Game Diary Summary - July

7/3/2007
I haven't done a lot with the game the last few days: I started writing the actual rules, but that's about it. Kind of feeling burned out at the moment, although I know I will get a second wind soon.

7/5/2007
My creative juices have returned and I've been able to write some starship rules. In many ways, it's a carbon copy of the robots chapter so that helps guide me a lot.

7/10/2007
Good progress over the weekend, although I was too busy with work yesterday to do anything.

7/16/2007
More progress: I'm more than 2/3rds done with the starship construction part of the rules, although I still have the starship combat section to do. I also decided to add a short section at the beginning of the chapter talking about getting a starship and a quick primer on FTL jumps, etc.

7/17/2007
I created drone examples: both combat and scout (light, medium, heavy = 5, 10, & 15 tons respectively). I also wrote some brief rules.

I need to rewrite the Drone skill somewhat to reflect how I implemented drone. Case in point, there's no astroid mining (at least not yet), so there's no mining drones.

7/18/2007
While was working on the rules last night, I came across some documentation I had written for an earlier version of the game. I had totally forgotten about it, but this will be somewhat helpful (ie: save time) since that text has already been written.

As for the rules, I'm nearly done with the construction section. Still need to add the construction examples, the combat section, and the introductory section. Yes, a lot to do!

I'm having a little internal debate about using the term "Mach" for spacecraft speed. Since Mach is the speed of sound and there's no sound in space, this may raise eyebrows. I could simply call it "squares of movement" (ie: the ship has a speed of 6, meaning it can go 6 squares per round). Not sure.

7/19/2007
I think I'm moving the Agility (AGI) value under thrusters instead of hull sizes. If I use the defense formula d20+AGI Mod+Size Mod (which imitates the regular def formula of d20+DEX Mod+Size Mod), then the defender would get a double bonus (both related to its hull size).

I wrote quite a bit for the beginning section of the chapter, detailing interstellar travel options and getting your own ship.

For one of my To Do items, I have "create more Psi abilities." However, I think I'll do the opposite: currently there are 36 combat abilities and nearly 80 psi abilities. This would be fine if psi was a major part of Imperium lore. However, it isn't which makes the number of abilities very lopsided. So, I'm going to combine several Psi abilities (like lesser and greater clairvoyance), which would reduce the total number down to around 50 or so. I still need to add additional non-combat and non-psi abilities, which should even things out better.

7/23/2007
I was out of town over the weekend so I wasn't able to do any work on the game. However, last night I did add in the stuff for the first part of the starships chapter that I had written last week. That takes care of most if not all of the first part of the chapter. The middle part (starship construction) is roughly 75% done. I need to finish up construction, add the examples (most of which are done), and then add the combat section (which should be pretty straight forward).

I've started to outline the combat section: this is more about how I want to organize the info more than actually creating the info.

7/24/2007
I updated the wiki to include information from the Introduction and chapter 1: Characters. I'm including general info without any specifics. As rule of thumb, if the info has actual numbers (stats) then I don't include it on the wiki. I don't want to include too much info otherwise there won't be any reason to buy the rules themselves.

7/25/2007
I began writing the rules for combat based on an outline I made last week.

I've also started to redo some of the Psi abilities now that I've decided to remove some of them. Lastly, I've started looking at the races section of the character chapter in an effort to make them more informative: specifically, the strengths and weaknesses of each race.

7/30/2007
I started creating the tables for the starship construction section. This is very time consuming, but i'm working my way through it.

7/31/2007
While working on the weapons tables for starships, i decided that there needs to be more weapons that cause kinetic damage. Currently there are only two, so I need to add more (maybe another 2). I thought about adding artillery (guns) but they would only have explosive damage so that wouldn't really help (although I might still add it for variety).

New Banner!

I’ve updated the website with a new title and nav banner. The old one was pretty lame so I’m hoping the new one looks better. My overall goal is to redo the whole site or at least the home page so it looks more professional. Unfortunately, I’m not a professional web designer so whatever I come up with tends to look amateurish. I’m also too cheap to have a professional do it since I don’t get any money from the site anyway. Sigh.

Of course my main goal is to finish the role playing game and try to sell that from my site (among other places). Not sure how much, if anything, will come of that, but I’d like to at least try to make money from what I enjoy doing. ;-)

Bundle of Arrows

I was watching Pan’s Labyrinth over the weekend and spotted a symbol on one of the cars: a bundle of five arrows. This perked my interest because I’ve used a bundle of five arrows to symbolize the five royal families (on the Imperium flag). So today I did some research and found some interesting information about it: the symbol on the car in the movie was the so called “yoke and arrows” which was used by the fascists during and after the Spanish Civil war. At this point I grew a little concerned since I didn’t really want the five families to be associated with Fascism. However, I did some additional digging and found that the fascists had taken the symbol from the so-called Catholic Monarchs of Spain. This made me happier since of course the five families are royalty.

So what’s interesting here is that when I first created the symbol for the five families, I don’t think I had any previous knowledge of how this symbol was used in Spain. Yet, I discovered that indeed it had been used, in a very similar fashion as I had done. Not sure what any of this means, but I think it’s interesting.