My name is Jon, I am an illustrator / designer with a lifelong passion for playing quality, enjoyable games. Board games, card games, video games, DND and anything of this ilk.
My business partner is Dan, a big DND fan and, way back in the 90s, he came up with an amazingly vast universe for this almost space opera style campaign he was running. Within that campaign he invented a little side game that was one of the main past times of his world's inhabitants.
Fast forward to a couple years ago and I am playing hearthstone on my phone. I play this guy with an interesting deck, add him and we start chatting. This turned out to be Dan and, after months of playing and becoming great friends, he tells me about his love for DND and about his idea to turn the mini game from his old campaign, in to a real one (at this point it's rules, dice and a play area). I have always loved game design and dreamed of becoming an art director, so when he said he would be open to my input, I leapt at the chance to get on board.
Turned out he lives in Dublin and I am in Cornwall, so after I set to work prototyping the initial components (with the help of a friend with a cnc and laser cutting business)I sent him a set and kept one for myself for testing.
I took my prototype game and the initial basic rules to my friends popular game shop nearby and held preliminary testing of the game while Dan started taking it to a local venue and inviting players to test. As solid as the rules were, its replayability proved to be severely lacking at this basic early stage, you would win or lose and had the chance to pull off two different special attacks, but that was it, once you had done all that there wasn't anything else to achieve nor any different ways to get there.
From this basic everyone fights everyone game, I helped him introduce two additional ways to play the game (Team battles and Boss battles) and introduced characters for people to use so, instead of simply being players rolling dice, they would pick a character with a certain play style / theme and play as them throughout the game.
Whether it be against other characters, alongside team mates or in a party of 5 fighting against a hardened boss, it was the characters that brought a new element to the game, giving game owners at least 10 different ones to play at the start as well as a boss and unlimited party options to face it. With the addition of two new game modes and characters, the replayablility factor went through the roof during testing and people were enthusiastically asking to play at every opportunity.
Now, over a year on from that point, we have play tested all the characters we want to make available at launch (plus many more for subsequent expansion releases). I have quotes and lead times in place so that when we finish our initial Kickstarter campaign, everything will be manufactured in the U.K. boxed and sent somewhere for us to ship out to buyers. We will then have moulds and templates for all game elements in place so we can continue to produce the starter box contents as well as subsequent expansions we have planned by ourselves if needs be until we hopefully get traction with a major distributor like Esdevium Games and get to move larger numbers.
The game itself is played in a way that all the play modes can be run as competitive tournaments, with people bringing their character cards along with them to local games shops to play for prizes. The expansions that we release will be constantly adding new playable characters and new bosses to add to the existing roster and these will also bring in new ability styles as well as exciting new ways to win the game. Instead of facing a boss with the initial 3 dps, 1 healer and 1 resurrector formation, you will eventually be able to take them out with a team of 5 debuff characters as the expansions are released.
Oh yeah and finally, we named our game "Master's of Gettown"
Dan pronounces it Ge-town and I pronounce it Get-town, we shall see.
What we are looking for from BGDF is to become part of the community, we want to help others through any problems they may be facing in their own game design processes as well as getting any help needed to make our game a success too. If we all succeed, then everyone wins, designers and players alike.
I so look forward to the future here with you all.
Jon, Co creator of Master's of Gettown
Thanks Frank. 1-0 to me then :)