As he gets older, I thought back to things my father and I used to do together as "projects." Those things in which lessons were taught, knowledge was passed down, etc. For some it was restoring a car. For my dad and I, it was hunting/trapping/fishing.
Now, I'll be completely honest. There was only one of those three activities that I actually enjoyed, which was fishing, but I enjoyed doing them all as they gave me and my father time together. Most that know me know that I'm a geek and was a choir guy in high school, so there was admittedly a bit of a gap between the things that I enjoyed versus what my dad did. But he was always proud of my accomplishments, even if he couldn't relate to the enjoyment I got from it. It was the same with me and hunting/trapping with him, I know it made him happy to have me and my brother there with him, and that was enough.
So I began thinking about what I could do with my son that would be in a similar vein. Luckily, he's a lot like his father in his love of games, so I was thinking about things such as mods for games like Skyrim or Torchlight. With something like this, I could teach some game design lessons and such. For whatever reason, I thought, "Well, we could just make our own game." There are many tools out there to facilitate this, but I wanted something that would be simple enough for him to use. I ran the idea by the wife and she thought it sounded neat. Then I ran it by him and he was ecstatic! He's been really big into RPGs recently, including some of the classic ones, so I decided to go with this:
I remember RPG Maker from waaaaaaay back when, and it's advanced quite a bit. Sure, it's still a top down, party based RPG that you get, but it fits the qualifications for what I wanted in being easy to use. What was really cool, as if it were a sign, is that the makers of the program just launched boxed copy sales of it literally the same day I decided to do this. In addition, it was buy one boxed copy, get one free. Since I needed two, this was great!
So in addition to updating with other stuff, I'll be updating with progress on our game. I expect this to be a long project, so it will likely be years before it's even done. It'll be something we do in between other activities together.
