Posted April 09, 2019 by Law C. Esper
#beta #dev's thoughts
Well, after some project reorganization and some late-night thinking, I've decided that the development process I originally had in mind is going to change quite a bit. That means that the road to beta just got a whole lot shorter!
The current plans for the game are to stop adding new chapters and concepts, first and foremost. I'll focus on finishing the reworks and incomplete segments that the game has right now so I can have a complete Core Rulebook containing all of the basic rules and subsystems you're gonna need to play the game in its full extent, and once I move onto Beta i'll focus on polishing up smaller things - small rules and numbers thar require tweaking rather than full-on reworks of how the game works at its core.
As of right now, the three biggest things that need to be sorted out before Beta are the following:
These three are the major bits that need to be finished before moving onto beta and working on tweaking numbers and polishing the game itself. Once those are done, it's off to beta!
Once having made the jump from Alpha to Beta, I'll release an open playtest Beta version here, and my publisher, Stormforge Productions, will be setting up a Beta version in DriveThruRPG. What's gonna be different from the current model? Well first of all expect a print-friendly version to be put up alongside the darker palette made for screens, and probably expect the placeholders to leave the doc as well.
After that, expect some minor balance updates throughout the lifetime of the beta, mostly in the same vein as the alpha updates that i've referred to as "cleanup updates". During the beta testing period, I'll be focusing on smoothing out the rough edges that the game has, as well as cleaning up the presentation of the game itself. I'll be getting in touch with some artists, and I'll be working on the art myself as well.
Then... I dunno, only time will tell. But hey, those are the current plans right now.
[Whistles] I don't know what you're talking about.
In all seriousness, the content that's being left out was planned from the start, but it's a bit too big to continue delaying the main game's wrap-up and release. In any case, missing content will not go missing for a long time, but it won't be a part of the core rulebook, and will instead be released in a series of Sourcebooks that can be used alongside Core to expand upon the experience.
There are three big things that I really wanted to make, but that fall on the "would be nice to have" category, and won't be making it to the final cut of the core book, instead being released in their own separate sourcebooks:
That's all I have to say for today. Tune in for updates, and remember to join the development discord!