Where to start? Well a little bit of background might help. As there are two sides to every story there are also two sides to ARGH Productions; AH and RG (Amber Hargreaves and Rob Grundy). Well we thought it appropriate anyway.

If you have any comments, criticisms, suggestions or any other feedback then please contact us at:

Rob Grundy - radg100@york.ac.uk - for game design and site problems.
Amber Hargreaves - nudge_saynomore@hotmail.com - for art and book queries.

Rob Grundy is a graduate physicist currently working on his DPhil at York University.

For a long time I have been involved in character based role-playing games, for people who have not experienced this it's like being a character in a play where no-one brought the script, but the director knows what the plot is meant to be. I have also played many computer games, including on-line multi-user-dungeons (MUDs). In all of this gaming experience I have always felt tied to a plot that is very linear, i.e. there is only one way to go in order to "win". Even on a MUD the development of a character allows you more flexibility in how you play the game, but the puzzles were all linear. When discussing this with some friends we started to plan what we would want from a game, either on-line or single player. We even went quite far into the planning and background for the game, but due to personal commitments the ideas were shelved. Then Amber said she was starting to write a book based on the characters she plays on Discworld MUD, and asked me for some input. This gradually re-kindled my interest in games design as this provided the perfect background for a game-world. Since then we've slowly been putting together ideas about the game-world setting, the characters involved, how the game should work, and we are now at the stage where I'm beginning to program some of the basic elements of the code.

Amber Hargreaves is a graduate artist / modelmaker currently working on commisioned artwork.

You see... there's this little MUD on the net called Discworld. I kind of got hooked on this a good few years ago and so have several characters on it. The problem was I was getting bored with it; it was the same thing over and over. All plots, skills and quests were set and there was very little personal input into the actual game. All the personal input went into character design and "role playing" (the nearest I've ever come to actual role-playing). Having also played Baldur's Gate and been through the character generation and personalisation features of that game I became absorbed in the characters that I had portrayed and developed throughout. So, logical conclusion, write a book about them (well it made sense to me, anyway). Unfortunatly I lacked a few things that I needed to actually be able to write this book; I obviously had to invent a setting or "world" to base it in. Speaking to Rob about this, and using his input (as well as some of his characters) we began developing our own environment. I began going through details that I would need whilst writing (such as how magic would work etc.) and this slowly progressed into a good basis for a game. Stuff happened and somehow, there we had the "blueprints" for a computer game tailored to our own specific requirements and desires. The rest as they say, is history.

So, there you go. Not quite "the story so far..." but close enough to give you an idea of what this is all about. For details of the parts of the project already completed, check out the links at the top. Happy hopping.