Okay... whatever! Before I got on the net I was kind of heavily involved in postal gaming (PBM, Play By Mail), and recently (April 99) I have started trying to get a bit involved again. Back around the turn of the decade I was not just playing, but even experimenting with some game ideas of my own. One such idea was the unfinished game It's A Dog's Life. The picture above was a draft for an ad I tried visualizing once. (Ignore the address, I moved four years ago!)

Oh, and here's another version I made earlier... or later... who cares? (BTW, I can't really draw. The dogs in both these ads come from different clipart collections.)

Now what? I hear you ask. (Go ahead, ask already!) Well, I have already put some of my more or less finished creations on the web, so I thought I'd have a go at making some of the IADL material a bit more presentable and maybe draw some attention to it. Who knows, maybe work on the game could get started again...

Back in the late eighties/early nineties I wrote down a bunch of incomplete rules and sent them out to a handful of postal gamers I knew, asking for comments. I got some, and let them inspire me to do some more work. Then I sent the results to the people who had made the comments, and got more comments. This continued for a while before the whole thing ground to a halt.
The first part is the original mailing. If you can be bothered to read all this, I would appreciate if you could pause to write down your comments before starting on the next parts, which consist of other people's comments and my reactions. The idea is to get your independent reactions first, see?

Okay, after the first part you should read the comment files in chronological order:

Then feel free to send me some more comments.

It's A Dog's Life was not my first game idea. One I even got as far as programming and playtesting was Archipelago, a strategical (?) fantasy game kind of based on the far more well known Starweb (which is not a fantasy game! Long story...).

To go a bit more into detail, Archipelago was first developed (?) and playtested on my old Apple II (or ][ as some joker got the idea to call it...), then when I got my first Amiga I got as far as porting the database and rules, and writing a new printout program which was tested and found to work. This was before I got a hard disk, so I had everything on a handful of floppies.
You probably guessed the next part. I got pretty organized and kept all the floppies in one box... which then disappeared only to resurface recently (September 2K1). So it's not just lack of time (and energy) that has kept me from doing anything with the game for so long...
The first step will probably be to HTMLize the rulebook and then "run it up the flagpole and see who salutes it". Just for starters, I have converted a page from what was meant to be a promotional flyer - which also happens to be part of the intro from the rulebook.
After a bit of thought I also converted the original rulebook index to give a bit more of an idea about what's in the game.