How about making a game literally by hand?

[Rob Lang]

When I started Icar (it was called Star Fleet), it was all drawn in pencil. I had character sheets (two stats) printed out on a dot matrix printer (it was the future, man!). The physical sheets have an immediacy to them. They also have a "warm, cosy, comfortable, friendly, honest" feeling. You can see I'm scrabbling around to find a word. It's a feeling I have when I see a homebrew that has graphics by the author. Sure, not professional quality but that in itself has great value.

What if you wrote the whole thing by hand?

Text, pictures, page numbering, title page, the lot! Crossings out, red pen, doodles, arrows indicating shared rules. Not necessarily in a book at first because it would be difficult to get the chapter order right straight off and you'd end up inserting "oh, another thing" all the time.

How could you make this easier?
Is there a way to structure it to make edits easier for the reader to digest? Perhaps only write on the left hand side of the page, leaving the right hand side for examples and doodles?

What about sharing the game?
If you're going to share the game, you have to assume that someone is going to want to print it. Would probably be a PDF of bitmaps. You could also host the whole game on imgur.

Are there any genres that would be hard to do?
Is Sci Fi harder to draw than fantasy? Horror might be fun because spidery hand writing would fit nicely. Perhaps part of the "game" is deciphering the book in the first place! Perhaps you could hide secrets in the text (although that would suggest a lot of planning up front rather than shooting from the hip).

Is this something you'd give a go? What sort of game would you write?

Since watching [url]https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082096/]Das Boot[/url] over the weekend, I've had a hankering for some WW2 gaming action, especially in the terrifying horror of a submarine (but shrunk down to keep the crew size manageable). Perhaps scribbling down handwriting is the way to go.

[Onix]

I think you described my first game. Everything was written by hand in a 5 subject notebook. I don't have the spiral notebook anymore but I still have a lot of the art I did for it.

First of all, nobody wants to read my handwriting and second, I'm lost without spellcheck. I'm dyslexic and autistic and I don't know which condition I should blame my terrible hand writing and spelling on but I'm saving people a lot of pain (myself included).

[Rob Lang]

Fair enough! I can see that a computer is handy tool for you to get everything organised.

My son has bad handwriting and they have put it down to "poor fine motor skills". He wears it as a badge of pride because he can touch type.

[Onix]

On the other hand, get someone with really nice handwriting and that could be a nice book.

We used to make our old character sheets on our Mac Plus in Mac Paint and later on Canvas. We would draw the portraits directly into the sheet.

[kylesgames]

Rowan, Rook, and Decard has 24-hour games done in this way.

However, I don't think I have what it takes to do it, mostly because of illegible handwriting. I could maybe scratch out symbols.

Haven't we talked about word-free games before? Or was it number-free games?

[Onix]

Pretty sure it was number free games. I sort of did one.



I still use a die with numbers but the numbers aren't meant to be thought of as discrete values. It's getting there.

[kumakami]

while I design this way....I still could never release in this way.. basically I'm on the Dysgraphia train. so that's a no for me.