Hi! Here's a quick progress report, by request, on what's working its way through the Nodeka creation pipeline and how far it's gotten.
Last week, I inquired if anyone talented with the pen would be interested in helping me out with room/mob descriptions (one of the bigger "busywork" obstacles for me in releasing an area, as it tends to take me a long time to tweak these). Several people responded (and thank you all for your willingness!); one of those players is now helping me with the Fields of Guidance descriptions and should get back to me this weekend. Once I manage to integrate those, the Fields should be just about releasable.
For the rest of the players who responded, I may be tapping your talent in the future given the numerous areas I have in the pipeline; I'll work it out via e-mail when the time comes, and thanks again! =)
In the meantime, I've been working out the details of a certain new in-game system which underlies a lot of the new content. One of the challenges in designing new content is the reward aspect - once the "new toy" sheen wears off, how do you keep this content relevant to the players? The current setup of the Ruushi Invasion is a good example of a failure on my part to set up a compelling reward system (compounded by the fact that numbers correlate to success in the current setup, exaggerating the inertia of increase/decline in participants). This is a mistake I don't want to make with the future content, and so I'm cleaning up this particular in-game system to interlock with the next few areas' reward structures.
What is this in-game system precisely? I'll talk about it more next week, hopefully after the Fields of Guidance have been released. For now, I'll just leave you with this indecipherable gibberish: ra znv yd sji. =)
