QuadRPG is now on Github

In the past week or so I have started an initiative to get all of my main game design files pushed into a functional version control system. Historically I have been absolutely terrible at organizing and maintaining my design notes, and this is made even worse by my tendency to step away from a project for weeks, even months, thanks to– SQUIRREL! It frequently gets to the point that I forget why I made any particular set of changes to an ongoing design, and often that leads to me just starting fresh again with a whole new take – I believe I rewrote the core of Motobushido four times from scratch, due to losing my place in a design doc.

Since I work so heavily with it in my Real Actual Day Job (TM), git (and more specifically, GitHub) seemed like the obvious decision for enforcing this version control. Git seems to be the way of the future, and game design really isn’t all that much different than code, right? Plus, given my prior decision to release a free “Frugal Digital Edition” (example) of every new game I create, GitHub specifically will allow me to release these things publicly and get open feedback, and maybe even some suggestions for direct text improvements.

I’m kicking off this project with an official public Markdown-converted release of my older free game QuadRPG, which you can now find at this GitHub repo. I’ve had a lot of fun running this game, and it’s been given away at every Gamestorm since 2008 or so. I haven’t touched it in a while, and the PDF I’ve been hosting is pretty ancient, so I gave it a bit of polish and released it on GitHub, the first of several more to come. I’ve been considering writing a greater article on my developing multi-device, multi-repo work flow, and that might make it to this page in the coming days. For now, though, I’m going to first focus on converting as many of my current and previous game design projects to git repos, and I imagine most of them will get published for public consumption in a similar manner.

• NPC