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Welcome Friends to Open20

 Hello. C J here. This will likely be one of my last posts here. This blog was designed to chronicle the game design and marketing set up process for my company Infinity Game Studios. The blog will remain here as an archive if anyone ever needs knowledge from one of its posts. The recipes in particular should stand the test of time. I have one more announcement to make. Here we go.

We’re running out of tabletop games. Cards, roleplaying, board game, these things are in trouble. I’ve spent my entire career keeping my thumb on this one and the pulse is weaker than ever before. I as an author should not have had to do this. It isn’t my job but someone had to do it. We need these games to be healthy as a planet but no one’s willing to make the vast, interconnected networks of products that once dominated the industry. It’s too hard.

My solution? Make software do it for us. I’m working on a free desktop Windows program called Open20. It’s a tabletop game generation engine. It’s also going to be open source. I’m using a streamlined twenty-sided die engine as its core mechanic and everything else is modular including its ability to generate an entire setting with nations, lore and geography out of user-chosen keywords.

The engine already has some of its paragraphs written and I’m very confident I know how to do the one or two lines of code it will rely on to sort them into new games based on user instructions. It’s procedural, not random, so it technically is not AI software. I’m looking to recruit the gaming community as a whole to write more of these paragraphs, each one containing a mechanical idea or a setting term and its definition.

I’m going to be running an online archive of free downloads for content and story modules that I and the community write. This is where I’m hoping to invest some of the profits from Dragon Engine when it’s done. Dragon Engine will fund paying people to make procedural setting design content and new mechanical concepts in number form. These then are added to the open source module content. I picked d20 because the industry started there. Someone’s got to keep the thing going.

For more information about my current projects see my two new websites.

dragonenginenews.blogspot.com

fantasyplusserver.blogspot.com

If you want in on the procedural game design project then find me on Fantasy Plus in Minecraft Bedrock Edition The server launches today in full Alpha.

I’ll be there.

C J Mcpherson
Head Game Designer
Concept Art Lead
Infinity Game Studios

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