So speaking of side hustles, I’ve been working on one with two friends from college since July and we were hoping to have it done in time for Valentine’s Day.

Friends, making a game is way harder than we thought.

BUT – our Beta test version is done and we setup our IndieGoGo a few weeks ago and our campaign is coming to an end shortly. Anyone who contributes does get access to the Beta version of the game.

And this post is about our adventure in developing a game.

So, what is The Tavern of Conquests?

A two player role playing game that doesn’t fade to black.

If you are super into fantasy role playing games such as (though certainly not the same as, at all, in any real way) Dungeons and Dragons or Gloomhaven, that sentence actually may have told you a lot.

If you, like me, know little about these things – maybe it doesn’t. Which is totally cool. The game is designed so that someone with no experience with fantasy RPG can just hop in and pick it up very quickly. The game also only lasts about 45 minutes.

Our game is set in a fantasy world with dragons, elves, dwarfs, witches, muses and heroes.

One player is the Muse and they are essentially the game master. They read the text of the game and roll for all the different NPC (non-playable characters – the people the other player meets along the way and has to decide how to interact with).

The other player is the Hero, who goes on the adventure to save the princess or free the captive (we have two storylines currently). They make the decisions along the way.

The Muse and the Hero roll against each other whenever there’s an encounter.

Sometimes the dice don’t go the way the Hero would want… and so, in our game, there is a game mechanic where you can Bribe the Muse. This allows the Hero to re-roll with an additional die.

The Bribe the Muse mechanic of the game is really what sets it apart. There are tables ranging from PG activities to X rated ones, depending on how difficult the particular conquest was, and… well we don’t fade to black, but I will with this post. The Hero can Bribe the Muse to reroll in a very Valentine’s Day appropriate manner.

Or a random Wednesday night manner.

Whatever your jam is.

In the long run, our goal is have a proper game with printed booklets, in a box, with lovely illustrations that fantasy RPG games are generally known for. At the moment, we have a digital Beta version with basic graphics (because illustrators are expensive and they should be – they are super skilled).

There are the two main storylines – The Princess in the Flame and the Prison of Desire. There are an additional 30 roving conquests that come with the game too. This means that each time you play, you make decisions along the two main story lines and every once in a while, you flip to a random roving conquest along the way to play that part of the game too. It adds a lot of variety and makes the game very replayable.

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One of the friends from college is a fantasy romance writer who has published several award winning books – L.J. Longo – and the other two of us do the endless scut work around trying to build and sell a game.

Which has been a fascinating and highly questionable distraction from my PhD work.

I’ve been trying to use everything I’ve learned from nearly 10 years of blogging to help spread the word but, to be honest, I’ve never even been that great at it here.

I did the layout of the game and hunted down the royalty and copyright free images to use until we make enough to pay an illustrator. I was really pleased with what we put together in Pages as a printable but then Pages wouldn’t do what we needed it to do to create a digital book that works essentially like a Choose Your Own Adventure format so I moved the game over to InDesign, but the two programs wouldn’t play nicely…

Essentially I have learned a lot about book layouts and design programs that I never really wanted to know. And I am still not super happy with how this version of the layout looks.

But the game is playable and we are excited to get some feedback on it.

Right before we put up the IndieGoGo, we started doing research on how to run an IndieGoGo campaign and it certainly seems like we may have done everything regarding that wrong, which is kind of funny but certainly a learning experience as well.

And at this moment, that’s where this side hustle is – a little IndieGoGo campaign with (what we all think) is real potential in the long run.

If RPG is your jam and you’re looking for something unusual to spice up Valentine’s Day, if you contribute $10, you get our Beta version delivered before February 14^th. There’s also a bazillion other campaign goals if you also choose to believe in our little-engine-that-could-of-a-game.

Stop by the IndieGoGo and check it out. Or follow our game related social media to see if we ever manage to fully create this game.

And if you’ve ever built a game before and have some tips, please, please, please drop them below.