First and foremost, happy New Year, everyone! It has been quite a ride, but hopefully things will be better this year than they were in the last.
December Updates
Work on pitched battles has started. This is the very last piece of the war section. As frequently happens, there's nothing terribly good to show just yet, but here's a teaser:
Also on the agenda was line-fillers. Line-fillers, in a medieval context, are small illustrations placed at the end of a line of text which continue to the right margin. Medieval scribes loved patterns and hated empty space, so this even extended to the ends of lines. More practically, spacing was also a bit different in manuscripts than in modern writing. I've added these to DGR:
I'm currently repurposing some existing icons. However more appropriate art is going to be added before launch; until then I'll keep the setting off for most screenshots. Speaking of which, there will be one more batch of art assets! There are a few more miniatures that need to be added, plus some general decorations like the line-fillers and such. Also I missed the letter 'Æ' (that is, the AE ligature) when I commissioned the first set of art. It turns out that there are still Anglo-Saxons milling about in the 12th century and some of their names start with Æ. I've been writing around this omission thus far, but it would be a lot easier to be able to have that majuscule available.
2020
The game has grown quite a lot over the year. The main accomplishment was most of a war system. In retrospect I should have made that part simpler and more abstract. A province-based map-staring war game delivered via hundreds of narrative events that tie into a simulation of people and kingdoms with a robust peace negotiation system could be a standalone game, at least it could be at indie scale. Regardless, what's done is done. I do think it will be worth it in the end though!
The simulation greatly improved as well, and I finally worked gameplay effects into the economics. Beyond that, a number of smaller changes and tweaks, like the initial-stroke rubrication, were made.
On the whole I'm pleased with the progress. My productivity was greatly reduced this year, but frankly a lot of that is beyond my control. It was a hard year for everyone.
2021
In news simultaneously good and bad, Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex must launch at least by early May. I blew past the first hard deadline of the project last year, and some pain resulted from missing that date. Missing the next hard deadline would be worse. I'm hoping to be able to do a full launch then, but if it comes to it there will be an early access release at that time. Early access for me is like crowd funding: I don't want to be in a position where I disappoint people who have given me money. I very much believe in DGR, but I want to do everything I can to deliver the best possible experience from launch day on.
In other upcoming news, the game dev group of which I am a part is doing its second annual summit on the 16th of January at 3:00 PM EST (20:00 GMT). Since there are still pandemic concerns, this will be an online event that, as I understand it, will be streamed on Twitch. I'll be giving a talk on using floating modules to handle combinatorial explosion in narrative design, dissecting some DGR events as part of the presentation. If you're interested in the nuts and bolts of the game, please feel free to tune in! I'll have more information, including some links, in a future post this month.
What's next
Keep making it until it is done, as a wise person once suggested. It will be a bit tight, but I'm hoping for the best!