November draws close, but before October ends, we have Halloween. And to celebrate the last big hurrah of spooky season, we have a special Halloween fiction! Plus, a fiction primer on why people enter the Precipice and a quick update on Open Alpha v1.2 and its adjustment to terrain elements!
Halloween Story: Harness Special Part 1 - The Boar Hunt
To celebrate Halloween, we have a special story. Set in the world of Harness, this tale of chivalry and monsters by horror novelist Ben Lathrop and setting creator Michael Gernes explores a dark fantasy tale set in the kingdom of Occhscien. With period-inspired header art by the amazing Rune Hrafnagaldur, find out what horrors await Ysolt and Lohier in the village beneath shadowed boughs…
Read on in Part I: The Boar Hunt!
Fiction Primer: Reasons to Wager
Our highlight thrills in might take place in the world of Harness this week, but the Precipice itself can be a spooky place, too. Why would you venture into this realm of terrors unknown? Well, several reasons, and in this week’s fiction primer, we explore those reasons. From personal motivations to national interests, find out why people gamble their lives in the place between worlds!
Read on in Fiction Primer: Reasons to Wager.
Open Version 1.2 Status
Open Alpha v1.2 is very close to being ready for release. Truthfully, I’d hoped to have it for today. But when you pull on one thread of a game design, you usually keep finding things to update. Unless a system is truly modular, the connections tend to run deep. In this case, the content for missions and enigmas links closely to terrain and other objects. The more I worked on updating the latter, the more I realized that the former has also been clunking along on outdated ideas for a long time, too.
As you can see, there are some significant changes here. For starters, “terrain elements” are now “features” (covering not just terrain, but also items and other elements in the environment). Further, they now use “stability” instead of “strain,” a much-needed update that cleans some rules interactions with these objects. Finally, features like structures can now degrade before becoming ruined entirely, with their keywords changing as their stability hits certain thresholds. This has proven extremely useful for the “partial certainty” that the new Enigmas table allows, where the first card drawn from a 52-card deck determines the general nature of the object, but important specifics are revealed with the draw of a second card.
Subtler, but equally important, is the fact that objects now have traits (to the right of their size and mass, in italics). These traits are unloaded keywords, meaning they have no intrinsic meaning, but can be called-upon by other game effects. This change is necessary for the updates to missions, allowing different types of features to interact emergently with your mission. For instance, a mission might call upon you to destroy objects with the Structure trait or take and hold objects with the Resource trait.
And that’s an update on where Precipice development is right now. The Open Alpha v1.2 update will be along soon! Stay tuned!