Plans for the week of 7/21/13

Well, it's the last day of my weekend, and things look a bit different around here. Plans for the next week -

• Finish the Mister 880 quest for In the Cold Light of Day: Edgehill in preparation for the second playtest (can't wait!) on the 25th.
• Write the Prologue for ICLD.
• As per testing feedback, make extreme ranges more realistic (i.e. extremely close ranges increase chance to hit). The obvious answer, offering a +1 bonus for each meter a character is closer to another within 5 meters, might be a bit clunky for people without the ability to visualize five-square circles around characters.
• As per feedback on the Reddit thread, make alternate rulesets to speed-up combat gameplay. I'm thinking two different rulesets.
  1. Standard - Action Points-based combat as the game is currently balanced, and
  2. Classic - the standard Move / Attack horsehockey.
  I'll give the players another session with Action Points, then try a Classic session the time after, and see what everyone prefers. I'm extremely hesistant to remove AP, considering it's really what makes the game interesting on a tactical level. The standard move/attack for combat is quite stale.
• Start working on Careers and Backgrounds again. I'm not sure if this - level 0 background story generation - will ever see the light of day. I'll have to take a few hours and come up with a few prototypes.

In the meantime, here's a preview of Mister 880. It's a quest I've been working a while, ever since I picked up the Fallout: New Vegas SDK about four months ago. It's based off the story of Emerich Juettner, a 50's-era counterfeiter who made fake dollar bills to keep himself alive and fed. That hook seemed really intriguing to me, so I decided to transplant it on to the Counterfeiter's Shack in F:NV, which for those of you who've played it know it's simply one of those untold story moments. I ended up getting about 500 lines into the mod before bailing. Still, it was a good learning experience, and there was a good story there, so I'm happy to resurrect it as a sidequest for this adventure.



We'll keep you posted.

Noah