Yora

Well, this didn't go as planned. I had expected to have an internet connection in my new place within a week after moving in, but then the technician from the provider saw that for the connection type I ordered they would have to replace some ancient hardware on the building's cabling. A week after that they still did not have a date for the upgrade, and couldn't even tell me yet when they would do the scheduling for the upgrade with the landlord. So I did make use of my 14-day annulment right and made a contract with a different ISP that was able to set me up with a temporary mobile network connection within two days. But this was data limited and it took another two weeks to finally have the landline up and running. But now I'm fully back in business, one month later than planned. And long after my summer break had ended. But I do have two half-day workdays every week now, so that's something. I've not been doing any Blender practice for the last month and only a little work on game concept designs, but I do now have some new thoughts about implementing stealth…

Today is the start of my first weekend in my new place. It's also the start of my summer break. After which I'll be working only 35-hour weeks, giving me two additional afternoons off. (I actually started three weeks ago, but those free afternoons were all spend at hardware and furniture stores.) This has always been when I planned to properly start working on creating my own videogame for real. Today also happens to be Midsummer, so this seems like a really good time to officially declare starting work as Bumblebee Games and the development of the Hornet Engine. As far as I can appreciate things now, there's three main things that I will need to making the style of game that I have in mind. Designing RPG mechanics and gameplay, using Godot, and 3D modelling in Blender. Fortunately for me, the first one is something I am already very familiar and quite experienced with. I've been tinkering with and researching the inner workings of pen and paper RPGs and what makes them tick for the last 10 years, and I feel that combined with my experiences playing a lot of late 90s and early 2000s CRPGs, I am having…

It has now been three months since I started out with my decision to learn making videogames. Since it was clear from the start that little, if any, actual work with Godot would be done during peak season at work and while looking for a new apartment, the game currently existing only as a bunch of scribbled notes is still right on schedule. But moving into my new place is now planned for late June, and I'll be taking my summer break in July. After which I'll be going from a 48-hour work week to a 35-hour week. Very excited about finally taking a crack at learning the most fundamental basics of Godot. And then, eventually, getting to the point where I can start attempting a first prototype for an actual game. Though I have to say, I've already been having a blast for the last three months working on just a general concept for what kind of game I want to create, and how it's roughly going to look and play like. I very seriously considered for a long time making a small, first person, open-world RPG like Morrowind with strong influences from Thief and System Shock 2. But…

I think by now it's really high time to finally get around to writing up a proper introduction to what this Kaendor thing is all about, other than being some kind of fantasy CRPG. Kaendor is the name of a world, or perhaps more accurately a collection of settings, that I have been developing and using for several campaigns that I have been running for different RPG systems since about 2009. There's never been a fixed world map or persistent geography between the different campaigns, nor a specified history, and over the years whole countries have been dropped from it, and various creatures that inhabit it come and gone. But all of the campaigns had many consistent elements that tied them together, like the many worlds of Final Fantasy games, FromSoft's Soulsborne games, or maybe even the Zelda games. Adapting Kaendor to a videogame format opens up new possibilities to present ideas and concepts that are difficult to bring to life in a pen and paper game, just as there are things that are interesting to play with in your imagination but would be really complicated to put on a screen. As such, the setting for my videogame will once…

Overly ambitious and lacking in impulse control, I already know that I want to use the code and mechanics of my game for at least two different game. A Sword & Sorcery game set in the fantasy world Kaendor, and a Space Opera game taking place in my Iridium Moons setting. Simply calling this site kaendor.com seems unfitting in this context, and so I've been thinking for a while to come up with a label for my game development aspirations in general rather than just the Kaendor setting specifically. And so Bumblebee Games it's going to be.

While I barely have any existing skills with coding or 3D modelling yet, I have do have a lot of experience designing game mechanics for pen and paper roleplaying games. I've been working with and studying new rules system for over 15 years. This is the one area of game design where I feel highly competent, and I can create mechanics with intent, to achieve specific gameplay experiences. With lots of CRPGs that are clearly inspired by pen and paper games, I have a strong impression that the designers tried to simply copy pnp mechanics into a videogame format. At first because that's what they were familiar with from playing such games as a hobby or after work, and then later because that's how most of the existing CRPGs they knew did it. All the Dungeons & Dragons CRPGs explicitly attempt to replicate the D&D game mechanics as faithfully as they can while still being playable. Fallout was originally meant to be a GURPS game until the license was withdrawn during development and they created the SPECIAL system as a replacement. The early Elder Scrolls games used dice roll mechanics. And of course, the entire iso-RPG genre of the last…