Welcome new and old!

Since the 27th, we've:

• Refined game design.

...

Yes.

Still very busy these past couple of weeks.

Should be clearing up soon, though.

What have we learned? How will we move forward? Let's see!

Completed the "Sight" section of the epic.

For this entry, I thought it give a bit of a reminder and a bit of context as to what the vision for the game is, as well as where it is now.

To avoid getting too granular and technical with genre naming conventions (because this thing is a very strange fusion that's a little hard to put into a genre), imagine Skyrim (first-person action adventure, without a bunch walking around), plus the Sims (character creation and life simulation, without all the house decoration), plus... I don't know, whatever games have you restart from the beginning whenever you die (without being a vicious, infuriating death loop).

I'm starting with a pen and paper version of the experience. Once it's done, I'll port most of it over into a 2D video game version, and when that's done (with its mechanical foundation all programmed in), I'll start grafting the 3D, first-person vision on top of it.

So, what is the game going to be like?

I'll spare you my capacity to drone on and on about mechanical details and the philosophy behind the approach in favor of giving you a summary of how the game is played and showing you a few visuals.

Anyway, here it is: you go through a loop of choosing the kind of encounter you want to deal with, you clear it, and getting a variable amount of "downtime" to spend improving your character. The game ends when you reach the end of time, complete An Epic Quest™ (there might be multiple), or if you manage to get your character killed.

Once you've gone through some amount of encounters (tentatively 100), the game ends. If you didn't fulfill An Epic Quest™ (there might be multiple) or if you managed to get your character killed before any of that happens, it's game over!

But your journey, of course, begins with character creation. And character creation begins with starting your starting point. I made a loose map of the starting points (and am in the middle of making a more abstracted map.

Here they are.

Each region will be divide up into subregions. The subregions will be where just about all of the gameplay happens.

And for the sake of completion, here's what the colors mean:

⚪ is neutral (innate, basic) 🔵 is benevolent (direct improvement) 🟢 is friendly (sociability; being kind) 🟡 is soft pressure (aura/presence; coercion) 🟠 is hard pressure (physical displacement, pushing, bruising) 🔴 is severance (laceration, dismemberment) 🟣 is transformation (burning, electrocution) ⚫ is destruction (permanent erasure, will subjugation)

The colors are generally what I'm using to organize everything about the mechanics, too.

But this update has gone on long enough.

Those details will be for another time!

: :

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That's all I have for you today. Next update on the 18th barring emergencies. Thank you for your time and attention.

Until then,

👋