Freelancing, Fighting, and Falling!

This week I've been pretty busy with freelance work, so I haven't made much progress on personal projects. So I figured I'd talk about the various things I've been up to.

Freelancing

I've been editing the manuscript for Altais: Age of Ruin, a far-future fantasy that looks pretty unique. As a bonus, it's by a fellow Australian! It's one of the largest editing jobs I've worked on to date, and making sure I get enough done each day to ensure I hit the deadline is going to be keeping me pretty busy until the end of May or so.

I just finished up he last art piece for the Motive Agency Storytelling System, or M.A.S.S., which is also by an Australian author! I think it may also go by the name Plot Device, but I'm not sure what the final published title will be. It's a generic system that seems pretty flexible; I've done illustrations for a weird mashup of pulp/modern/noir but with human/puppet/cartoon characters, as well as superheroes and fantasy adventurers. I'll let you know when it comes out, or if there's a Kickstarter or anything.

Last year I did a heap of layout work for Johnn Four's Roleplaying Tips. This year he's given me the task of managing the production of a second edition of his book NPC Essentials. I'm pulling material from his archives to expand the content, editing and formatting it, and then getting it ready for digital and print. It's an interesting challenge, dealing with a project of this scope! Apart from my own stuff, I mostly just deal with things after the final manuscript's already been assembled.

I've also been doing a couple of short edits on scenarios for Arcana Games, namely sprucing up their Trouble in Waterdeep scenario for the DMs Guild, as well as a new adventure for their original game, Blood & Bone.

As you can see, I've had a lot on my plate, which is why I haven't managed to finish any of the following things:

Blade Bind: Sparring Partner

I've made good progress getting this automated duelling tutor for Blade Bind programmed, but there are still a couple of hurdles to jump before it's ready for external testing.

I managed to sort out how to handle Jokers in most situations, where you get to draw a new card and then play one from your hand with a wild suit. However there are a couple of situations (on an Engage and Wind) when it needs to be handled differently because both players reveal their cards simultaneously. That means I need to reveal both cards before you draw and replace, and I also need to allow for the edge-case where both players reveal a Joker!

Hopefully I'll get a chance to nut that out over the next week, now I've finished up the art job.

Fallen Princess

I've recently started playing a new app game called Fallen Princess. It's a fun little JRPG-style fantasy battler where you follow the exploits of Princess Aki and her army of monsters as she scours the countryside in search of gold and dark magic. It puts me in mind of the little I've seen of Disgaea, and the writing is pretty amusing.

Anyway, the real reason I bring it up is, it's got me thinking about grid-based mini battles and elemental systems.

I'm tempted to try writing a JRPG-themed RPG with a system for building your own tactical battlefield manoeuvres. I'm trying to figure out if I can do something with the stats to keep them inflating so that you kind of enter a new sphere of power at every factor of 10 while keeping the system fairly simple. So characters might start out with stats from 10-100, but then they can "limit break" to get stats in the hundreds, then the thousands, and so on with no theoretical limit. It's a nice pipe-dream, but I haven't actually worked out any specifics yet. I just want to use my Super Dungeon Explore minis for something other than SDE. 

Part of me wants to make a brand-new system, and part of me wants to come up with a revised edition of PowerFrame. I dunno; in some ways it might be easier to start again from scratch!

The elemental system in Fallen Princess is fairly straightforward: Fire > Earth > Lightning > Water all go around in a circle, each dealing extra damage to and resisting damage from one element (so Fire both damages and resists Earth). There's also Light and Dark, which both deal extra damage to each other and don't get extra resistance against anything. It's nice to see that alternative approach, as a reminder that not everything has to fit neatly onto a magic circle. That isn't going to stop me trying to fit my elemental systems into a neat circle, though.

Incidentally, Altais has an unusual magic system that relies on parallel dimensions that let mages manipulate the forces of reality, so it has "elements" like light/heat, gravity, electromagnetism, time, and space. It puts me somewhat in mind of the list I've been working on for Ark Frontier.

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Hopefully I'll have some more progress to report next week!