Posted December 20, 2025 by pattern-blue
#journal #development
It’s time to do some actual writing. And if you’ve been reading these dev journals you might have noticed I’m not a particularly good writer. So the plan to combat that is to be very concise with the writing and keep the fluff to the minimum. A lot of worldbuilding, but a little of actual text.
What I need to write listed in no particular order:
The Body of The Letter parametrized for people, places and times.
Key phrases that pairs of nobles use to authenticate. Unique for each pair, it doesn't matter which one is the sender and which is the recipient. If the pair doesn’t have a passphrase defined it defaults to the sender’s house motto.
Information on each of the high houses. The name of the house, province, seat (a fortified estate in the province), estate in the Capital (a manor or palace or something), nobles, seal (shape, motto, color), motto, feuds (list of other houses), alliances (list of other houses)
Are from a noble house, have personal estates, personal seals (personal seals are never used for official house business), military control (yes/no), relationships to other nobles.
List of Rules that the letter needs to satisfy, changes level to level.
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I managed to work out four houses with three members each, just enough info for the initial prototype and started working on the message templates. I’m going to need another section, Court Etiquette; where it’s explained what the proper etiquette for writing letters is. A separate subset of the rules.
Naming things is pretty hard. The only reason I’ve managed to get 4 houses with 3 members each is because I have been thinking about this for a while now. But even with this, there’s a lot of stuff to name, and now that I’m doing it, it seems it’s going to be a much bigger task than I expected.
I’m trying to have the names reflect the world, but I worry a lot on how good I’m doing. Do the names create the associations that I want them to? Is some historical or media context sneaking past me in those names? Are they just plain generic and unremarkable?
I try not to dwell on it too much, it’s already going pretty slow, and it can all be changed later. Maybe I’ll be smarter once I let other people try it out and I get some feedback.
Next time I’m going to continue with the letter templates, then on the Rules and Etiquette sections. I was planning on doing individual Nobles pages as well, but I’m going to skip that for now and reevaluate later. I don’t want to spend too much time writing before I’ve even got a working prototype.