We’ve come to a point in the development of Told where we must make a choice about its’ future.  Some fundamental aspects of it have strayed away from the purpose of the system and would take a very long time to fix.  Even if they were fixed, it would turn the game into something completely different which would have to be tested again and it could potentially end up with another problem which would require a similar amount of time to fix.  For these reasons we have decided that we will move away from this project, though parts of it may be implemented into future projects in total or in spirit.  It has been fun working on it, but we just can’t devote the time that we would need to get it to a completed state.

Within the upcoming months, we will be releasing the details of our next project.  This project will be taking a very different approach, and will release much sooner than Told would have been for you to play around with.  For this project we have located several new team members, which will be introduced soon, and we are still seeking at least one more member for our team.  So, if you are a 3d artist or you know a 3d artist that would be interested in working with us creating games, get in touch with us!  You can reach us easily with Facebook, Twitter, Google+, email, phone, text, P.O. Box, carrier pigeon, rumor, or by showing up somewhere that one of us is going to be!

Well, ready or not – here it is!  Starting immediately, people who have been contacted to be a part of the beta for Told will be able to get access to the files.  During the first phase of the beta period, we will be undergoing heavy reformatting, and some auxiliary systems will still be in progress.  As such, you will be granted access via a file that will be automatically updated whenever a new addition or fix becomes available.

The first phase of the beta will continue until all auxiliary systems have been added, fleshed out appropriately, and fine-tuned to ensure that they run smoothly.  After this, there will be a second phase where each group is given a hard copy of the book to review in total, leave remarks, and hand back in to the team.  After that is complete, we’ll enter a third phase of beta testing where almost anyone will be able to join the beta (while it’s still free!) so we can run lots of games and make sure everything runs as smoothly as possible!

In addition, if you haven’t been contacted to join the beta, we do have some groups that want additional players.  So if you’re interested in playing a pen and paper rpg with some new friends, contact one of the team members and they’ll get you hooked up!

We’re getting very close to our beta version of Told now, and we have decided that this would be an excellent time to talk about what you can expect from the game.

We started making Told because we had some very disappointing experiences with previous pen and paper roleplaying games, and knew that we could do better. Of course, when we started, we didn’t think it would take very long to get it done. We thought would just finish it quickly and use it in our group as a home-brew system.  As we got into designing it we had many major revisions as bugs would come up during testing, but each time it got a little more fun to play.

The goal for Told is to provide roleplaying groups with a sustainable game system for long-term tabletop campaigns. To achieve this we set out to provide as much flexibility as we could without making the game more complicated than it needed to be. In addition to providing this flexibility, we’ve kept a watchful eye (and used a lot math) to stop characters from exceeding a maximum bound of general usefulness. It is possible to make an awful character; you just can’t make one that will make everyone else in the party worthless – unless they all decide to be awful, but then they deserve it.

The first release of Told, dubbed the core system, will include what we have determined to be the most ubiquitous fantasy elements. We will be offering the core system on some sort of “Pay what you want” basis to allow whoever wants to play it to get their hands on it. There will be several large expansions coming after the core system which will include campaign settings as well as additional options for all characters. There will also be some smaller expansions without campaign settings which may be set to a specific theme.

Also, since I know that I can’t possibly have answered all your questions. The three most popular questions asked about Told between blog comments, emails, and facebook will be the subject of our next blog post!

I’ve been compiling a list of bookmarks for game programming recently, so if you’re at all interested you might want to check it out.

There’s some good articles and blogs in there covering MMO scaling, terrain generation and OGRE tutorials. Additionally there are GPL and Creative Commons free graphics repositories.

Over the last week or so we’ve been discussing the internal beta release of Told.  We’ve been making lists of everything that needs to be finished up or fixed before it is released.  And we’ve been deciding who should be getting in on this very limited test run.

A select few who have expressed interest will be selected for this beta period, which is tentatively scheduled for sometime within the next month.  Those who recieve the invitation will be able to run their own campaign at whatever time works for them.  We will provide a list of potential players if you need it, and we will be meeting with each of you either individually or in a group before we officially start the beta.

If you do not recieve an invite, it’s not because we don’t want you to play!  We can only handle so many groups running at a time, since we need to monitor and troubleshoot these campaigns as they go.  Because of this, some people have been discluded because we assume they will be invited to someone elses campaign.  However, if you aren’t invited by us or anyone with a beta invite just shoot us an email and we’ll try our best to match you up with a group.

We’ve got the basic website up and running, we’ll be tweaking it and adding more content as we have time. Expect a Told update sometime in the next week.