New Battle Pod (Ankle Biter) Available!

The battle pod: Ankle Biter (AKC00031) is now available for purchase. It can be used to add creature encounters to adventures you have created or that you are already playing. Use the Battle Pods with the same parties as other pods. This will allow you to create a diverse and exciting night of adventure. The tool handles all the grunt work for the referee. This includes generating individual creatures as well as tracking Training Points and generating appropriate treasure.

Keep checking with us for more pod releases as they become available. Once you download your copy of the “Ankle Biter”, you only need a rule book and a couple more of your friends to create a great night of fun and entertainment.
Requirements are Windows XP, Vista, Win7, Win8 (8.1) or Win10

New Pod (Dyson’s Fear Farm) Available!

The pod: Dyson’s Fear Farm (AK000040) is now available for purchase. It can be played separately, but the base story arc has pod 40 following pod 30. Keep checking with us for more pod releases as they become available. Once you download your copy of “Dyson’s Fear Farm”, you can start having hours of fun. A rule book and a couple more of your friends is all you need for many great nights of entertainment. The Pod is designed for 3-4 players, but like all other Pods, can be adjusted to fit your party size with the click of a button.
Requirements are Windows XP, Vista, Win7, Win8 (8.1) or Win10

Manticore Limited Edition Prints on Kickstarter!

Help us to complete our inaugural print run of an A’Kyria fantasy creature!
Over the years of brainstorming, play testing, intense discussions (ie. arguing) and innovation to create the fantasy role-playing game A’Kyria, creatures for the RPG were created. We decided on a simple, but detailed, style of pen and ink illustrations that have proved very popular with our players. This is the inaugural print run of one of our more popular renditions of a fantasy creature: The Manticore; which is one of the many creatures featured in the print and eBook versions of the A’Kyria rulebook.
With this Kickstarter campaign we hope to be able to bring some of our fantasy world to you through vinyl stickers, artist prints and the advertising material we need to spread the word that A’Kyria is ready to be enjoyed by gamers around the world. The artist prints we are offering during this campaign will be individually signed by our artist in residence, Louise Hughes.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/551018022/akyria-manticore-limited-edition-prints-and-sticke

New Pod (Rock Roll ‘n’ Bandits) Available!

The pod: Rock Roll ‘n’ Bandits (AK000020) is now available for purchase. It is a starting Rank pod following a different story arc than Temple of the Solitary Moon. Keep checking with us for more pod releases as they become available. Once you download your copy of “Rock Roll ‘n’ Bandits”, you can start having hours of fun. A rule book and a couple more of your friends is all you need for one great night of entertainment. The Pod is designed for 3-4 players, but like all other Pods, can be adjusted to fit your party size with the click of a button.
Requirements are Windows XP, Vista, Win7, Win8 (8.1) or Win10

When You Need to Beat the @#$% Out of Something

With the election year reaching its final death throes and every media outlet screaming doom and gloom, many of us have moved past stressed to a raging, boiling pot of Grrrr. We need an outlet and Luke Cage and the anticipation of the Rogue One release are not cutting it. We need to smash something with wild, gleeful abandon and not lose our day jobs in the process.

Our Own Game Company has you covered. We have developed A’Kyria Battle Pods: single creature battle pods to use in creating your own adventure or for hours of hack and slash bliss. The software will handle the battle just like our full Adventure Pod software, allow you to choose the rank of the creature and will generate treasure and training points at the end of victorious battle.

Download the creature or creatures of your choice, gather some anger soaked friends and prepare for some cathartic release. You can even give the creatures’ cute little names like “Congress” or “Politics” or “Presidential Candidates you would like to sacrifice to the Borg” and laugh with maniacal glee while you smash their butts to smithereens! Gee, I am feeling better already! You can’t beat that kind of therapy for just $1.49!

Our Own Game Company is here for you…and playing for the fun of it!

Comic Con Newbs

August saw your friendly neighborhood game makers running around like BB-8 dodging blaster fire. We were prepping for our first con booth and attending comic cons doesn’t really school a body in the legwork behind a booth. Despite being the newbs that we are, we felt that our first Con was a rousing success. We learned a load, met some amazing people and introduced A’Kyria to a whole new group of potential players.

Many thanks to the organizers of the Fort Collins Comic Con! We plan to awkwardly stumble around in your presence again next year!

We are Our Own Game Company…Playing for the fun of it!

New Pod (Beetle Mania) Available!

The pod: Beetle Mania (AK000090) is now available for purchase. It can be played separately, but the base story arc has pod 90 following pod 60. Keep checking with us for more pod releases as they become available. Once you download your copy of “Beetle Mania”, you can start having hours of fun. A rule book and a couple more of your friends is all you need for one great night of entertainment. The Pod is designed for 3-4 players, but like all other Pods, can be adjusted to fit your party size with the click of a button.
Requirements are Windows XP, Vista, Win7, Win8 (8.1) or Win10

Psychiatric Help 5¢ : The Doctor is In…

Can we talk?

You look stressed; very stressed.

In fact, everyone looks stressed!

Maybe it is the political climate right now, or the state of the planet, or the time of year or the fact that even our superheroes are fighting one another, but every person I have met in the past few months has been a giant stress-ball. And not the good kind…not the kind that you can beat the crud out of and feel better. No, we are talking about walking prescriptions for Xanax, ball o’ stress kind of stress-balls.

More often than not we turn to a screen to alleviate that stress for a moment. I mean, it is pretty cathartic to watch Captain America lose his cool and Superman get his derriere handed to him. If you have had a particularly bad day, you can always tune into Game of Thrones. There is bound to be one person (O.K…probably a small village of persons) who is having a worse day than you are. We hop on video games or MMOs to take our angst out on hundreds of people, real or imaginary. And, if you have lost all hope for humanity, you can always load a version of Pandemic and obliterate the world with your bad virus self.

But, there are times when you really want to be someone else; to forget for a few hours that your world doesn’t really have dragons and your boss wants you to invent time travel to get a project done. What the frell?! You want to smash monsters, throw magic, create some otherworld mayhem and drink a beer, or Romulan ale, with your friends! You, my friend, need a prescription for a table-top rpg.

A few months ago, we creators of A’Kyria had to take a dose of our own medicine. It occurred to us that every group we were playing in was some form of play-testing group. As fun as it was, it meant that we had one foot out of the game gauging it with a developer’s eye, rather than cooling our toes in the playing pool. So, we backed up, grabbed a pod adventure we had already released and set up a group for the sole purpose of playing.

You know what? It has been pretty amazing. My husband and I, for the first time in our role-playing lives, decided to play a married character couple. As married gnome wizards, Valerie and Miracle Max, (if you don’t get the reference, then you really have been mostly dead all day) we can nag each other with impunity…and magic…and still like each other at the end of the night. You could call it geek marriage counseling.

So, if you are stressed, ditch the screen. Grab some friends, hassle them into coming over and start up a table-top rpg…preferably A’Kyria. They, and you, will not be sorry.

We are Our Own Game Company…Playing for the fun of it!

The Nerd in the Herd…

Let’s be honest; being a nerd is no longer the stigma it used to be. Thanks in part to Steve Jobs, Big Bang Theory, Comic Cons and the like; Nerdom is enjoying a Renaissance of coolness that is unprecedented. It is easier than ever to find a sympathetic and obsessed ear. Hop on your computer and there are Meet-ups, and Nerd bars and Cos-play at the click of a button.

But, meanwhile, back in the real world, we still pull the hood up on our alter ego. We still trundle to work as Plain Janes and Joes because (honesty again) if we ever released our true inner geek with its lunatic fascination for zombies and the apocalypse, they would call out the National Guard. We can’t hide it completely, but we settle for the tolerated, even celebrated, ‘mostly weird’ and keep the balls-to-the-wall, totally out there psycho fan for our friends and fellow asylum inmates.

Despite our current trendiness, we still know we are outnumbered by the ‘Normals’; so when you happen to bump into a nerd in the herd, it is a moment to rejoice. It happened to me this weekend and it was glorious!

Set the scene…a Girl Scout outing to a dinosaur museum with giggling pre-adolescents and barely-know-each-other moms. Yikes! It is enough to send any true nerd diving for their inhaler or anti-anxiety meds…so you pop off an obscure movie quote under your breath and, Lo! The woman next to you giggles! She gets it! It is kismet!

I had talked to this mom briefly before. I was attracted to her batman earrings, but the true essence of our nerdiness we kept under wraps. I mean, how much geek can you reasonably slather on a person if you know you will have to deal with them on a regular basis? However, despite our reservations and looking up at a T-Rex named Stan, we finally let it fly.

She is a much bigger Dr. Who and Batman fan than I am, but that’s okay because I get it. I am a bigger table top role playing fan and am caught up in our A’Kyria world, but that’s okay because she gets it. We threw out movie quotes like confetti, wondered why Treasure Planet was so underrated, argued the virtues (or lack thereof) of Frozen, geeked out about the upcoming cons and waxed philosophical about books, movies and shows. I don’t know if we will become “besties” as my daughter calls it, but by the end of the day my little cup of nerdiness overfloweth. I had bumped into a kindred spirit, another nerd in the herd, and I was replete with all things geek. (Insert contented sigh here.)

We are Our Own Game Company…Playing for the fun of it!

Life is a Game, My Friend…

We all know the stereotype of a gamer: socially dysfunctional; lives in their parent’s basement obsessed with all things sci-fi and fantasy; only has a job so they can buy the latest updates on Steam…blah, blah, blah. For those of us who take the leap into game design, you would need to kick that stereotype up a notch. Now, you’re not just obsessed with games, you are obsessed with your game. It gets to the point where even your gamer friends (the ones you haven’t roped into helping develop the game) are putting you off. “Wow! Will you look at the time! I was supposed to meet Jared at the club for a game of racquetball. Ta-ta!” And before you realize that your friend doesn’t even know a Jared, he is off and running.

Beyond talking about A’Kyria, playing A’Kyria, developing pods for A’Kyria, drawing pictures and writing software for A’Kyria, and having Our Own Game Company meetings about things typically related to A’Kyria, we do stuff…life stuff. We have our J.O.B’s, spend time untangling our kids and their various paraphernalia, feed pets, liberate the chickens; the usual stuff. We keep on top of current events. We know that Scalia bought the farm and now Congress and the White House are going to start slugging it out again. We know that 150,000 penguins were wiped out of existence by a thoughtless iceberg. We know the Zika virus is poised to run amok in South America if it doesn’t mutate and kill us all. But our nerdy little hearts are singing for a joyously raunchy and irreverent Deadpool, that a new Star Wars movie is in production and the predicted chocolate shortage hasn’t hit us yet. Firefly is still a classic, Carrie Fisher and Stan Lee are going to be at the Denver Comic Con and all is right with the world.

Gamers of every stripe can appreciate a good obsession. While Our Own Game Company is firmly living in Nerd-dom, our obsession just happens to be something that everyone isn’t talking about…yet. Before you go off to find a Jared to play racquetball with, take a moment to check out the world of A’Kyria to see if “mi casa loco es tu casa loco”…my crazy house is your crazy house. You’re welcome!

We are Our Own Game Company…Playing for the fun of it!