September has been a bit of a clean-up month, in more ways than one.
I’ve found myself a bit sidetracked into sorting and organizing a pile of older records, sketches, and notes. The genesis of this is the new Sunday Sketch series that I’m doing, as it requires me to scan in my various sketches and doodles. And of course, while I’m doing that, I thought it would be a good idea to at least try to impose some order and file these sketches away. Now, the physical sorting is more or less straightforward, but since I used both sides of every page in the sketchbook, it’s also not quite organized, since on one side is one kind of sketch and on the other is a different kind. Still, scanning them files makes it a lot easier to sort either way, and I don’t anticipate to have to dig into the hard-copies too often once they’re all scanned and filed away. Related thought: OneNote is an AMAZING piece of software.
The turn backlog is getting a lot closer to being done. Another 7-8 turns of backlog got processed, which was enough to get one empire all caught up, and another one within spitting distance. Ended up stopping with the second empire right before a 10 month break point, since that triggers a bunch of additional checks, and the caffeine wasn’t really working that well by then. But I should have THEM done in another week or so, and that means that the deWulf main story will start moving forward again, since then I can do the deWulf turns first. The best way to make sure that you’re not reacting to NPRs, even psychically, is to process your own empire before you do theirs. If anything it affords the NPRs a little help, and since they’re usually constrained in other ways, they can use a bit of cheating to help level the playing field.
In the interim, I did write up some more filler story line stuff for the next month or two. Nothing major, but a nice little side story that will run cleanly in parallel to the main event. I just don’t want to post it all in one go, since it’s realistically spread out over the next two or three in-game months.
No new play testing in September. Unfortunately, my main playtest partner got a job, and now I have to try and wedge in some time between his job, his wife, and some sleep. And his other gaming habits. I really do need to reach out to him and just schedule something.
Finally, while I haven’t gotten much progress on Scenario Book 1, there have been two developments that are worthy of note. The first is that I’ve been informed that one of my bits of commissioned art is in process, so that means I can expect seeing something soon(ish). The second is that I’ve been invited to be one of the playtesters by the Starfire Design Studio! So that means my input may actually have some effect on the future of Starfire, which is pretty awesome! This will probably bite into a bit of my own project time, but I think overall it’s a good trade-off. Of course, I can’t talk about what I’m helping with (NDA’s and all), but I can say I am both impressed and pleased with what I’ve seen.
Finally, September is the one year anniversary of me having started this madness here on my website. I might see about doing some data dumps later in October to talk a little about the ups and downs so far, but I’ll have to see if I can make time for that. It would be, if anything, an amusing little side note 🙂
So, let’s see what October brings!
Dollarton Proxima Shipyards 