_About Reasonably Septaweekly_

RinkuHero

There is an emphasis on game design engines rather than pure or 'programmed from scratch' games. There is no rule that a game designer has to be a programmer (although it helps to know programming, programming shouldn't be primary). There is also no rule that a game designer can't use programs specifically designed to make game creation possible for the nonprogrammer. Here we emphasize games made on game creation engines, although of course games that don't use these will appear as well. Our stance is that game creation engines are to game designers what word processors are to writers and what painting programs are to visual artists.

There is an emphasis on games which are made by a small group of people, or a single person, rather than a large team. It's often the case that adding too many cooks spoils the soup, likewise too many game designers on a development team often dilute the talent. I've seen Ohrrpgce games fall because the group working on the game become too large for organization and direction. In my experience, one to three people is the optimum for independent game development, depending on the size of the game.

There is an emphasis on games which are either freeware or shareware, rather than games which are marketed on store shelves. It's fine to hope to make money on one's game, but if that is the only reason one creates the game, then the author often feels the need to adapt the game to the public's wants, instead of making it the best it can possibly be and knowing that others will like it because of its actual value and not because it is a copy of what they have liked in the past. Originality for the sake of originality is not condoned, but neither is copying for the sake of copying.

There is likewise an emphasis on games that have low-budgets rather than high-budgets. Literature enjoys the variety that it does because it is cheap to produce (all you need is a word processor, or even just paper and a pencil), but currently the field of game design suffers from economic pressures similar to the movie industry's, where every movie is made based on how well past movies have done, and no radical experimentation goes on. If game design is be achieve full flowering it needs to be brought to a wider audience; and to be brought to a wider audience the cost of production needs to be reduced to some low level, comparable to the cost of writing a novel. Independent game design is the key to that door. We will show in these pages that you don't have to have or belong to a "company" to successfully make a game, just as you don't need that to write a story or a song.

There is an emphasis on principled game design theory rather than pragmatic and detailed technique. We don't intend to have articles on how to get more speed out of a processor, or how to do task x better than ever before -- we intend to have articles on the relation of games to life, and how to do tasks others haven't tried before. We may have a few articles on the local worries and variables, but the emphasis is on the globals and universals.

There is an emphasis on the future and potential of games rather than their current state. While thinking of names for this magazine, one of my ideas was "The Farther Reaches of Game Nature" (referring to psychologist Abraham Maslow's book The Farther Reaches of Human Nature). Game design is in its infancy. Games are where movies were when they were doing films like The Great Train Robbery, and where navigation was with the Greek trireme, where painting was with Egyptian hyroglyphics. So we (or at least, I) look at game design as a recently discovered planet -- with the vast majority of its lands and deserts and mountains and forests and seas all waiting unexplored. Reasonably Septaweekly is to be a group of explorers camping farther into its reaches than most others have dared look.

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The Magazine's History

The reason for the name change and topic change is that I didn't want to restrict myself solely to Ohrrpgce games and Ohrrpgce game designers -- partly because many of its readership (including myself) used means other than the Ohrrpgce in our game creation efforts, partly because I wanted to write on a wider scope of topics, and partly because I like to change the name and look of things for the sake of freshness. The focus will continue to be on Ohrrpgce games for some time, but I the game design section will focus on game design in general, and there will be a non-Ohrrpgce reviews and previews once in awhile (e.g. in this first issue we have a review of Kung Fu Chess). The focus is also currently on Ohrrpgce games because it has most of the best engine-made games; if other game engines start turning out great games, we'll turn the spotlight on those.

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The Staff & Joining the Staff

(1) Game design theory articles, especially if original, insightful, well-written, and well-thought-out. These can be on any topic imaginable, as long as they give you some new angle on thinking about game design. This doesn't include rehashes of old game design ideas that you read somewhere (although expansions and clarifications of the ideas are fine if they are properly acknowledged), nor does it include common sense things like 'the importance of backing up your data' (unless it's written brilliantly). It also decidedly doesn't include articles solely on how to write a nonlinear story, make graphics, or write music, unless those are tied in with the interactive (gameplay) element in some cohesive way.

(2) Game postmortems and design docs and design diaries of your released games. A postmortem is a description of the process of creating a game, written by the author of the game. It can be in diary format, in design document format, or whatever else format works, as long as it is an interesting account of how you or your group created a particular game which is released.

(3) Independent game walkthroughs, strategy guides, or faqs, especially if the game is popular and elaborate, and especially if you include behind the scenes information, interviews with the author, and goodies like that.

(4) Essays that aren't exactly design-orientated but still relevent to the concerns of the magazine's audience. For example, an article on ideas of how to get your independent games to a wider audience, or a history of games article, or a review/critique of a commercial game, or an interview with someone of interest.

Features must be in .txt or .rtf format. If they include images you should include the images with your submission in a Zip file. Features may be of any length, within reason (anything between 2 and 200 pages should be fine). You retain all rights to submitted features, except that you have to mention that they were first published here if you want to publish them anywhere else (online or off).

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Submitting Games for Review