Crafting: Höhlenabenteuer/Cave Adventure

The basic idea behind this was making a kid-friendly version of We're Going On A Fucking Adventure. Not only did I want to cut out most of the violence, I also wanted to make the game much more simple so that I could play it with my son (who is four years old right now). We both do still like to explore caves and dungeons, so this game keeps the theme.

The game itself is basically a riddle and can be played by one player alone. Sometimes it's difficult to solve the cave, sometimes it's rather easy. And in very, very rare cases, it's actually impossible. Still, it's fun and children won't see the obvious solutions, instead just going for it and generating interesting situations that the four kid-protagonists have to get out of.

The four kids are basic kid-story-archetypes, each having one special ability and one weakness. It's often all about avoiding the monsters and perhaps setting up a multi-player-trap to catch them. The game is completely cooperative and I am quite pleased with it. I entered it into a game developers competition and am as of right now waiting for results. Wish me luck!

Crafting: A cardboard pinball machine

When we were on family vacation to Greece this year, the hotel had a little pinball machine that you could play to win rubber balls (and you couldn't lose. You'd eventually get your ball). I played it for my son as he wanted the ball and I wanted the play. It made me think of building my own pinball machine again. A quick search on the net told me that actual components are incredibly expensive. Then I found the large number of cardboard crafting videos on YouTube that had actually covered this topic.

I decided to make one myself. It took a while, in the end I even had to wait for a suitably large thing to be delivered to our house in order to finish the last big components. It took five or six sticks of hot glue but I think the result is quite nice:

The thing is big: 50 by 25 centimeters. And it works quite well: You can actually get the marble to run up the ramp and then come back down via the bridge. I'm quite fond of it and play it every once in a while. Make no mistake though: It took me roughly 40 hours of work to make this thing over the course of several weeks. If you don't enjoy the crafting process, there are alternatives out there.

Crafting: Der Dornengarten/The Thorn Garden

This game book has been in the making for a looong time. I had written most of the pages quite a while ago but this summer I went and did the drudgery of randomizing the page numbers and still keeping the page jumps intact. I have yet to give the book a true and serious look in order to make sure that there are not errors of style or numbering. Still I'm pround of what I made there:

The book is a non-linear fairy tale. It's basically a classic choose-your-own-adventure but it has a twist: On the inside of the cover, there are markings with letters and numbers that you can mark with paper clips. That way, the book essentially gets RAM:

This means, the book can remember things and have them be obscure to the player/reader at the same time. The thing is: The maze this story takes place in, is different every time you read it. In order to make that work, I needed to craft some tools before writing the actual text:

Every time you read this book, you will need to find a new way through the maze and will encounter other characters and have different conversations. And your decisions matter. At the same time, you can always retrace your steps and the whole thing stays consistent in its topography. I'm quite proud of that working and in theory one could take the structure and put other stories into it, now that the base work has been done. I'm planning on pitching this to a publisher some day.

Crafting: Captain Pischer's Gold

The first little project I'd like to talk about is a small board game I made for my son. The title Captain Pischer's Gold is an insider between the two of us from the early days of his current pirate phase. Captain Pischer, you must know, is a crazy and very dangerous pirate who likes to piss himself because that's just how little of a fuck he gives.

I wanted to make a board game for my son, when I had this little box of chocolate we got for Easter. It was a nice and compact size and I decided to fit a game into it. The game itself is a simple ladder-game: You roll dice and hope to get on fields that go forwards rather  than falling back. The goal is reaching the treasure first. It's completely random but when you play with a 3-year-old, that's the only way to ensure a fair game.

You start on the boat and make your way over the beach, through the jungle, into the cave.

The crafting is, in this case, a work of love: Every third of the foldable game board is made out of several layers of thin cardboard and the connections are made from medicinal silk weave so that they don't break when folded over and over again. The gold chest opens up and there are actual round gold pieces glued into place that I made of the gold inlay that the chocolate was resting on.

This is probably the smallest project of my current crafting streak but it was also the first an I enjoyed making it. If your kids likes something and you enjoy board games: Make a themed game for them. It's not that hard!

Crafting: Analog Adventures

So, some of my fives of readers might be wondering: "What is MadZab doing? Has he stopped creating things? Has family life finally overtaken his creative urges? How do we fix the gaping gaps in societes the world over?" I can answer the first two questions. The answer to the second one is "No! Even if I wanted to, I couldn't!" and the answer to the first is a bit more complex.

I've had several distinct phases of creating things in my life and I am currently in an analogue phase. That means: What I am creating, is nothing that can be replicated and shared as easily as, say, a pdf or a Twine game. I've been writing and crafting. I think this trend started out with We're Going On A Fucking Adventure (which still needs a decently written rulebook but recent experiences might empower me to finally get to that), where my Roguelike-phase came into the physical world.

Now, I've had a fascination for physical objects for gaming for a while. And I've loved crafting since I was first able to hold a pen and a pair of scissors. Over the next few days I'll use this small series to introduce the projects I've more or less finished over the past few months. They include (so far) a mechanical cardboard pinball machine, two board games for my son, and a game book that I still need to proof read and then select a part of to pitch to a publisher. Stay tuned.