Saturday, August 20, 2011

A Crisis of Development

I really need to update this more often.  Maybe if I, like, post some art at least once a week or something, to enforce a regular update schedule.  Not to mention get up to speed on drawing again.  And it's not like this game development stuff isn't in need of illustrations...

Anyhow.  Meat of the post.  Still no real updates on DitS as far as general development, beyond some bits of a setting.  More on that later, as I should drop the bombs first.  I may put DitS on indefinite hold (well, after a few last checks and fixes) so that I may work on it's bigger sister project focused on more general mecha musume/cyborg girls and such.  Chances are, most of what I have will end up a portion of the greater work anyway, so I do sometimes wonder why not?  Main reasons are actually more those of fluff, as a way to dodge some inexplicable negative stigma attached by a doubtless small yet annoying vocal minority.  It's like if you admit to liking Strike Witches or anything to do with it on the internet, you're officially weird or some shit.  But, I digress.  Another motivation for the change is that starting (kind of0 from scratch and a more general approach than "everyone files, always" will make it a bit easier on cooking up the fluff side of the game, which DitS currently lacks pretty much completely, which makes it a bit "weak" as a coherent project.

And, speaking of fluff, there's been some vague work toward it.  Mostly, it's not much so far, just a framework from which to develop things further.  I'm not the best nor most creative writer, and I tend to forget to get into big discussions on this stuff to get help from friends.  What I've got is the following: a not-Earth alternate world map, because those are fun, combined with a "nations of hats" (warning, link is to TV tropes) idea.  So, there's the GRIMDARK country, and the fairly normal/modern country or region full of infighting, and the happy magical pseudo-utopia county, and the giant technologically-advanced country that's a megacorp which bought out its own sovereignty, and so-on.  This allows for characters to have unique bits of background, possibly including an influence on crunch as ell as fluff.  It also lets GMs select a specific setting location to focus on what kind of tone they want to convey.  Or...something. 

There's also been some talk about multiple character origins or natures beyond nationality.  Possibly, this will relate to things like whether one is wearing powered armor or is a full-body cyborg, or other such things, but I honestly kind of dislike this rout, as it may invite too many rules exceptions or changes.  To make a parallel to old White Wolf games, I'd rather it be more like Tribe/Auspice from Werewolf or the like, than something where character A is an unmodified human, so all these rules should work differently to reflect that, and Character B is the default cyborg.  At most, any of the various background bits shouldn't do much more than modify a few attributes up and down and/or provide a couple of other minor bonuses and penalties.  That's about it, though.  I will say that it also kind of gets in the way of one major/defining quality I want to add to the setting as a whole: the modification of the human body with heavy cybernetics is widely portrayed as somewhat distasteful, and the unaltered human body is uplifted as an ideal, particularly in propaganda or within the military units composed of cyborgs.  I'm not sure why, but the idea just seems fun, if maybe a bit dark.  But, it leads to things like a justification of slightly non-human qualities in most PCs, and a sort of motivation or two.  If you survive through your term of service, you can get a much more lifelike body.  Also, talk of making sacrifices to protect others and so-on. 

Tl;dr:
  • DitS may be shelved so I can just focus on a project that's near-identical but bigger in scope; but I'm an indecisive ass.
  • Some rudimentary fluff exists, to go with the rudimentary rules.
  • I might start posting art as a regular update feature, 'cause i need the practice.

2 comments:

  1. Especially art ones.

    And a few goals for how fluff's set up makes for a good starting point too.

    ReplyDelete