I tried to give Game Chef a go this year.
Unfortunately, my efforts are not among the final entries,
as I didn’t finish in time. Part of this was being a bit too ambitious
with what I wanted to do in the one-week timeframe. The other, more
serious, part of it is that I’m not really sure the game I was building
would have worked. I can make it work eventually, but what’s in my head
right now might not. There is a little smoke there, but not much
fire.
Still, the whole point of Game Chef is not to win, or even enter, really. It is to go through the effort of actually building a game. So, in that spirit, I thought I’d release what I have so far. I’m unlikely to take it much further unless interest seems there. I’m releasing what I have under a “do pretty much anything you want with it”, so feel free to hack it, reuse it, whatever.
The task was to build a game in one week with a theme of “Journey”, using three of the ingredients “edge”, “skin”, “desert” or “city”. You can see what I tried to do with these here:
- Exodus (PDF format)
- Exodus (EPUB format)
- All of the InDesign, Illustrator and image sources used to produce these books (around 38MB).
If you are interested in the probability at work in Exodus, you can see its distribution on AnyDice.
One thing I wanted to find out making this game (and one reason why the actual game isn’t better) is how to use a single InDesign setup to export both a PDF and an EPUB version of the book, without compromising the layout in either, assuming that is possible. I’m fairly pleased at the result, though I’ve only tried the EPUB version on an iPad and the Mac version of Calibre. I haven’t tried using other readers (if you do, please comment below). I will probably have more to say about the technical bits of this in another post (if you have questions you’d like answered on such a topic, please ask them below).
If you have suggestions for Exodus, please leave them below. And, check out the real Game Chef entries. Since the winner will be the game that gets played the most often over the next few weeks, try playing one that sounds interesting, and let people know about it. I may try to run Danger Mountain! and/or The Chaos Lords and the Desert of Death, myself.