to propose is to perhaps put out stuff on a more regular basis, even if it means to delay something for a day. It appears to me that lots of your posts have no reference to a current event or something anyway (postings about game design for example). Those postings often have the most interesting discussions in their wake and I think that sometimes more could have been brought to light…