So I am most certainly not what you would call a “gamer“. I played DND in high school which was more than four decades ago, quite possibly first edition. My immediate family and I have a tradition of playing Monopoly on New Year’s Eve because it’s the only time we all stay up late at the same time and have that many hours to burn.(Yes, I can feel you cringing as you read this).
My oldest son introduced us to Catan last year and we really enjoyed playing it but it’s just difficult to get everybody together at the same time.
I have a whole slew of creative hobbies. I’ve been a writer since I could pick up a pencil and have possibly 100 different stories in different stages of being finished. I’ve been making custom T-shirts for the last five years and my youngest son has designed his own line of faith based shirts.
Up until three months ago my game designed experie nce consisted almost exclusively of a game I came up with that we play on Christmas Eve at our annual party. It’s called Christmas Chaos and it’s a trivia game in which you try to guess the answer the other family members will give to the question. It’s a huge hit and unfortunately the pandemic shut us down for a couple of years so we’re expecting a crowd of probably 50 people this year at our party. Aside from that, though, I don’t have a lot of experience designing or playing games. And anyone who knows me well knows that lack of knowledge and ability has never stopped me from doing anything.
So I created this game called One Letter Better (as a result of playing Wordle every day) and showed it to my buddy, Cesar, at work. We both work for a large metropolitan transit agency here in Southern California. He thought the game was awesome and I gave him a copy to share with his girlfriend. He came back after the weekend and told me this needs to be on a shelf in retail. His enthusiasm is the main reason you are reading this blog post right now. We attended the Strategicon Gamex convention in May of this year in Los Angeles and we were blown away by the number of games and enthusiast in attendance. We noticed the sign-up sheets in the gameplay area and asked them about it. They said people submit their games or ideas and people can sign up on the website ahead of time or at the convention. About two weeks after we attended I shot an email to one of the organizers inquiring about doing a demo at the Gateway convention in September. He said the schedule was open so we took a slot for Friday afternoon and Saturday afternoon. This is called jumping in with both feet way over your head.
So this blog is likely to be about all sorts of things related to Game Design. Graphics design is one of my many hobbies and I have a lot of experience using both Inkscape and GIMP. From time to time I may throw little ideas and short cuts to help those of you that might be struggling in the graphics department.
How to videos are also on a list the first most likely being how to play One Letter Better. Cesar and I are both available to answer questions, field critiques or just chat about life in general. Our website right now is dedicated pretty much exclusively to 0LB but from time to time we’ll throw some other stuff on there. If you happen to see something and think that we need to modify, change or improve it feel free to reach us through email Contactus (at) CruiseMonkeyGames (dot)com. You can also reach us at our contact us page here.
https://cruisemonkeygames.com/contact-us/
I’m sure I’ve rambled on more than enough for an initial blog post, but that’s the beauty of voice to text. I talk, Siri writes then I go back and make everything make sense. That’s it for today, go out and do something that makes someone smile
Ed, on behalf of the Cruise Monkey Crew
