A few weeks ago, I published a post about where the name Gothic Panda came from. Today, I thought I'd do the same for the name of our gaming company, Team Sidequest. Currently this name belongs to our D&D group, the invisible sponsors of Physics Not Included, the WoW guild led by one of our illustrious D&D group members, and the game company consisting mostly of my husband and I and occasionally a couple of other members of our D&D group. Of all of these manifestations of Team Sidequest, the name has belonged to our D&D group the longest.
Over the years, our D&D group has become notorious for ignoring the main plot and instead would wander off on side quest after side quest. Between 4-5 years ago, we started to jokingly refer to ourselves as Team Sidequest when recapping adventures, since usually it involved describing how we got distracted by the shiny side quest and completely missed the obvious main plot. Sometimes we'd see the plot. We'd know deep down that we should follow the plot. In the end, however, the side quests always drew us away. They were shiny nuggets of goodness added by our Dungeon Master to make the world we played in more well-rounded and exciting. There were many nights where our D.M. would watch us in bewildered wonder as we turned what should have been a 15-30 minute role-playing side adventure into a 3-4 hour fiasco. To make communication between members easier, we started a private Facebook group with the name Team Sidequest, except Facebook failed and in general at least half the group would miss notifications and information on the next game and other such important details. It's worth noting because the Facebook group was when our group officially adopted Team Sidequest as our name.
In that vein, Team Sidequest seemed an appropriate name to apply to the game company my husband and I have been trying to put together. Our only product to date is the Anime RPG book, currently in its beta version. Team Sidequest, the D&D group, has played a large part in the evolution of this book. It is true that my husband wrote the entire thing, and only one other group member really took the time to sit down and hash through the mechanics for the powers (he is rewarded for his time and effort with credit on the cover, and if we ever turn a profit with Team Sidequest, the game company, we might even pay him). Although most of our D&D group had nothing directly to do with the book, they were our faithful guinea pigs when it came to play-testing. They suffered through the alpha version of the book, which never existed in any published format. They still play and offer feedback on the beta version, which helps us as we are editing and preparing the next version. We also expect they will be willing sacrifices when it comes to play-testing future game products we put together.
Team Sidequest also makes an appropriate name for our company as both my husband and I--well mostly me--are easily distracted and tend to wander off on cool ideas we have and neglect whatever our current projects are. We currently have plans for at least two supplements to the Anime RPG along with a revision to the current book--including looking into the Pathfinder system and including a version for that for 3.5 fans plus an e-book release of some kind. Moving away from D&D, we also have plans for nearly a dozen different games--board games, card games, and even a phone app or two. Thankfully, my husband is not nearly as easy to distract as I am; he helps keep us at least a little focused on 1-2 projects at a time, or else we'd probably never actually finish anything.
So, that's where we got the name from and why we chose to apply it to our game company. The logo of the dragon with the crescent moon I actually borrowed from my old cosplay commission business. The commission business was named Lunar Dragon and was my 4th attempt at running a business--Gothic Panda qualifies as #6 and Team Sidequest makes #7 (maybe one of these days I'll write a post about all my various adventures and mis-adventures in the entrepreneurial world). Incidentally this was before the Lunar Dragon game was released--I think it was for Play Station, but I'm not sure and I'm going to be lazy and not look it up right now. =P I really liked the logo we'd designed for that business, so we saw no reason why we couldn't just recycle it into the Team Sidequest logo for the game company since as of yet no other version of Team Sidequest has a logo we might have wanted to reference. So that's where we got the logo you can see printed on the back of the Anime RPG book.
No comments:
Post a Comment