My Actifit Report Card: September 3 2022

Another day with very little writing, but at least I had work so I wasn’t entirely unproductive.

I’m just really tired for reasons I can’t quite understand and my stomach has been bothering me a little, which shouldn’t really keep me from writing because I know I’ve pushed through worse.

I think that the irony might actually be that while a lot of the time I haven’t wanted to work on stuff because it’s felt like shouting into the void, I now don’t want to work on stuff because Alter Data was a more successful effort than a lot of my others and I don’t want to not meet or exceed its level of success.

This is a problem for a couple reasons, not the least of which being that I now have like five projects going that I just need to resolve.

My goal is going to be to get Tali Nova ready for a Monday morning release before work (don’t go in until noon, which means that I probably need to get it done by 10 AM to be realistically able to launch), then focus on Jovia and Oasis Roads.

I still haven’t finished the editing for Carrion Birds. I told myself that being constrained by a less effective laptop would help with my focus issues on that, but I honestly just can’t make myself read through it again. It’s one of those blocks I have. I didn’t mind going back through Alter Data as much, but that was a much smaller project (about one-eighth the overall length).

Now I need to do that before release, which is a little silly because if I do that all I have left to do is just get the layout done. That’s child’s play, technically speaking, in terms of the overall work on the project, and then I could release it and have another project out for sale on Itch.io and DriveThruRPG.

At this point, I’m just aiming for deadlines by the end of the year. I want to get both Carrion Birds and the Oasis Roads early access out by then.

I also need to get some work done on Dragons of the Western Shores, since that’s also a cool thing I want to do, but it’ll probably also partly wait until Kenoma.

I came up with an idea for Oasis Roads. I’ve been using distance band tracking, which works really well for characters who might move one or two bands a turn.

But for vehicles, where you’re tracking a lot of momentum, things have issues since you might have people passing forward and backward. You also have more constraint by terrain.

So I’m adding a lane system, which will give maneuverability a major role again even in the simplified framework.

Part of this is also going to be editing out all the grid-based stuff. It’s not that it won’t be possible if players want to do that. It just won’t be a goal, and this will streamline the rules to the point where Oasis Roads is more about the character play with satisfying rules for chases and combat than a game with loads of extra things to remember and prepare before working things like chases and fights into the story.

This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io

Walking