Catching up, Part 2

Well, I finally managed to update PocketCiv with the new "scalable event" Event cards and rules. Sadly, this completely breaks the walkthrough scenarios; I'm not sure if I want to go through that pain again (which is the right thing to do) or just blow them off and forever remove them from the server. I just don't have the time to update those with my other plans for my short hobby hours.

And I've finally caught up posting all of my scans for My Budding Artist, my blog for my 3.5 year old daughter and some of her drawings. I thought this would be interesting to track her progression from completely random scribbles to, well, less random scribbles. However, if she keeps up her interest in drawing stuff, it might actually have a real nice progression over many years. And I'm starting to fall behind on the scans again...sigh.

Finally, my whole priority list has changed again in terms of design projects. Once again, I'm going forward with Restless, only because I now have a pretty solid foundation for how I want to test it out.

Restless started out originally as a complicated "choose your own adventure book" kind of thing. You move pawns around on a map, you looked up a chart that cross-referenced what turn it was with where you were, which then got you to a list of book entries which you had to choose from based on how many players were in that room. Those entries were FURTHER expanded to other entries based on various player stats.

It became quite the headache to keep this entry chart staight with all these cross-referenced numbers, affectionately called "the database."

This has been an off again/on again project for a few years now, I've had about 30 "beats," or major elements to the story outlined out. Not to mention my various false starts with it. At one point, I've gotten about 40% through the game over a few months, took a break, then came back to it,and had no idea where to continue it from. It's a game that really needs a strong focus to wrap one's head around the creation of, apparently. Mostly, due to where I was in the database, and how far I had gotten on the various story threads, things got quickly off-track.

Well, some friends of mine have been big on goofy "tear away a page caladars" recently, where each day gives you a new factoid, or questions to answer. Which got me to thinking that this might be a way to go with Restless by make each turn calandar based. But it still had a lot of database issues regarding entry numbers and such. I've just changed the mechanism for what a turn is.

But then I got to thinking about trying to create a weblog game [edited to nando's liking, and the correct terminology], where each day you could go to a blog, and then get your instructions, or game state changes. Html becomes a perfect replacement for the database. Sure you need to keep your links straight, but I don't have to deal with hundreds and hundreds of entry numbers scattered around in a book.

Also, the blog format lets the people I know who I chat with everyday on IRC play together (well, I hope they try it out), without having to create physical books for everyone.

Anyway, I'm currently building this, getting my feet wet in terms of formatting room descriptions and such. I'll probably turn it on after I've got 8 or 10 turns linked up, just to see how feasible the game is, and then determine if I want to continue it from there.

Anyway, I've got a starting point now, and a pretty good direction. You can check out the eventual home page here (now with rules!).

Poor, forgotten Smoking Barrels...