It has been about a year and a half since Cindy and I first got it in our heads to make a game. We had just finished listening to a talk by Sarah Mayhew in July of 2011. Sarah talked about how she was using her passion for manga and fantasy to have a positive impact on the world. Cindy and I talked afterwards about what skills we had, and what we could do with them.

This thought festered in me for a long time after the conference. I started working on a variety of board and card games. Cindy and I would occasionally chat about some of the ideas. But on November 21, 2011 we had the idea that would go on to become our Cult Leader game.

Truth be told, it was Cindy’s idea. I know because I just reviewed the Gtalk conversation that we had the good sense to save. Both of us were interested in cults from an academic perspective, and I had been working on a game where you combat the spread of infectious and dangerous ideas. However, none of these games were really capturing the core idea that we wanted to get across. Cindy had the bright idea to flip the whole thing on its head and have the player take on the role of the cult leader. In this way we would be delivering our idea through role play, rather than a more ham-handed good vs. evil approach.

That was when development of our game began in earnest. It’s been a long road since then and the game has changed quite a bit. We also added Jesus to our team a few months ago to help us with the theme. We’ve learned a whole lot during this process, and I’m sure we’ll learn a lot more as we progress to the completion of this game and future games to come.

In light of that, I thought it would be fun to catalog our journey. The plan is for all of us at CRAM Games to occasionally come on here and talk about our progress, both on the game and within our skill sets. Our wish is that our readers glean some small amount of inspiration and wisdom from our efforts.

Thanks for taking an interest in us, we hope you like watching our project grow.