Tag: gamedev

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A couple of months into 2024…

Time flies when you’re having fun. This post has been sitting as a draft for some time now, if you’re reading it we’ve actually published it!

At the end of last year we funded Perilous Pond through Kickstarter! If you backed the game, thank you so much for your support! We’re speeding along towards the actual production of the game.

We started the year with dealing with a some practical things:

  • Getting proofs for the mini expansions, Life Lessons and Bigger Teeth
  • Refining the rules
  • Starting the conversation with our production partner, getting all the templates and making decisions on colors and other production details.

Getting the proofs early was important to us to make sure our digital mock-ups would work in real life and if not be able to make changes without causing delays. Luckily our ideas seem to work well.

Crocodiles from the Bigger Teeth expansion has surrounded a flock of frogs.

We’ve had to make a lot of tiny decisions regarding colours and designs. Our backers already know that we needed to change the dice material to make sure the designs would work out, but now we’re out of the woods and are preparing the files for production.

We’ve dug into the rules, trying to stream line them somewhat. We thought it would be a quick process and done back in February and we mostly was…but we still find things to improve. No actual changes to the rules, just clarifications.

Right now we’re focusing on preparing all the files for the printer. Converting colour profiles is always nerve wracking but things are moving along nicely and we should have no problem delivering the files in time.

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Wrapping up 2022

2022 has been a rough year on a personal level for both me and Per. We have however rolled with the punches and made it a really good Frozen Maze Games-year.

Conventions!

We managed to visit three conventions this year.

LinCon is one of the older[citation needed] conventions here in Sweden and very much focused on playing board and role playing games.

NärCon Summer is a festival with cosplayers everywhere, K-Pop bands playing on large stages, lots of different foods, video games, arcades, an entire building with artists selling their artwork and much much more. Everyone was super friendly and the atmosphere was great.

…and BibbCon is a tiny convention hosted by Jönköping City Library (Bibliotek in Swedish) and just a single day. This convention is hosted in the city library so entry was free for all and small kids ran around trying new games or playing Mario Cart everywhere.

Some of the awesome gamers who played Perilous Pond at conventions this year.

The most important thing about the conventions are meeting people. In addition to all the gamers, we met some exceptional creators. We met the people behind Falkenjack Gaming Woodcraft at LinCon, they make and sell custom dice trays, towers and DM screens (We managed to trade a copy of Bushido Duels for a lovely dice tray for Perilous Pond). We also met Emma, coordinator of Uniting Geeks. They run various events and geek markets. We also briefly met with Swedish Meeples and the Tody’s crew our friendly competitors and got some input for Perilous Pond.

Our Games!

Our upcoming title, Perilous Pond, has come a long way this year and is now in a very mature state. We’ve been getting feedback from We’ve done some rule changes after comments from play-testers and we’ve just received the first version of the Swedish rules from the printer, we can now start to send the first boxes to Swedish reviewers and content creators.

Bushido Duels has been ticking away. People at conventions still seem to enjoy the game which in my opinion is the most important measurement. Sales have also been ticking along slowly but steadily. We are now featured on the shelf of a large share of the stores here in Sweden.

And much more…

We contributed prizes to the Helpful Pixels charity stream for the Tim Bergling Foundation, we had a booth at the Nördarnas Julmarknad market, learned blender (to some extent) and much more!

/Åke

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Perilous Pond Preview Edition

As part of the Preparations for the upcoming Crowdfunding campaign we’re starting to assemble the Preview copies of Perilous Pond.

The more complicated components like card decks and game box are all designed and has arrived. The standard meeples we’re using has arrived and we have enough of the custom pike meeple for 10 games. The current issue is the crystal gems we’re using as fireflies. We have received plenty of the red, white and blue ones but the dark yellow ones were out of stock at spielematerial.de. We’ve ordered some yellow ones from The Game Crafter but we’re not sure if they are the same hue.

The big pile of game components

Hopefully this preview edition will be much closer to the final result than the Bushido Duels preview edition. We’ve learned a lot* about designing the various things that make a game a game…

My favorite thing is, the box size matches Bushido Duels almost exactly so the games makes an excellent pair.

Let’s briefly cover the elephant in the room…I haven’t mentioned the rule-book yet, and yeah…That’s still a bit away. We’ve worked through the book in Swedish and are getting quite close to having all needed graphics and text. There are still rough patches that needs to be ironed out and after that we’ll translate into English**.

So to summarize, we’re close to having all components for the preview editions of Perilous Pond. Rules are also coming along nicely but will likely be the last piece of the puzzle.

* By “a lot” we mean “a little”

** Should be quick… Right?

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Kickstarter preparations for Perilous Pond

To help with the (hopefully) upcoming Kickstarter campaign I started messing about with 3d-rendering using Blender.

The game box rendered in Blender

These images show the progress so far. A decent representation of the game components along with the box. We will hopefully be able to use these scenes / models on the back of the box, on some promo-material and in an eventual Kickstarter campaign for the game.

A game in progress.

The hardest part has been to get the look of the firefly crystals right, I’m still not 100% satisfied but I think it’s good enough for use on the back of the preview edition. Cards, dice and meeples were surprisingly easy to get into decent shape.

The intended use of the rendering above is to use on the back of the prototype box we’re producing for preview copies.

Another nice thing is that we’ve been able to try out different options for the dices. Producing three dimensional images really helps bring a choice to life.

We’re really partial towards the black ones.


Working with this has been sort of relaxing. Sitting down an hour or two at a time and just working through a scene or trying different shaders…

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The colors of the fighters in Bushido Duels

⛩ Story time! ⛩

I thought I’d tell you the reason why we asked Emily Ryan to give the different fighters in Bushido Duels their own unique color scheme.

Was it a bold fashion statement? Or perhaps deep knowledge about the meaning of different colors and how they would match the characters’ personalities guided our decision?

No… sorry to disappoint… The reason behind it all stems from our playtesting days. The culprit: a d20 dice.

You see, in the beginning we used a d20 to keep track of the health of the fighters. The dice were available in different colors, naturally we thought it would be cool to have different color dice for the different fighters.

One of the D20’s we used during testing way back in 2017.

And booom* the idea of characters and dice with matching colors was born. 🥳

We later on decided that a health tracker card was more user friendly (great idea Åke 👍) and cost effective and thus the d20 idea was scrapped. But don’t be sad kids, their memory lives on in the color schemes of the fighters of Bushido Duels.**

/Per

* Booooooooooooom /Åke
** If the kids are still crying tell them that the dice also get to live on a farm to play and roll a natural 20 all the time.