Week 39 Update

TL;DR finished UI framework. Started integrating & testing older "hard coded" user input & interface components.

Build & Deployment:

Development:

• Finished the new UI framework! Preliminary testing thus far has been flawless and I've started integrating the new framework with the older, "hard coded" components. The new framework divvies up components and input into layers that can be combined & recombined as needed to create new interfaces. It isn't exactly notable or revolutionary but it's one of the easiest things I've worked with (now that it's done...).

Design: 

• So much design work this last week! Designs fall into three broad areas: Culture & Religion, Magic & Spells, and Classes & Mechanics.
• Did a lot of research on Early Christianity and major Denominations, basically looking at the Jewish-Roman wars & Siege of Jerusalem, Gnosticism, Nicene Creed, East-West Schism, and Protestant Reformation. I'm finding that while having dates for certain events in the Gregorian calendar is useful for organization, it creates this artificial division between the "Before and After John the Baptist."
  • Broadly speaking, Christianity rose to prominence at the end of the Second Temple period as a result of the political upheaval through successive conquests by Persians, Macedonians, and Romans.
  • Separate Roman and Coptic traditions of Christianity developed in West and East, respectively. Following the establishment of the Roman capital in Byzantium and the Council of Nicaea in the 4th Century, Christianity was adopted as the state religion of Rome.
  • It is virtually impossible to separate Christianity and its beliefs from the context in which is was created. To create a tradition of "ignoring other religions until they go away" is to undermine the foundations of Christianity. Which is apparently what each of the ecumenical councils did. Normal Christians didn't care, or even know about the councils.
• Revised and updated spell lists. The approach I'm taking to magic traditions merges the ideas of "Domains" and "Schools" from D&D whereby each School is a short list of spells. I've taken care to create new traditions that better reflect their constituent spells, e.g. "abjuration" contains spells that reject supernatural entities & bind them to the authority of a deity.
  • Each tradition represents a literal school of thought inasmuch as possible, such that it could be "taught" as a curriculum, and each follows a pattern of thought. To use abjuration as the example, its spell list includes the following: detect evil, exorcism (renamed the "turn undead" power), tongues, banishment, planar binding, and forbiddance for its first 6 levels. The spells build on a theme of rooting out and rejecting evil & heresy.
• While I didn't make any explicit changes to classes (or their mechanics), I did make a number of implicit changes for every class that utilizes spell-casting. In a sense, each magic-using class is defined (at least partially) by the tradition of magic they "learn" as a member of said class. There are several reasons behind this design choice.
  • Achieve a degree of "consistent play experience" across a single class. I could write an entire blog about this (and I did, from 2010 to 2021) but I can summarize it with a question: "did you ever play D&D with a cleric who only used healing on themselves? Or would threaten or demand payment in exchange for heals & buffs?" It's a rhetorical question but if you answered "yes," I'm very sorry you had that experience.
  • Another design choice that tracks back to magic is that with one exception, magic-using classes are generally incapable of casting spells above "7th level." In general, divine & supernatural spell-granting entities won't trust mortals with power in excess of what amounts to a "7th-level spell" so those mortals will never be able to challenge the entities themselves.
  • The above is an idea borrowed from AD&D whereby wizards, and -only- wizards, are capable of researching & casting spells above 7th level. In order to obtain the higher-level spells of different traditions, wizards must necessarily bargain, barter, or steal the secrets of other schools in their quest for knowledge. "Casting spells above 7th level" is basically the wizard class feature.

Influence:

• In case you can't tell (I know it certainly isn't obvious) but watching The Last Kingdom had a profound impact on my desire to dive into the convoluted history of Christianity for the purpose of reflecting its beliefs as game mechanics.

Marketing:

• Finalizing Kickstarter for pre-launch.
• Released an RPGMaker game I made back in 2015, Mother of Monsters, when it occurred to me that my page could benefit from having a completed game (even in a different engine) to help cross-promote Rogue Souls. So far, so good!