• Working in the background

Even though you may not have been able to see it, the game has actually been progressing. These things happen in the background when you aren’t looking. I just did not feel it needed an update until there was some substantial progress to be reported.

This happens to me as well, when I feel nothing much is happening, and then, suddenly, a result is produced without me knowing there was a problem to begin with. A few weeks ago this happened as I was biking off to the woods to do some hiking, and as I took a corner, all of a sudden, a brand new way to handle weapon proficiencies in the game presented itself. I didn’t know that there was something wrong with the current system for proficiencies, but apparently there was, as this system was a lot more elegant, and works a lot better. All it required was a rewrite.

In other news, the acquisition of a new piece of software solved one of the core issues that was plaguing the layouting process, and with that problem out of the way, all of a sudden, layouting the game became a dawdle. So I knocked out a first draft and this is currently being reviewed and revised. The previous layouting-process had been very costly., time-wise, and not very efficient. It had taken me about four days per chapter, and the results were not always what I wanted them to be. With this new software I was able to exceed my previous year’s worth of output in just a week.

Below is a short clip of what the rough layouting draft looks like.

The reason the clip almost comes to a stop of at the picture of the person hiding in a bush, a picture which was in the last version of the game as well, is that that particular picture was corrupted, and could not be loaded at all. I thought I had lost it, but it happened to be one of the pictures that had been sent to me physically, so I was able to re-scan and re-edit it, so that it could be included. It would have been a sad loss had it been gone forever.

The playtesters have also been busy, and completed two run-throughs of all the available pre-written adventures, and more. They have been sniffing at the rules for the first expansion as well, trying out some of the things that won’t be in the core rulebook.

The progress by the illustrators have been amazing thus far as well. Only a handful of pictures remain to fill out the rulebook and the character creation book. Then we can roll on into the adventures as well. I have been astonished by the outpour of talents on display for this little project, and the amount of effort these truly gifted individuals have displayed in their contributions. I could not thank them enough, no matter how hard I might try.