Not Even Resting

Kannagara is not dead. It’s not even resting. It’s just all been happening behind the scenes.

I know I haven’t posted anything to this blog for a long time, but I have been working on the game, along the lines I outlined previously. This has proved difficult.

It took me a while to identify the big problem, but I think I finally have. The structure I was working on was insufficiently modular. That is, it was not possible to make changes to one part of a scenario without changing the rest of the scenario to match, and each part of a scenario depended intimately on all the others. That made it impossible to write anything on a unit smaller than a single scenario.

That would have been bad enough, but as Kannagara is supposed to support long term development and growth, a “single scenario” quickly turned into a whole campaign. Designing something that large, all at once, with new mechanics, proved too difficult. If I can’t do it, then it will be impossible for other people to write for the game, or to design their own home campaigns. That, obviously, is a very bad thing. I had to find a way to make the parts of the game more modular.

I think I have now cracked this problem, at least for investigation and discovery. I have a set of mechanics that looks simple to use, and that will allow me to drop in any number of different things to be discovered. It still covers searching for evidence, and putting that evidence together to make a theory, even if you have some evidence that doesn’t fit. I have a straightforward way to deal with evidence that doesn’t fit, rather than having to design in the interactions between every possible version of the game world. It doesn’t involve complex mathematics, and normal persona statistics should stay in the 1 to 5 range, with 6 and higher for really skilled individuals.

As I have got a set of mechanics together today, tomorrow’s job is going to be putting something in those mechanics, and that something ought to be the first part of the demonstration scenario. If it all works out, I’ll move on to the mechanics for creation, and for interacting with other characters. That should be relatively easy, because I need to keep the same basic mechanical structure for all parts of the game. This is important to keep it easy to play, but also to make it easier to write.

I know this post is a bit vague, but I’m only part way through putting the first bit together. If I make progress tomorrow, I may have something a bit more concrete to post in the next week or so, but as it has been about six months since I updated the development job, I really felt the need to post something. Is my plan to finish something playable this year still realistic? I think so, but I’m not confident yet.