Mind Maps

After chatting (or was that ranting*) with over email this afternoon about Games Design I was reminded of a little toy I was playing with the other day that I wish I had when I designed Monkey.

MIND MAPS, if you don’t know what one is pop over to wikiapedia here where they do a much better job of explaining than me. Inspired by the idea that they are useful for creating lists of contents for book I worked up a quick example for Monkey.

Monkey Mind Map

(scroll down to see it as a list of contents)

I used Free Mind which is a free open source mind mapping piece of software, available in both windoz and linux flavours.

[*I should really take out my Game Designing frustration on some forum…..]

Monkey update

“Finished by the end of May”…what a horrible horrible liar I am!! As it turned out my writing time has been squeezed to a trickle. I sat down to work on the Character gen chapter last night, started writing about Magical Staffs in Ancient China and wee small child awoke!! This is fairly typical of late, so I am doubly glad I’ve cut down on what I’ve decided to release by Oct.

None of which ramblings tells you my loyal readers where I’m upto.

Introduction – done
Character Generation Chapter – Done.
Action Chapter -90% done – just need to do the non-combat dramatic contest example
Developing the Story (character advancement/using virtue and fortune points to drive the story) – 50% needs pulling together plus intro story.

GMs section.
Setting chapter – need to start
Adventure – The Bag of Wind – outline + one npc

So in short nearly there with the players section, which I feel is the really important bit for the ‘coaster edition’ and still on the starting blocks as far as the GM’s materials are concerned (but not to worried about that).

So be happliy surprised to get the first draft of the coaster edition by end of this month, more realistically by end of July.