Kingdom of The Magic Crystal?

After last weekend's adventure with my kids, I decided to proceed to create a game prototype for a RPG Board Game for them, and if successful... who knows! And so...

Creating the Bestiary

Over the weekend, I created 60 creatures for the bestiary of my RPG board game prototype, with full statistics, magic and special abilities. During this initial stage, I basically borrowed a lot of the creatures from western mythologies of different eras and region. So, you can expect to find elves, dwarfs, goblin, ogre, sphinxes, zombies, vampires, etc.



In order to make it interesting, I used Google images and basically borrow any images I could find to show what the creatures looked like. Well, my kids certainly had a swell time going through the list asking all kinds of questions. They had never seen nor heard about many of the creatures here. They had difficulty even pronouncing some of the names... LOL. I could see that it was fun for them, just looking at the bestiary :-)

Sketching out the RPG Game Board

And so this morning, I decided to start designing the board of the game itself. Firstly, I needed a story plot to see which direction I was going to take. There were just too many choices. In the end, I decided to just stick with my initial "magic crystal" story line.

The following are some sketches I did on an old calendar I found.



Then, I realised that I would have to draw everything all over again when I make the actual prototype board. That was when I decided to scan everything into my computer and use Photoshop to clean up the drawings. The touched up images below :-)





More Game Design To Do

There are still three more prelim illustrations that I needed to sketch out:

• The Tower of Irim
• The Temple of Ubis
• The Pyramid of Tipak

I will probably work on the drawings when I feel inspired... LOL. Took me quite a while to figure out how I was going to name some of the places and locations... LOL. There is a secret behind the naming convention :-p

I was also trying to worked out the game format for battles, special NPC (Non Player Character) interaction, item collections, movements, maps, etc. There are going to be a lot of work in this area... and a lot of it will depend on the single most important thing... The Story!

I am still trying to flesh out the main plot of the story. I have written up a brief background that hopefully will give a nice setting for the story to take place.

Game Design Goals

I have 4 simple design goals for this RPG board game. They are:

• Story Play - Enable the players to play the game according to the main story line.
• Free Play - Enable the players "free play", which means that they can choose not to follow the main story line and still able to play and have fun.
  
• Re-playability - Make this game very re-playable.
• Keep it simple! (I think I am failing this miserably at the moment... LOL.)
  

I have not figured out exactly what I am going to do to achieve the above goals, but they will certainly guide me when I progressed... LOL.

Game's Working title

So what is the name of this game? Actually, this the really tough part. The title will set the tone of the entire game. I have come up with a few names.... but I think as a working title, I will call this game, "The Kawaras Crystal".

Hopefully, I will be able to post more status updates next week. Cheers!