24 Hour Game

[philreed]

Why don't we just collect them in groups of five? As five are finished we'll collect them and sell them.

No deadlines or anything. Just create a 24 hour game when (and if) you feel like it. If you don't want to donate it to the project you don't have to (but at least tell us about what you've done . . . please).

[Paul Czege]

Hey Phil,

I think the 24 Hour Game concept is great. And I'd be all over it if I weren't the time of the year when if I want to be selling My Life with Master at the GenCon booth I need to be writing it.

But this...

Don't give these away to everyone in the world. Maybe we can bundle them and sell them as PDF with all proceeds going to advertising the project and The Forge. The final PDF collection would include advertising for each contributor and all of the games (even partials) created during the established timeframe.

...I'm not so sure about. I'm not sure I like the message:

"These are a bunch of games we wrote in 24 hours. We never playtested them. Some of them are incomplete. This is who we are and what we do at The Forge."

It seems to me the purpose of Scott McCloud's 24 Hour Dare is to get folks out of stasis mode and into a mindset where the objective isn't creative excellence, but effort and completion. It's the artist's anticipation of his work being subjected to scrutiny and evaluation for its creative excellence that fosters the paralysis mode in the first place. Aren't plans to put the games that result from this effort out in front of The Forge as a promotion of its excellence actually working against the purpose?

Paul

[philreed]

I see at more as: "Here's some experimentation in RPG design that's not usually seen. Your chance to see the earliest stage of five different games for $5."

I see a lot of value in that and would buy such a thing. But maybe I'm weird.

[Jonathan Walton]

All I can see are pics. No text. Looks like a PDF problem. I'm using Acrobat Reader 5 to look at it.

Hmm, it's opening just fine for me.  I'm also using 5.0, and Jason Blair (over on the Key 20 Forum) said he's been able to read it.  What kind of machine are you on, Phil?  If you're using a Mac, there might be a problem with the way I (or the Adobe Online PDF service) embedded the fonts.

Is anyone else having this problem?  If I could get some idea as to who can read it and what machine they're using, I might be able to figure out what was wrong.

In any case, I'm planning to edit and revise the document as soon as I can find some free time (giving it a proper layout in InDesign and fixing some nasty typos that I just noticed).

I just hope other people aren't having Phil's problem...

[philreed]

I'm using a Mac.

I'll try opening it in Acrobat 4.

[iago]

Phil, I think this is a cool thing.  I especially like the idea of packaging them together for sale with proceeds going to the Forge.  Are you serious about that?  If so, give me (and others here) a time frame for when you want submissions for such a publication.  If need be, I can put TandT on hold for this.

Rock on!

Very serious about that. I think the income from such a project could go toward co-op ads in some publications. Advertising geared toward directing people to The Forge where they'll learn all about a ton of different games that they otherwise would have probably never heard of.

As far as timeframe goes, I am tempted to say that it should happen sometime in April; this keeps it very much in the spirit of this being "24 Hour RPG Month", and also keeps things from, well, dragging.

[iago]

I'm using a Mac.

I'll try opening it in Acrobat 4.

I'm using a Mac.  MacOS X.  Acrobat Reader 5.0.  Opens fine.

[philreed]

It opened in Acrobat 4. Won't open in Acrobat Reader 5. Max OS 9.2.

[Paul Czege]

Hey Jonathan,

Is anyone else having this problem? If I could get some idea as to who can read it and what machine they're using, I might be able to figure out what was wrong.

I get the same thing Phil does, a nineteen page document with images on various pages and no visible text. I'm on a Windows 2000 machine, with Acrobat Reader 5.0. I tried both downloading the document and opening in Acrobat Reader, and launching it into the Internet Explorer Acrobat Reader plug-in, and got the same result.

Paul

[Jonathan Walton]

Bizarre, so why can Fred get it, but not Phil?  And why can I get it (Windows ME + AR 5.0), but not Paul?  We seem to be running pretty similar setups.  Maybe it's because I set the Adobe Online thing to process the Word files into "eBook" format instead of "web."

In any case, if I can find time this weekend to run everything through InDesign I will.  Sorry about all the trouble.

[iago]

Bizarre, so why can Fred get it, but not Phil?  And why can I get it (Windows ME + AR 5.0), but not Paul?  We seem to be running pretty similar setups.  Maybe it's because I set the Adobe Online thing to process the Word files into "eBook" format instead of "web."

Difficult to say.  Phil's on a different version of MacOS, so even if we're both running Reader 5.0, it's effectively a different piece of software.  Haven't used Adobe Online stuff, ever.  If critical, I do have a version of Word for the mac and can "print" to PDF format if you want me to do a quickie like that.

I also am running with about a gig of RAM, so I don't know if the image-heaviness is having any sort of impact on things.  I doubt that, though.

Instead, I'd be more willing to believe there's some sort of odd conflict with installed fonts, where acrobat might believe that the font used in the file is installed locally, but it isn't, and it thus comes out blank.  Weird thought, I admit, but I've seen weirder.

[hardcoremoose]

It just so happens I have a few hours to kill today, so we'll give this a shot.  I started about 12:30 this afternoon, but that's ultimately irrelevant, since I have to be work at 10 AM tomorrow.  We'll see how much I can get done before then.

In case anyone's curious, this potential game could be seen as a spiritual companion to my own http://www.sorcerer-rpg.com/product.php/charnelgods.html">Charnel Gods.  A little role reversal, so to speak.

Take care,
Scott

[Trevis Martin]

I just opened it in Acrobat 5.1 on Mac OS 9.2.2,  no poblems.

--Trevis--

[SrGrvsaLot]

This strikes me as an incredibly good idea, and some serious fun to boot. Consider me started as of the time of this post.

[philreed]

Good luck with it!

I'm trying to clear Sunday so I can do mine then. In the middle of moving so I may need to work on the new house Sunday but I'm hoping I can do this instead.