Friday, May 16, 2014

Recession Reviews: Raging Swan's Be Awesome At Freelance Design



Be Awesome At: Freelance Game Design : 

Reviewer Bob Ross

Written by: Creighton Broadhurst (Lead Design and Development)

Page count: 30, counting insider cover

Throw Away pages: 10 (covers, forward, full-page art, sectional title page)

Golden Pages:  15

Cover price: $4.99

Price per page: $0.17

Modified price per page:  $0.14 = Cover price/(pages + golden pages - throw away pages)

Crunch to Fluff Ratio: 5 to 1, though not strictly applicable, since the only fluff takes the form of images, and this is a book on game design rather than a supplement or adventure

Our Rating out of 10: 8.5 (Very useful for prospective designers, and even has some utility for a GM)

Description: The book touches on important areas in game design, such as maintaining productivity, giving reasons why not to enter the field of freelancing, and how to better pitch a project. It covers, with a series of concise but meaningful points, the major facets of game design at the indie scale. In the later part of the book, Creighton writes about specific in-system design for things such as dungeons and their ecologies, treasure, and NPCs.

Overall: Solid formatting, some sound advice, and a reasonable price point; what more could you ask for? From productivity, to taking your design to the next level, not to mention the all-important facet of what not to do as a designer, Creighton does a wonderful job at explaining to a prospective freelancer not only the what of game design, but the why. As an added benefit, the book may provide some use for a GM in its second section, which covers the design of dungeons, encounters, settlements, and other assorted concepts every GM will have to use in their campaigns.

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