Evening everyone! Well I just finished a weekend of Adventure Course certification, meaning I can now facilitate corporate, educational and other groups in leadership and team building exercises. I spent from 8am to 5pm yesterday and 9pm to 7pm today so I''m quite tired! But other than that, I have a question to ask of you all. How should I get started in my transition from table-top RPGs into the world of game design? Should I head over to the Help Wanted forums and plea for a job (sarcasm) or wait till someone needs something like a project manager? How should I promote myself and display my skills when I don''t have any computer design background? Any advice would be great! Thanks again for taking the time to read this! Tyler ''Calaf'' Roehmholdt The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. - Karl Marx

My suggestion is to set up a website and write a few extremely detailed and extremely well thought out design docs to display your capabilities. And you might try the help wanted forum and writing forum to see if anyone needs help fleshing out ideas. Its just a start.

Assuming you are talking about the amateur scene...

I am sure that you would like to get a position with major creative input, like the project manager you mention, as most of us on here would.

To do this however, you will need some kind of experience/portfolio behind you to prove your worth to potential team-mates. This is possibly an awful lot harder for a writer than it would be for a programmer or graphics artist.

The best bet would probably be, as TechnoHydra suggests, to look around the Help Wanted ads and see if you can make contributions to other projects. This would be adding to your portfolio, enlarging your ''contacts'', and giving you some experience with how teams operate. At the same time you might start work on a grand concept of your own with the idea of one day using this in a major project.

Unfortunately, there are not many MMORPG''s out there with a post-Renaissance or Napoleonic theme (that I am aware of, anyhow). They mostly finish around the Middle Ages and then start up again in the Second World War and on to the futuristic.

Be prepared to accept that working on teams can be frustrating, slow work, and that the project may well grind to a halt. Try to find something you enjoy doing for the sake of it, so that if the goal is never realised it will still have been worthwhile. And think long-term, large projects take years and years even for the professionals.

Hoffs

Design something to industry standards and specs, and let it do the talking for you. All you have to do additionally is ensure it gets read, the reader understands it, and the reader was the right person in the industry in the first case to give it to.

This is exactly how to sell a screenplay with no previos credit; plunk down that design doc and let it use the legs you gave it to get up and run over the competition.

Addy

Great! Thanks for all your wonderful input everyone! Looks like I''ll be signing up for a webpage here tonight and posting a ''creative producer available'' thread in the Help Wanted forum. I already have a number of ideas for some games, most of them would be either single-player, multiplayer < 30 or interactive 3D chat clients. I suppose I should get some experience writing backstories and the like first before I start touting my own thoughts. Thanks again everyone and I''ll give you my webpage URL when its up and running!

Tyler ''Calaf'' Roehmholdt

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. - Karl Marx

You may want to try your hand at a design project I created some time ago; a few of the old users and myself are trying to regather some interest. Things should be all updated in a few days, but for now you can get a good overview and even post some ideas if you become interested. Check the sig...

The Tyr project is here.