Reigniting progress

Progress has crawled along since I decided to work on version 5. Partly due to family constraints and partly because I wanted to try my hand at writing a computer game. I did that. It was largely fun but now my spare time has become more fragmented, I think I will have more difficulty making the huge jump to something commercial. I've shelved it for now. I've not played any RPG in almost 2 years and I've barely read or touched on other peoples. It begs the question...

How do you go about reinserting yourself into a hobby?

Time away from an activity can give you the opportunity to look at what you were doing afresh. To get back into the hobby, I can recommend taking stock of what you have, questioning all previous decisions, working out what was fun, working out what was best and then making a series of small goals. Here's what I decided:

I like playing face to face. Roll20 was cool and better than nothing but I need face-to-face. I like communicating. Getting back onto 1km1kt and Twitter is a start. I see G+ is going the way of the dodo. I like creating.

Back to basics... sort of

I read the core rules again, cover to cover. My wife's red pen along with my own notes. I scribbled some old designs and made notes in my notebooks. The game isn't very easy to read; layout and language could do with a lot of improvement. I wanted so desperately to be different from other books, that I stepped too far from what is effective. A tabletop with the old v4 rules print out, a scribble of new rules ideas and notebooks I've decided to open source all of Icar - text, 3D models, pictures, everything. To do that will take a fair amount of effort but it's a goal with an end that I can see. I will get to fix things along the way - such as the Mex buildings and some of the vehicles I never really liked.

Keep track of my progress!

  • Micro-musings on Twitter @icarrpg
  • Chatting on 1KM1KT forums
  • Blogging here (for now, but I'm moving it)
  • Updates through to Facebook
  • Task list on Trello
  • Open source content as I go on By keeping this all out in the open, I hope to stay motivated!