Game Design Project

One of the main types of coding projects I periodically come back to is game design, with my preference being RPGs.  As a kid, I played a handful of MMORPGs and some D&D, and at one point aspired to be a writer.  Since then I've ended up quite a ways from publishing my own novels, but I still enjoy thinking up entertaining fantasy and scifi scenarios as a creative outlet.  One bonus of being able to program is that I actually have the capability to implement some of these scenarios in the form of a game (assuming the art doesn't need to be above a 3rd grade level).

So I've fiddled around with a few RPG programming projects in the past couple of years, with none of them really going anywhere.  Just the other day, I started another one I've been conceptualizing for a couple of months.  Last spring my roommates and I started doing weekly D&D sessions, but after graduation it's been pretty much impossible for us to set aside time to learn the online D&D tools in addition to the hours it could take for a single gaming session.  Parallel to that, I also pondered about a science fiction game focusing on early space travel for humanity.  I personally enjoy science fiction shows and books about humanity's crawl from where we are now to an interstellar society.  I find near future, or at least futures heavily rooted in the present, settings to be the most compelling.  So I thought about different ideas for how we could reach the technology of interstellar travel and how that would relate to an RPG.

Since I will most likely never get to the point where I can design a high end 3D game, I've decided to shoot lower and attempt to combine the story I was creating with the game mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons.  This way I can hopefully one day soon continue my gaming sessions with my roommates in addition to providing myself a creative outlet.  With work, however, I can usually only average one or two productive hours a day, so I'm going to try and break down my design process on this blog hour by hour.  This way I'll be able to have an in depth view of how my game develops and hopefully some input from readers.