Here’s an overview of what I am working on at the moment and for the immediate future, and what I plan to do after that. As always, development on the main title (Chimborazo) continues all the time, regardless of anything else that’s happening, so that doesn’t need to be mentioned.
First things first, these next three months I will be focusing on releasing Balance. We just did a slight overhaul of the system internally, so in the following couple of weeks that should be up on the google docs file, and the Beta (which is to say, the full game sans the three adventure modules) will be available. But, before everything else, here’s the road map for Q1:
These are not hard-set dates of course, just a self-imposed time frame I’ve made for myself to help me stay on track, based on roughly how much time I think I’ll need for each of the projects.
Most exciting is the Lore Update, because I’m planning a truly massive expansion on the available lore for Chimborazo. That’s to say, at minimum one article per week, hopefully 3-4 small or 1-2 big ones. The dream would be a small one every week day and a bigger one every weekend, but… well, that’s just a dream.
Speaking of Chimborazo, now that I have my hands on the proverbial “motherload” of a resource regarding herbs and ointments, I am finally able to start seriously working on one of the major standalone supplements for the game, the Potion System. I’ve actually been sitting on it for a while, unable to focus on that, but once Balance is out it’s full steam ahead.
There are also two brand new titles in the works. I call them Micro RPGs, or mRPGs for short, and they are just fun small games with roleplaying elements. Since working on Unreasonable has proven tricky due to ever-increasing scope and ambition for the project, these will be perfect to scratch that itch and the concepts are quite entertaining.
Other than that? Who knows, really. The lore update will continue throughout the entire year, to the best of my ability. Balanced will be released at some point, though I can’t pin it on an exact date. Writing one-shot adventure modules is tricky business (and I mean writing good modules) and there is solo play to also consider, which I’ve been giving more and more thought.
In the second half of 2019 I’ll most likely double down on Chimborazo and get it finished by the end of the year, design-wise, though who knows how long it will take to get the art done. The key now is to focus on playtests and ironing out things that potentially don’t work, if such become revealed in the process. If all goes well, Unreasonable might see a Beta release, though at the moment that game is the least of my concerns production-wise.
In terms of other content, hopefully there is a lot more. I don’t plan to stop with the articles whenever I have the time to push one from the backlog, which is getting quite large already (23 posts on this blog sit as Draft, and those are only the ones with more volume, that aren’t essentially a collection of notes). C.A.R.M.E.N. is still somewhat of a priority, though it’s more like a wheneveryouhavethetime-priority rather than priority-priority.
And that’s about it. Basically, as all things go – work hard, post whenever possible, slowly churn out content. 2018 was somewhat of a revival for me, both in terms of game-design and just content production in general. It took the better part of the year to shift focus from work (actual work) to this, but now that I have, I can only hope to stay on track and turn 2019 into a really productive year. I’m not big on the whole “new year’s resolutions” thing, neither do I believe that somehow the calendar turning over a page changes anything, but there is a certain momentum from the past couple of months of productivity which I’m going to try to ride.
