Hail, fellow Obsidian Portal GM’s and Players! My name is Steve, also known as Jynx001, and for several years now I’ve been a Content Creator, Support Sorcerer, and Maker of Many Things here on OP. I’m very happy to announce that I’m taking my next level in the Game Publisher class as I begin the quest of launching “Group Beta Games!”
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I’ve been making games since I was a kid — everything from board games constructed from cardboard and old chess pieces to castle-building games made from Lego bricks to custom Magic: the Gathering cards drawn with fine-liner pens and colored pencils. Discovering table-top roleplaying games in my teen years opened up an entirely new and vast universe for creative endeavors. I’m sure many of you are familiar with the stacks of spiral notebooks and piles of loose-leaf paper that comprise homebrew rule systems — organizing such imaginative chaos is part of what drew me to Obsidian Portal in the first place.
Finally, after decades of tinkering with games, it is time to start publishing games professionally. There are lots of ideas in the works and plenty of hands-on learning that still needs to be mastered, but I’m very excited about the progress and the plan. I’m currently constructing a rule set for a futuristic Mech game set on an alien world riddled with a vast system of caverns.
The publishing house is called Group Beta Games and the website — groupbeta.games — is currently being built. Over the next few months I hope to have a developer’s blog set up so you can read about the details of how I design, test, and publish games. The goal is to encourage others to make their own games and books by showing the process with all its particulars and prices. And I would love to have some members of the OP community beta test some of our games when they’re ready for that phase of work in the near future.
Due to the size of the GBG project, I will have to devote all of my working hours to that venture, so I must unfortunately hand my duties off to other members of the Obsidian Portal team and say goodbye. I have learned a great deal during my time with OP and loved building and creating things for the gaming community. Everyone I met here has been wonderful and I am very grateful for the friendships, conversations, inspiration, and sharing of art and ideas. Thank you to the team and thank you to everyone who is a part of Obsidian Portal!
I will be certain to share news and announcements about Group Beta Games on all the OP platforms and I look forward very much to hearing what you think as we release material. Take care and Happy Gaming!
— Steve / Jynx001
