Today, I have the urge to fly in space, to trade stuff and blow up some pirates. Traditional pick for this kind of stuff would be to take old an' good Elite III from the shelve, but maybe there are some more modern options?

My dear friend spend some time in the Internet and found Evochron Renegades . It seems that this has some good features:

# Space
# Flying in space
# Multiplayer
# Maybe pirates?
# It's an indie game

Let's see what this has to offer.

As of yesterday, the Iron Game Chef 2008 has been opened to designers. Iron Game Chef is a yearly competition for RPG design enthusiasts both hobbyist and professional. The objective is to design a role-playing game from the available ingredients. This year's ingredients are the result of the competitions first phase: numerous artists have submitted a set of illustrations for use in the game. The designers must use one set of illustartions as the game art. Each set has from 3 to 5 gray-scale images. As said, the competition opened yesterday and ends on Sunday 27th of April.

The letter of invitations (from Story Games) repeats the main idea of the competition several times: You Can Do It. It's a great motto. With these restrictions there's no guarantee or prediction of what kinds of RPGs will emerge. Surely not all will be great, but each one will have some insightful design choices, I'm sure. So go ahead, go to the Game Chef site and see how to participate. It isn't very complicated.

I've looked at the illustration sets and played with the idea of participating, but we'll have to see. I've got some ideas, but mostly my mind is blank from a week of working. I'll probably know on Monday. If I do, I'm not going to pick a set of illustrations and try to go on from there towards a single game idea. Instead, I'll probably choose a couple of sets that interest me the most and brainstorm on every set a little. And from there onwards I won't have a map. Hmm, I'm getting a little interested in participating. We'll see, we'll see.