🛸 Dungeons, Dragons, and the Oregon Trail… in Space?!

On this episode of Nerd Show and Tell, we beam up with Ed Emanuel, Senior Developer at Font Awesome, to chat about his lifelong nerdery, dev adventures, and a galactically nostalgic side project called Space Awesome — a text-based, icon-powered space game inspired by the Oregon Trail.

Ed shares how creating Space Awesome helped him learn Vue.js, how he mashed up 8-bit style game logic with Font Awesome’s space-themed icons, and why it’s a quick, secret-filled trip through the stars (no microtransactions, we promise).

We also talk 3D printing, Dungeons & Dragons, and the magic behind Icon Wizard, the tool Ed and fellow FA-er Mike Wilkerson built to help customize icons on the fly.

If you love dev rabbit holes, retro gaming, or rolling D20s, this ep's got your name on it.

⏱️ Episode Timestamps

• 02:27 – Working with Dave and Travis at Font Awesome
• 04:07 – Creating Custom Icons with Font Awesome Pro
• 06:34 – 3D Printing and D&D Miniatures
• 10:31 – Exploring Icon Themes and Ed’s Faves
• 12:11 – Launching the Space Awesome Game
• 14:02 – Text-Based Games and Blockbuster Nostalgia
• 16:20 – Ed’s Dungeons & Dragons Origin Story
• 19:21 – The Rise of D&D and Role-Playing Games
• 21:51 – What Makes a Great Dungeon Master?

🧠 Highlights

“I designed Space Awesome to respect your time. You can sit down and play for 5–10 minutes. No timers. Just secrets to discover and paths to explore.”“We’ve got the sword, the wizard hat, the 20-sided die… But we could definitely use a slime monster. Maybe a gelatinous cube? Just… not called a beholder.”“We homebrewed our own D&D rules as kids. We didn’t have the books, but we had imagination.”

🔗 Links & Credits

• Play Space Awesome
• Check out Icon Wizard
  🎵 Theme by Ronnie Martin
  🎛️ Audio mastering by Chris Enns at Lemon Productions

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Highlights

Well, I think I can thank my brother in law for that one as well. When he started dating my sister, my older sister, they played DND and kind of introduced me and my other siblings to it. So I played Advanced Dungeons and Dragons back in the late eighty s a little bit. And then we didn't have any of the books. So we kind of homebrewed our own game for a while, just like everyone else. We kind of stepped away from it for a while and then, let's see, it's been five or six years ago actually.

It went well. We had lots of traffic the first couple of weeks. Not as much since then, but when I designed the game, I wanted to kind of respect people's time. It does not require a huge investment in your time. You can sit down and play it for five to ten minutes, and while there are a lot of secrets to discover and things that you probably won't encounter your first time through. There's no timers. There's no anything that requires that you come back and play it every day.

We have a 20 sided dice that belongs in there. We have some swords, axe, the wizards hats. We have a bunch of icons, the cloak, the skull, stuff like that. I think there's definitely a few icons we could add. Some more DnD themed things. Oh, we have a dragon icon already, but I think there's some other monsters that would be cool to add some kind of slime or gelatinous cube or a beholder, but I suppose we couldn't call it a beholder.
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