I've just had too much stuff going on recently and it's been slowing down Exoworld's progress somewhat. But I hit a big milestone today.
Exoworld's draft is now over 20,000 words long. That's roughly a quarter of what I expect the final length to be, though I'm suspect that I may have underestimated my 80k initial prediction if I go into the currently planned level of detail for everything.
I'm still really struggling to get through the rules-writing section of the game, which is a problem because it's also the major progress blocker to doing stuff like playtesting which can run sequentially with other development if I get it done.
This week I've been going in and putting some more setting details.
One organizational method that I have been using is to break the setting down into six chunks: Exile's orbit with the Icarus and its moon Jewel, and one additional section for each of the continents.
This is important, because each of these represents a different space to play in with regards to the sort of campaign that players would expect (e.g. the orbital campaign is focused on Exemplar intrigue while a campaign on Umbriel might focus on exploring the wilderness for early settlement detritus or to hunt megafauna).
I want to include them because they give players an idea of what to expect as they play the game, which will also inform some abilities and focuses I put into the mechanics as they develop.
I've also been working on more fiction for the game, which is a painful and drawn-out process even though I like the outcomes. Not sure why it's doing that, especially because this is a setting I swim in like water. I think one problem is that I'm having issues just narrowing things down to the set of outcomes that I want to include and not over-tell the stories.
It's important to remember that they're advertisements for reading further and a way to pique interest, not just a way to convey the universe.
I really hope to have basic character creation done next week, because it's just time to get that in the game. I don't know that I'm going to keep the same system forever, but I'm thinking of doing some exploration and discovery.
One place I might start is to have a hybrid creation/advancement system, where the basic attributes and a couple talents are chosen at the start and then characters apply a couple adjustments from their background (i.e. Exemplar, Original, Spurned, or Reaction).
Then they get an amount of experience based on the experience level of the characters.
The thing I like about this is that it makes the decision making process in character creation more static, with dynamic allotments of concrete values rather than a point-buy system.
This means that you don't have to worry about differences in the scaling rate of investments between creation and advancement, because everyone's going to leave with significant mathematical similarities and you're putting most of the personalization into the development post-character creation.
One thing that I also need to work on is gear.
I've actually got a very simple sketch here, and one thing that's different from other games is how acquisition works. Some gear can't be acquired with money (and I don't even have Exoworld's money figured out yet), but rather it requires certain criteria to be met. This can be as simple as being an Exemplar or as complicated as having a particular historical event in a character's backstory.
One idea that might tie into this is having character creation include a number of elements that are basically pre-baked story pieces, which could be interesting though it's also a lot of work and you need to create probably ten to fifteen distinctive elements for each faction to prevent overlap when you're expecting characters from each background to potentially specialize in any skill-set.
That might be an idea for an expansion content thing, since it's almost certainly beyond the scope of the core rulebook, but if you put it in an expansion then you obviously can't rely on it in your core rulebook.
