Week 33 Update

TL;DR documentation, spaceships, property taxes, and TTRPGs!

Build & Deployment:

Development:

• Restarted work on network multiplayer, and made some decent progress. Following my meeting with Don Wednesday, I changed gears to work on an important visual component, which will feature prominently in the next release:
• Spaceships! I'm working on the design and components of spaceships! Rooms aboard ships will be interactive so the player can assign crew members to different stations. I don't think it will be quite as granular as FTL, and I would like larger ships and more crew members overall.

Design:

• Wrote new documentation on player/character progression.
• Designed a system for characters to have memories of specific events, based on their relationships.
• Updated combat documentation with some more technical details regarding concepts like hit stop, hit stun, block stun, animation canceling, and option select. These seem like really important game concepts that I haven't seen discussed hardly anywhere outside of fighting games.
• Created a framework for property ownership, taxes, law levels, and policing. Crime-related skills (lock-picking, pocket-picking, burgling, bribery, forgery, etc) will build on this framework. Some of them will also tie into the crafting system~

Influence:

• Recently discovered some new TTRPGs that look SUPER cool: Lancer, a mecha jockey game that looks nice and crunchy, and Wildsea, a game about pirates surfing the treetops on chainsaw-powered ships.
• Also looking into OSR solutions to encumbrance & damage/healing. A game I've had my eye on (and which I backed on Kickstarter) is Knave 2e. I've reviewed the current PDF and the solution to the wizard power curve is... ingenuous. Really, between the approach to ability scores and encumbrance, I'm really enjoying the look of this game.

Marketing:

• Tech.LGBT has led to much more traffic than dead bird app. 3 months ago, I was averaging 20 views per update. 2 months ago that doubled to 40-50 views per update. Since I've been on Mastodon the last two weeks? My 2 most recent updates received 300 and 600 views, respectively. Yay~
• Updated the Kickstarter page to better reflect some developments over the last few months.