About Stormdancer
Stormdancer Creations is a tiny little games company with far too many ideas for its own good. Father and daughter team, Paul and Caitlin have both grown up with a love for games, and know it is a great way to connect, have fun, and play with interesting ideas.
Dungeon Crusader and King’s Alchemist are their first games, but they have many more ideas they are developing, waiting in the wings.
About Dungeon Crusader
As a kid, Paul loved making his own board games. He would build graph paper maps of twisting Dungeon mazes and make little 3D paper sculptures to represent doors, archways, chests and other exciting figures for his little token that he would move about the board and roll on tables that he had created to see what would be encountered there. Somehow a seed was planted…
Dungeon Crusader was first created by Paul about 20 years ago. The first edition of it was created on a laptop using Microsoft Word, and bad illustrations. Still, it was a pride and joy. The original version had 150 Encounter Cards and 150 Treasure Cards, and 100 Edge Cards… and it was a lot. One printed copy was made, with the cards printed out and glued onto poker playing cards. And then…
One night, Paul’s house was burgled, and his laptop was stolen. However, he had done the sensible thing, and had backed everything up on a USB memory stick, which was kind of a new thing back then. However, the USB stick was stolen as well. D’Oh! When he told the police how important it was to him to get them back, they laughed at him.
Heartbroken, Paul kind of walked away from the project for some years, disappointed that so much of his ideas were gone. However, he had a whole lot of notebooks, with a whole lot of ideas, and the original stuck-on-with-glue version of the game.
Occasionally he would look at the old game and the notes, and sigh… what if?
Then, after working on many other projects, professional and personal, Paul realised that the array of modern tools that he was now working with made things that were incredibly difficult in the past, were quite easy to realise today. It was while on holiday in Christchurch, on some downtime, that he attempted to create a template for the Dungeon Tiles. It worked! And suddenly the project was on, to recreate the game, and finally have a go at getting it out to the world!
Two years later, and a lot of persistence, patience, and testing, the game is ready to go to market. There may be small errors, if so please first, forgive us. Second, let us know, so we can make corrections. And thirdly, hold onto the errors! They may be worth a mint some day!
About AI Artwork
Dungeon Crusader uses AI artwork. With around 1000 pieces of artwork in the collection so far, all of them have been painstakingly generated to fit the requirements of the card.
The dilemma of AI artwork is that it is created through a scraping of imagery from artwork across the globe. It could be argued that this is an unfair copying of someone else’s art style and work. However, there are also arguments that all art has some degree of plagarism / homage to them.
Regardless, we would like to acknowledge this dilemma, and acknowledge the different opinions around this. It would certainly be our preference to have every single piece of artwork in Dungeon Crusader be hand drawn / painted by skilled artists, who are paid well for their efforts.
It is the ultimate goal to achieve this, and replace all of the AI artwork with competent and well-paid human-created artwork. To this end we will be striving to find a way to do this, and to afford the vast sums involved.
Until then, we would like to acknowledge that Dungeon Crusader in its current level of professional presentation would not have been possible without AI artwork and other related modern digital design tools.
The Future of Stormdancer Games
Stormdancer is an effort to start a branding for what we consider to be high quality games, not just in production, but in really good games systems that work really well for people who play them. Our intention though is to on-sell the games to a larger games company who is interested in purchasing it.
However, our goal here is not to make huge amounts of cash, but to produce awesome fun games, the kind of games that we love to play with our family and friends.
Because we believe that great games can shape people’s thinking, beliefs, and the world.
“You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” ~ Plato
Contact us
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