TL;DRLadyman explains the ad is for Star Traders, a board game he's about to Kickstarter, which resembles Star Citizen only unintentionally, as it was originally developed about 30 years ago.
It's there for a reason. In addition to all the stuff that we're doing with Cloud Imperium and Jump Point and so forth, I'm about to actually kickstart a board game. And it has similarities to Star Citizen. They are unintentional. The original version of this game was developed almost 30 years ago. But it's called Star Traders. And in the game, I just happen to have a board handy. In the game, you travel from world to world, you pick up cargoes at, perhaps at Wells, you pick up time machines, you deliver it to Willis, you might pick up positronic robots on Asimov, deliver them to Bradbury, or you might go to Endor and pick up some snuggly fur belts and deliver those to Adams. But you go from world to world, you have contracts that you use to pick up and deliver things. For example, McDevitt there has stellar antiquities. And when you do it, you get paid in Starbucks. And the best of all, you get to use the little ships that we used in the economy game. This is how I happen to know about them. You get to use the little ships to go from world to world. But that's Star Traders. And as you say, there happens to be a location where you can sign up. We'll be kickstarting it in about a month to two months. If you're interested, go ahead and check us out.
As David said, this is a game he worked on many years ago, and they're bringing it back, along with the help of another one of the members of our family, Ryan Archer. And it's not Star Citizen, but check it out when it hits anyway. I got to sit down and play a demo game with you guys when we were in Austin and I had a lot of fun.
The goal of the game is to earn money, to gather prestige, to convince the Emperor that you are the one worthy to be the Star Czar in charge of all shipping and merchandise throughout the Galactic Empire.
TL;DRLadyman describes a career in tabletop and game publishing, including Car Wars, GURPS, Origin Systems' Wing Commander material, MMO game guides, and now Jump Points and manuals for Cloud Imperium.
Well, I'm sitting here. I got into gaming back in the early 80s with Steve Jackson Games. I worked on Car Wars. I worked on GURPS. I was the guru for those two systems for a little while. We did Star Traders at that time. After that, I worked with FASA on Renegade Legion and MechWarrior. I did some D&D work for TSR. And then I started with Origin Systems just after Wing Commander 1 released, but I was, is it Secret Missions 1, and what were the add-ons to Wing Commander 1?
Secret Missions 1 and 2. And everything from there on out, including the Wing Commander movie. We did the Wing Commander movie book for that product. And after that, we did game guides for EverQuest, EverQuest 2, Asheron's Call, Dark Age of Camelot, Star Wars Galaxies. And then most recently I've been doing the Jump Points, the manuals, the brochures for Cloud Imperium.
Well, you know the answer better than I, Ben. I don't know that we'll be doing any game guides, and the manuals are being decided on that end. But I would be happy to do them.
Yes to the manuals. Game guides usually are contracted through some outside publisher. We'll see if anybody wants to do one. And if they come to us, we'll point them at David.
Oh, my. Possibly Ultima 9, which isn't Wing Commander. I should say Wing Commander, shouldn't I? Ultima 9 was the climactic episode, nine of a game that went nine long. And we did several interesting things to bring that whole series to a climax. And that was fun. Other than that, Wing Commander was, I think, Wing Commander Armada. I got to write, I'm left-handed, I got to write with my right hand a note from a four-year-old to her daddy about why is he killing the kitties? Because kitties are nice.
Actually, Star Traders has five levels of play. The lowest level is for seven years and up. The next level is 10 years and up, then about 13 and up. And then there's a really cutthroat game that I wouldn't recommend many families try. But there's actually five different games and the simplest can be played by kids who can read simple words.
Two answers. One, maybe. This first one has to be successful, so everybody go to traderslock.com and sign up for the Kickstarter. That's one answer. The other answer is there is actually someone who owns the trademark for the electronic game Star Traders, which is an RPG game. It's like an MMO or something like that. So we'd have to name it something different if we went online with it.
Well, I'm not doing what we announced at the front of the show, which was design the economy. We're designing some of it. There's a lot of pieces moving here. I am able to discuss it with folks as other folks are designing the economy. But what I specifically am responsible for is to find a way to make it into a board game so that as the economy is being built, we can simulate it on a board game before we spend hours and hours programming it all. And we've got little ships and pretty counters, and you're looking at two of the star systems there.
To save time, to see as long as we can actually simulate the computer game with the board game. If we don't, then we're spinning our wheels. But as long as we can simulate the computer game with the board game, then we can get a much better idea of how the computer game will run. And we will know, guess we need to emphasize this more in the computer game, know we need to stop doing that. We find the fun things, we emphasize the fun things. It's what you do in any way of making a computer game. You find the fun things and you make them important and more fun.
TL;DRRob Irving says the first board-game playtest went about as expected, with the design department as first testers, and further rounds will refine the rules incrementally.
It pretty much went the way I was expecting. We had the design department here in Austin. First victims. They're very happy to spend two hours playing a board game rather than sitting at their desk working on things. And it went pretty much as expected. As a first test, it's still working out the, okay, does this work to simulate the computer game? But in fact, as soon as we get out from here, we're going to go and do another one. Round two. And I have refined some of the rules, especially through discussion with other folks who are playing. And we'll get closer to the game, and it's incremental. We won't have a breakthrough, I wouldn't expect. But from week to week we'll get a better and better idea of how the board game works to simulate the computer game, and from that how the computer game can be made better.
TL;DRRather than scaling the 20 systems to 100, they hope to move into the engine and add more economic detail, such as insurance, as they gain confidence, since the engine makes scaling easier.
At that point, I would hope that we'll be at the point of moving it all into the engine. And so then it'll be much easier to spin up to 100 systems because it'll be faster to generate the data.
And we are doing the economy simulator as well, as far as the electronic version of said things. We just can spin up features a lot faster in this methodology than the Canon.
In fact, yeah, I was going to say, rather than taking these 20 systems and going to 100, probably where we will spin up is to go into more detail on the economic systems. Last week, this week, we're not going to try to include insurance in it at all. There's lots of other parts of the economy that won't go in for several more weeks. And so as we get more confident, as we get a better handle on how it's playing, as we get that feedback we need to know on how the computer game works, we'll start adding the other things that are in the economy that just aren't there right now.
They're averaging about 50 pages now. We hit a high-water mark this last issue with the Idris. We had 80-some-odd pages. But we're not going to do that every time. I can't handle 80 pages.
I have been involved in game design. I was working with Steve Jackson Games and some others, but primarily with Steve Jackson Games on the GURPS role-playing system. And so I was involved in developing that. Steve was the one who designed that. I'm not trying to say I designed that thing at all. And similarly, Car Wars. Steve designed Car Wars, but for a while I was what they call system guru and responsible for making sure the systems worked.
Sure, yes. I've got a degree in mathematics. And I can't say I know analysis real well, but in terms of what we need to do in the game, I can handle that.
David LadymanJump Point and brochure editor, Incan Monkey God Studios
I get credit for doing Jump Point and the brochures. I don't do Jump Point and the brochures. A lot of very good people put all the material in there. It's a team thing. But I take all of the stuff that is given me and put it together into the brochures, into Jump Point.
TL;DRLadyman explains the company name came from a Dilbert cartoon about an Incan monkey god, which matched their experience of writing game manuals before designs were final.
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David LadymanJump Point and brochure editor, Incan Monkey God Studios
This takes a little while. Back in the day, you had to release documentation with the game. And the disk could be printed in about a week, but it took about three weeks to print the manuals. So that meant we had to turn the manual in two weeks before you finished making the game. And sometimes we just had to make it up. And sometimes we would have it exactly right, and in that two weeks the team would go in and change it. And it stuck in us mightily to have to call it errata when we had done the right thing and then gotten it changed. But we had to release errata. So we're having to do documentation before the stuff is designed. And there was one time we had a game releasing and we just had to make some stuff up. And there was a Dilbert cartoon.
David LadymanJump Point and brochure editor, Incan Monkey God Studios
I've been working for five days without any sleep to finish this report. At first I had a mental block, but on the fourth day I was visited by an Incan monkey god who told me what to write.
So this is how you named your company, then? Like the Dilbert cartoon?
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David LadymanJump Point and brochure editor, Incan Monkey God Studios
We named ourselves Incan Monkey God. We realized that we were servants of the Incan Monkey God, that the only way we could get our work done was through devotion to the Incan Monkey God. And as far as we know, there actually were no Incan Monkey Gods, but that's where we came up with the name. Incan Monkey God Studios.