Wednesday, October 31, 2007

And so it begins...

Many have been curious about how LDS games, such as mine, get made. So, I figured that would be a great place to start this blog.

I love to teach and I love to use my art to help bring the scriptures to life. We had just recently moved from Oregon to Wisconsin and I was no longer the early morning seminary teacher (an assignment I love). All the creative energy I normally poured into seminary needed somewhere else to go. So, on a Sunday afternoon, in the early spring of 2002, I began thinking up a way to create a simple battle card game for my boys.

I wanted an even deck of good guys and bad guys and the Book of Mormon afforded the best selection of those. The game play was initially the same as War, and was generally fun but had two big flaws.

One: I had set it up to have point values assigned to each person. For the bad guys I didn't really care but for the heroes - who would I give the low points too? That was really rough. For my boys, I figured I would put the more popular heroes at the higher point values and take it from there.

Two: The game didn't really teach anything. True my boys were becoming more familiar with some of the names but to me that wasn't enough.

I knew I had to change the game when I was listening to my sons play and one of them said, "Awww, I only have Lachoneus." ONLY HAVE LACHONEUS!? Yes, Lachoneus in my game only had a few points but I didn't want my boys to look down on the great Lachoneus because he didn't have a lot of points. So, I began to come up with other cards to help the lower point cards, and the game developed from there.

After developing the game for a while and others telling me I should really see about getting it published, I looked around at who in the LDS publishing world was doing the most (and best) with games and so contacted Covenant Communications Inc.

Next time... Getting the game ready for production part 1

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