Week #1

alasdair

Weeknotes were a thing in blogging for a couple of months back around 2012 or so.  This seems like a sensible space for bringing them back.  The idea, shockingly, is that we log what we’ve done this week, in public, combining both tracking state and motivation.  (I have to do a thing, so there’ll be something for the weeknotes.)

So, if we designate this week as week #1, what’ve we done?

  • Picked a name for the company.  Welcome in (Badgers and) Jam.
  • Bought domain names.
  • Arranged hosting and web management tools, and thrown up a couple of basic websites.
  • Written a first draft E&D policy, and circulated it for comment.
  • Coded and tested some early stage game management tools.  Much still be be done here over the next year,
  • Tested some forum software, and then run away from it in terror.
  • Coded the stub of a ticket purchase system that can be used for many different games.  Need to go away and actually think about the purchase/registration user journey.
  • Came up with a codename for the major LARP project under development for 2018.  It is now to be know as Pentagram.  (Never let a name out into the wild unless you can live with it as a permanent name, in case people react well to it.)
  • Had the third design meeting about Pentagram, it’s starting to take the kind of shape that we’ll be ready to do the writing in earnest in the next few months – the structures and ideas are starting to slot into place, another iteration or two and we should be ready to start producing all the player facing materials.  I have the notes to write up about it tomorrow.

Station Identification

alasdair

This is yet another blog about design for live games, primarily LARP.  It will be largely concerned with the games offered by Badgers and Jam Industries, and the thinking that goes on as we develop games.  There are a few posts in the archive prior to this post, imported from a previous blog on live game design.

Badgers and Jam Industries, at this point, is really just this blog, a domain name, and a collection of historical achievements that are being retroactively claimed as Badgers and Jam games.  Badgers and Jam Industries has been created to unify these things, and because we have some slightly more ambitious plans for the future, that mean it’d be useful to have a unifying pot to keep things in.

So, for the record, a list of the historical achievements of Badgers and Jam Industries:

  • Interregnum – 2008-2009 – old-school Vampire LARP.
  • Testament – 2010-2011 – experimental game about the second coming.
  • Restitution – 2012-2014 – Chronicles of Darkness LARP.
  • Armistice – 2015-2017 – Urban Fantasy LARP about war criminals after the war.

As things currently stand, Armistice has come to an end, and we’re taking some time to  help organise some short form work, while we do a lot of prep work for a bigger and more ambitious offering some time in 2018, of which more anon, in between rambling screeds on aspects of game design.

We vs I

I’m likely to use “we” a lot when writing here, because while Badgers and Jam is primarily the brainchild of one person at present (Alasdair Watson), the games we create are highly collaborative experiences, that require buy in from all the participants, so if “we” talk about “our” design philosophy, or similar topics, it’s because these things do require buy-in from others in the execution.  And because “we” want to involve friends and fellow-travellers under this banner in future, if “we” can.