Hello world!

Okey. Now I’m here. With a blog. Here. Heere. ….. Breath with me: Heeeeeeeere.

No, seriously.
My name is Martin Ahnelöv. I go under the nickname Gasten in pretty much every community I get involved in and for those who doesnt know: gasten means “the poltergeist” in Swedish (yes, I’m a Sweed). Thereby the name of this blog.

What am I supposed to do? Well, Since I’m very interessted in games, and preferebly how they are designed, I’m going to rant about just that: Independent Game Design.

So, what is Independent Game Design? Well, it is games. Du’h. Ok, games that wouldn’t make it in commercially. We are talking really small games here.

My first experience with indie-games (as I prefer to call them) were the indie-rpgs from the Forge. The game which hooked me first were the rpg InSpectres where you play as ghosthunters similar to those in the Ghostbusters-movies. I played it at GothCon (Swedens biggest convention), and I were astonished: we met this guy who should GM it for us, and he just sat down, tought us the rules, helped us create characters, created the adventure (!), and run it. IN LESS THAN AN HOUR!

Well, that’s the type of games I’m gonna write. Quick to learn and set up, fast to run, and with no or small preparation time. I like that.

Ok, there is probably more to me liking indie games than that, but I don’t wanna shout about that right now. (I can sumarize it as: I’ve always liked games. preferebly small (both small as in size and as in number of people interested in it) and free games. My first role playing game I bought weren’t D&D, White Wolf or any Swedish equivalence. It were a small (indie) game called Skymningshem: Andra imperiet. And that’s me in a nutshell. When others play Warcraft III, I play Wesnoth (cant’t remember the link), when they play WoW, I play Nethack, and when they play Counter Strike, I play Tremulous (and sometimes Quake).

But what have I done this far? I have written one murder investigation-RPG which isn’t 100% finished yet (and not even playtested), I’m just too lazy to write that last page. I’ve done almost all of the mechanics in a boardgame (it got some “mayor” flaws (see later post)). I’m thinking about a RPG where the players takes turns to be the GM. And I’m also coding a roguelike-like game in python. Well, a lot to do. And on top of that comes school. I’ll try to not turn this into a whiner-blog.

Thanks for me,
Gasten