Successful streamlining

I think I got TtSR figured out - the harvesters move automatically after every player turn like before (though with a simpler movement path with fewer decision points), and the fighters start in the middle of the board but don't get automatic moves unless a player ends their turn in an adjacent space.

I did a solo test today with this, plus a simplified decision tree for which AI deck to draw from for the aliens, plus tech advancement being based on shooting down alien ships instead of spending actions and energy (these were both suggestions from players in last week's test game).  To really stress test it, I used all five player factions, which I haven't done before.  And it worked.  There was a lot less work at the end of each player turn, but the aliens still felt threatening since they were hovering in the middle of the board instead of all the way back by the mothership.  There were tough decisions around what "players" should do at different times because addressing one threat would mean letting another one go, and around what order the players should go in so the aliens wouldn't be playing a long string of Attack cards at the end of the round (which hurt a lot when it did happen).  And there were interesting opportunities to strategize around the new rules, like when I was able to pull a lone fighter into a ridiculous trap.  The game ended with a human victory after four full rounds, which felt like enough.  During that time there were enough ups and downs that it felt tense more often than not and the victory felt well earned.  So yeah, I'm pretty happy with the core structure of the game now.

I still have a lot of fine tuning to do though.  Biggest things that stood out to me today were that I don't love the current rule for how the mothership defends itself from attacks, and I need to change how random direction of movement gets decided (at least rearranging the icons on the board that I'm currently using, but maybe I'll even think of something better than that).  Probably also going to want to make some more tweaks to the tech options.  And I'll see what else pops out at me with further testing with other people.  But for now I think I'm in a good place to commit to making a physical copy, as soon as I update the image files to match what I did today.  PAXU is only 14½ weeks away...

Back in action (kind of)

Finally got Tonight the Stars Revolt in shape for another public playtest, after several rounds of solo testing and various revisions coming off of that.  Overall reaction was positive, but I couldn't get into the specifics as much as I wanted because all of the between-turn maintenance slowed it down and we only got through two full rounds of play.  So that's definitely one thing for me to work on next, is finding ways to streamline that without losing the sense of threat.  The other big challenge, also connected with between-turn maintenance, is that the action economy is pretty lopsided and it forces the players to be on defense pretty much constantly, while the theme of the game (and also the victory condition) is really crying out for them to be on offense more.

Something that I noticed in solo testing, and which also came up in today's test, is that there are a lot of cool tech upgrades and never enough time to get more than one or maybe two of them.  One of the players had a cool idea though - upgrades are earned by shooting down alien ships instead of by spending energy and action points.  I love this idea, I think it'll work well to reduce some of those opportunity costs and actually allow the players to be more aggressive.  It feels a little more video gamey, but I'm okay with that; there's no attempt at even faux-realism in this game.  Now I just need to work out the details of how to implement it.

And then maybe I can get one more test in if I move quickly on this, and then it's time to commit it to hard copy for Unpub at PAXU... 

TtSR: recent updates

I've been making incremental changes and then solo testing for Tonight the Stars Revolt! over the last few weeks.  It took me this long to get around to it because one of the changes I needed to make (again) was to the board layout, and for some reason I find that one to be a big barrier for me.  And I'm just solo testing for now because I want the game to be more clearly improved before I bring it out to a group again.  I do feel confident that I'm moving in the right direction, though it's still tough to find the right balance.  In today's test I had a few turns where the aliens did feel more threatening without it being a quick sweep like I've run into before, but also they were tough enough that the game dragged longer than it should have.  I've also found that the AI system is not as smart as I'd like, since it responds to player actions but not to board states (for example, making a decision based on players attacking alien ships without caring how many alien ships are left on the board after that attack).  I can't get too detailed with this because that will bog the game down more than I want, but I do want to mess around with it at least to some extent.  There were also a couple of turns where, by coincidence, it felt like the AI was getting more cunning as the game went on, so I want to see if I can make that happen by design in the future.

TTSR playtest report

Finally got to bring Tonight the Stars Revolt! to another playtest with other people besides myself.  Maybe I swung too hard the other way on adjusting the difficulty, or maybe I just suck at strategy during solo testing, but either way they destroyed the mothership with very little difficulty in only a few rounds.  Biggest points of feedback were that the combat dice are an improvement over the static numbers from before but should have more options for using the "special" faces, and that I should streamline the alien stuff so there's less effort involved in managing their actions.  I also want to make some more changes to the board, which... I don't know, for some reason that particular task feels really hard for me to do even half-competently.  Still gonna do it if it needs to get done, I just probably need to plan more ahead of time for how I should even approach it to get what I want.

TTSR - some serious overcorrecting

Made some updates to Tonight the Stars Revolt based on the playtest a couple weeks ago.  Biggest thing is that combat is based on dice now instead of flat numbers.  Besides just generally making combat more unpredictable (and hopefully more exciting as a result), this is giving me another tool to work with for interesting options over the course of the game - the dice have a couple of "special" sides that normally don't do anything, but can have different effects depending on tech upgrades that you might get over the course of the game.  And of course the aliens will be able to take advantage of those as well, though that will likely be single-turn effects based on the AI cards rather than permanent upgrades like with player tech.

The other big change was making the aliens more aggressive.   In my test a couple of weeks ago they mostly just sat there and let the players shoot them, so the new rule I put in was that all alien ships move after each player turn, or attack if they are already in the same space as player ships.  And wow did this turn out to be too much.  I ran a solo test just now to see how the updates worked out, and the result with this one was that it felt like an overwhelming Zerg rush before the humans even had a chance to get ready.  Granted, this could be mitigated to some extent by letting players start with more ships on the board, and by making the board itself bigger so it takes longer for ships to reach each other (I probably will do this eventually, but it's a lower-priority change right now).  But even so, it felt like a lot of extra work to move every alien ship every turn, it made the AI cards feel a lot less important, and I didn't love the feeling when, through a combination of horde tactics and bad dice luck, the aliens had wiped out two out of three human fleets by the end of two rounds.  So I'm going to be scaling this one back for next time - maybe just automatic movement at the beginning of the aliens' turn, before revealing AI cards, rather than after every single player turn.  Hopefully that strikes the right balance.

But despite all that it still feels like this game is moving in the right direction overall.  I don't know if I'll have it ready for any of the usual design competitions when it's time for them (I'm already missing Cardboard Edison as we speak) but I'm feeling pretty good about what I might be bringing with me to PAX Unplugged next year.

ADDENDUM: and after another day of thinking about how to use those dice, I have now changed the system for tech upgrades, with some common ones that anyone can buy and also some unique ones for each player.  Hopefully they're relatively balanced against each other.  Now I need to update some of the AI cards like I mentioned earlier, and then we'll see how the next playtest goes... 

The Sorcerer's Apocalypse

Got inspired for something new this weekend, was hoping it would be one of those things that I could blast through in the span of a good weekend but I was also fighting off a cold so that slowed me down.  So now I have a rough outline of a new RPG setting, and maybe enough of the details figured out, but definitely still a lot of actual writing to do.

The Sorcerer's Apocalypse is set in present-day Earth, except that magic suddenly appeared one day and now we are in the middle of the whole world falling apart as everyone struggles to deal with this.  There's random wild magic happening everywhere, and also some people have developed the ability to use magic but haven't yet figured out how to control it very well.  The PCs are all new magic users and are working to help their communities survive through the current chaos while trying to control their new powers and keeping themselves safe from the various anti-magic factions around them.

Probably no surprise to anyone, I'm doing this in Fate (although the full system this time, rather than Accelerated Edition).  Current plan for working magic into the rules is to add it as its own skill, which everyone has at 0 at the start of the game, and also that everyone has to take an Aspect that describes what kind of magic they can do (and gives an idea of what kinds of unwanted effects they'll get on a compel).  Still need to reread the relevant Fate materials to see what other ideas this might give me.

So that's that in a nutshell.  I'm aiming for the finished product to be 5-10 pages.  Might be done in a month, realistically?  Of course I'll post again here when it's up on DriveThru. 

TTSR - first playtest

Had my first open playtest today for Tonight the Stars Revolt!  It went about as well as could be expected, by which I mean the players liked the theme and the overall structure of it, and gave me lots and lots and lots of feedback on things to improve for next time.  My biggest concern was the combat system, which is currently pretty flat and really was just a placeholder for initial testing anyway.  Players agreed that it wasn't great, gave me some suggestions for other games to look at for ideas, and that was as far as that went so it's pretty much all "TBD" at the moment.  My initial idea is to add randomization on top of the combat stats for the different ships, but I'll check out the other suggested games before I really get to work on anything.

Ooh, maybe cards for special maneuvers in combat.  And the aliens would get something similar, with more cards added or removed from that deck based on what players do.  Actually, maybe that idea should add onto (or completely replace?) the current AI system as a whole.  This will need further consideration...

Yeah, the enemy AI system, that was my other main focus.  In principle it worked well - they liked the setup with the three different decks of cards and with the players' actions determining which deck the aliens would draw from, and they used that as part of the strategizing on their turns, which was exactly one of my design goals for the game.  But it actually worked too well in that regard, and the aliens wound up being very passive in this playthrough, which is the opposite of how it should go (and very different from what I got in my last solo test, but then I was also playing it pretty differently from how the other people were today - which of course is part of why testing with a group is so important).  So whatever I do to revise the AI system, it will need to be a lot more aggressive overall.

Those are the main things I'll be focusing on for the next round(s) of revisions.  Other things that came up today were giving players more control over what tech upgrades they get (maybe even have whole tech trees?) and having more ways for them to interact meaningfully with each other.  I definitely do want to address both of those, but for right now they feel like lower priority compared to combat and enemy AI, so they're going to have to wait for a bit.

Hang on to tomorrow, because tonight...

 It's been a few more rounds of tinkering, solo testing, and tinkering some more, but I think I got Tonight the Stars Revolt! up to where I want it - ready to start testing with other people.  Solo testing with the current iteration felt suitably tense, with a lot of back-and-forth swings between the humans or the aliens having the upper hand, and that was very much how I want it to feel.  There's still a lot to figure out, most notably whether combat is going to be based on static numbers or if there will be any randomization, but that's what further testing is for.  At least now I got it up to where I can start doing that, maybe as soon as next weekend.

I'm back, and with even more lasers...

That hiatus over the last few months was good for me, but I am definitely back now.  Today I did my first barely-even-alpha solo test for a new board game, Tonight the Stars Revolt!  The premise of the game is that a number of human-occupied space stations around a trinary star system were being forced to gather energy from the stars for the benefit of their alien overlords, but now they are fighting back.  It's a co-op game with all of the players working together against the aliens, trying to destroy their mothership before the aliens have collected too much solar energy.  The goal is to have lots of high-speed space combat, multiple problems on the board that need to be addressed at any given time (kind of like X-Com, now that I think of it), and an interesting AI system for the aliens.  There's still a lot for me to figure out, but I think I'm at least on the right track here.  And I like what I have so far for the AI, that it uses three different decks, which are weighted toward different types of actions, and the decision of which deck to use depends on the player action to which it is responding.  Ideally I'd like to get it to a point where players can strategize around which deck they want the aliens to use (or avoid), and have that be a meaningful decision.

There's still a lot of work to do before this one is even ready for testing with other people, but it does already feel like there is a real game here (much more so than what I got with Scales).  And more importantly, it's gotten me excited to get working on games again. 

minor update (but yes I'm still here)

I know things have slowed down lately with the game design stuff while I work on some other projects.  But I did knock out one big task today, which was finally giving the Werewolves of London rulebook a proper update instead of just having all the changes scattered among my playtest notes.  And that means that I'm now ready to submit it to this year's Hippodice competition!  And then to some publishers after that's over.  So let's see what happens with that in the near future...

Scales - stepping back

After a few more weeks of beating my head against the Scales rules, trying to find a way to make this game work, I've decided it's time to set it aside.  I might come back to it eventually - at the very least, I would hate to let all those band name puns go to waste.  But I definitely need a break from it for now.

Which means I do get to put my real focus on another project that's been hovering on the periphery for a while.  I'll explain that one in the future post, hopefully with some more things figured out that I can include there.  For now I'll just say that this one is probably going to be around the same weight as Explorers of Legend, give or take a bit.  I'm a little disappointed that this means I pretty much definitely won't have an almost-ready game to bring to PAX Unplugged this year, but that's alright.  It's going to be that much more exciting if/when I do have it more or less complete.

Roll the World is now live on DriveThruRPG

All done and ready for public consumption: 

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/527945/roll-the-world 

Distraction done (for now)

In the last post I mentioned a new thing I was playing with, a system of random tables to generate a setting for a fantasy campaign.  Rough draft is now complete and available here.  Here's an example of what it can create:

The region where this hypothetical campaign is set is the western half of a continent, with two large islands close enough to be part of the same region.  The climate is hot and dry, with little seasonal variation.  Despite that, much of the region is dense with plants that have evolved to live with minimal water.  A long range of low hills separates it from the rest of the continent.  Two major rivers do flow from the hills down to the coast, and there are two lakes as well - most of the plant life is probably concentrated around there, but there could be patches that spread out well past where one might expect.  Up in the hills, at the sources for the rivers, it's surprisingly cold, and the rivers are even icy in places.

[if I was actually going to run a campaign here then this would be the part where I draw a map, but I don't feel like spending the extra time on that just for this blog post]

Magic is rarer in this setting than in the default for whatever game system we might be playing.   Using magic requires a physical implement - right now I'm thinking stones with runes carved in them sounds like a good default, but different styles of magic might have their own preferences.

"Civilization" has only begun in the past few generations [author note - taken together with everything else we've rolled so far, I'm getting heavy Ur/Sumer vibes, so that would be something to lean on later - but let's see what else the dice give us].  At this point there is one cultural group that has developed to be the major power in the region; if I was putting them on the map they would almost definitely be on the coast, with their capital at the mouth of one of the two big rivers.  There are also three minor powers to place on the map.  Given this setup, most of it will probably still be unclaimed wilderness.

If I was planning a real campaign I would probably do some rolls to define all four of the states that I've placed, but for this example I'm only going to roll up the one major power.  The process for the minor powers would be the same, some things just might be interpreted differently to keep in mind the relative power levels.  Anyway, for our one major player, they have the one large capital city, no other cities of note, and two large wilderness zones within their claimed borders.  It was established when rival tribes along the coast were forced to pool their resources to get through a particularly difficult year, and recognized the possibilities if they continued this way instead of splitting up again.  It is ruled by a parliament in which each member chooses their own successor before retiring.  Let's call it the Council of Masters, and say it's 50 members who each serve for however long they want (with 5-10 years being average) and an expectation that they will return to their original line of work afterward.  At this moment, the Council is not perfect but they are mostly focused on benefiting the whole country.  Or at least benefiting their city and also trying to keep the more distant settlements safe.  However, only a couple decades ago the Council tended to be a lot more selfish, keeping more resources for the city (or for themselves) and slowing development further out.

 

Technological development is about the same in this country as in the rest of the region.  Most neighborhoods in the city have a variety of workers who complement each other; originally this was an organic development, but more recently the Council has been incorporating this into city planning as they strive to maximize worker efficiency.   Manpower and raw materials are plentiful, particularly clay and stone for building.  There is no central institution for knowledge or culture; that's probably been a non-issue for most of the country's brief history so far, but they're now getting to a point where people are starting to feel it. 

 

The culture is fairly homogeneous.  They're not hostile to outsiders, there just aren't many people traveling the continent right now (although traders sailing along the coast would certainly be a thing).  They value hard work and religious observance, and for the most part they're not fond of people trying too hard to be clever.  Their religion is animistic.  Most of the magic that anyone here knows how to do (and there aren't many who know how to do it) involves bargaining with spirits.  Contact with certain spirits is strongly discouraged, based on legends passed down from early tribal history; whether or not those spirits are actually as dangerous as everyone is told remains to be seen.

 

There are three factions of note in this country:

• The burgeoning class of professional warriors, looking for ways to keep a comfortable income flowing when there is no war at the moment
• Several pirate gangs disrupting coastal trade and fighting with each other as well - one of them is clearly in the lead and working to put down the rest
• Descendants of one of the old tribes who argue that they are underrepresented on the Council

At present, the Council of Masters does not look too kindly on either the warriors or the pirates, but does not consider either faction to be a serious problem just yet.  They are sympathetic to the one tribal group, and several Council members have been actively working with them on identifying suitable candidates.  However, some members of that tribal group have also worked their way into both the warrior class and the leading pirate gang, looking to use either (or both) as leverage if they feel it's needed.  And the warriors and pirates seem suspiciously okay with each other...

 

---------

Okay, yeah, I could definitely run a campaign of something or other in this setting.  I should also point out that not everything presented here is in the order that I rolled it; some information got moved around based on where it fit better in the narrative.  But all of it does come from the random tables, with me just adding a few details here and there to turn the prompts into something coherent.

 

So that's that for now.   I'm giving it some time for people to review the draft and maybe suggest more content, and then eventually I'll pretty it up and post it on DriveThru and/or Itch.  I'm in no rush for that though.

A small update for Scales, and a... [rolls dice] small update on something else

Doing a lot of pondering about Scales since the last playtest, and I think I've figured out the core change I need to make.  Instead of my original (admittedly bland) system of adding points to stats and then comparing with a target, I'm moving to a set collection mechanic.  I don't have the details worked out yet, but what I have in mind so far is that each skill from the first draft of the game is now essentially a suit in a deck of cards, and players need to first collect sets to build their individual skills, then contribute cards from completed sets to the band skills.  I'll need to add meaningful ways for players to interact with each other, and I think I want there to also be an engine building aspect.  And of course there's still the whole "what about dragons?" thing from my last post which I haven't figured out yet, but I hope you'll agree that it makes sense to get a better feel for my core mechanics first before I determine how different aspects of the theme can interact with that.  So that's all still in progress.  But it is at least still actually in progress.

And in other news, I recently started listening to a worldbuilding podcast called Mythtakes Happen, and that inspired me to start writing up my own worldbuilding tool.  My goal is for a glorious, lifepathy set of random tables to give all your dice a workout and end up with a fairly well sketched out game setting.  Definitely more involved than my Lazy Culture Generator, almost definitely less involved than the old Central Casting character lifepath books that are another major inspiration for this project.  I know that other games already exist that include something like this, but none of them have it at the level that I want, so I might as well make my own attempt.  I'm still outlining it right now and listing what tables I need to create for this in order to cover physical geography, how magic works in the system, significant history, and current nations and cultures.  Filling in more specific ideas as I have them, which is very scattershot right now, just enough to help me organize, remember what I want in each section, and maybe spur ideas for what else to add.  I will say that I've already had some fun just with the bit for generating factions within a nation - what I have right now is that for each faction you roll for what group they come from (e.g. ruling class, trade guild, religious sect, etc), what their main goal is, and their relationships with each other faction, and just rolling those things for three factions, with no other context established, already gave me some serious fodder for a campaign set in that otherwise undefined country.  So I think I'm going in the right direction with this.

And yeah, I guess I should specify that what I'm working on right now is only for fantasy settings, and is system agnostic.  Maybe if this goes well I'll write similar ones in the future for other settings, but that'll be for another time.

Scales: I thought you said this game was about dragons?

Had a Scales playtest today, with more complete rules than last time but still feeling very first draft.  Got lots of good feedback on different ways to go with the mechanics, but this one hit me the hardest - if the game pitch says that it's about dragons learning to play instruments, then why don't they do anything draconic in the game?  You'd think I would have seen that one coming after my early tests with Werewolves where players complained that they weren't doing anything wolfy.  And this comment is 100% correct.  If the game is going to be about dragons, then there should be something in it (besides just artwork) so it feels like you are playing as dragons and not just generic characters.  Magic, or breath weapons, or flying, or... something.

So what is that going to look like?  No idea yet.  Playtest just finished a few minutes ago, I need time to digest everything.  Hopefully my next post here will be to announce that I've figured it out (and maybe sooner than another month?).

Werewolves of London: what's all this then?

In my last WoL-related post I mentioned changing how police work.  Today I finally got to test out the new system, and it was almost a hit.  It started off slow, but by the end of the game the police were blocking off a good portion of the board.  Test players said they liked how this forced us into more conflict, and how it helped with balance (Mayfair isn't nearly as valuable if you can't actually cash out your investments).  The remaining flaw was that the bribe rules were just a slight tweak off of what I had before, when the threat of mutual annihilation meant that everyone had a reason to contribute to paying off the police.  With that threat gone, today's players felt like there was no reason for them to spend their own hard-earned money for something that might only benefit their opponents.  So what I'll probably do instead is to have a flat rate that you can pay on your turn to clear the investigation off of a territory of your choice (but you still can't invest money into that territory on that same turn, since the police don't clear off until afterward).

Ooh, and maybe to keep some sense of the "prisoner's dilemma" tension, even if it isn't quite the same anymore, multiple players bribing the police in the same turn will still only clear one territory, chosen randomly between them (or determined by whoever is willing to throw in more money on top of the base price). 

Alright, I guess that's at least one more test I'll need to run before it's ready for pitching...

Scales: sound check

 First playtest for Scales today, just a bare bones setup to make sure the basic mechanics work.  And basically they did.  Players liked the overall system of improving their various musical stats, and the competing needs of solo practice to improve personal stats vs group practice to improve the band's stats.  And the final battle mechanic seemed to work well enough for now at least.  They felt like there wasn't enough information in the game to make meaningful decisions, which is what I expected for this 0.1 alpha test, and we had a good discussion afterward for different features that should help with that.  I especially liked a suggestion they had for adding information - put some of the stat icons on the backs of the opponent cards, indicating what each opponent's strongest and weakest stats are but without saying which is which.

So, next steps for this game:

• Make more opponent cards
• Decide between the suggestion above, or my original idea of letting players reveal the opponent any time they want but that incurs a penalty for the rest of the game (ultimately I should probably test both variants and see what goes better)
• Re-balance the stats for the different instruments
• Come up with characters that have unique abilities (and maybe secondary goals?) so each player can pick one of those to then combine with whichever instrument they choose

Probably going to be a bit before I put all of that together, but we'll see what happens...

Werewolves of London - it's New Scotland Yard now

 The last couple of weekends, I played Werewolves of London with different groups of people in real life (as opposed to my usual online playtests).  One of these games ended with a police-triggered game over, on the final turn of the game.  First time that has happened, and while it wasn't the worst thing in the world I didn't absolutely love that outcome either.  As luck would have it, the person I met with for the other game had some interesting ideas for potential revisions, one of which was a complete revamp of how the police investigation works.  So I took his general idea, and today I worked out the details for it, and here's what I have now:

Instead of the old "if you hit this Meat threshold then the police do stuff," the new system has police doing stuff every turn.  Bribe money prevents them from doing stuff this turn, instead of undoing stuff from previous turns, and there is no more "police catch you, everyone loses" like before.  And now there's variation to what they actually do.  Sometimes it will be locking down random territories like what I already have, and sometimes they will target specific territories based on a game condition like "where there was combat last turn" or "where there is currently the biggest single investment."  I don't know that I have all the details right just yet, but I think this new system has some potential and I'm looking forward to testing it out.

The other thing I learned from these recent games was that the I might need to have a 2-player mode with some rule tweaks.  I think the last time I had a game of Werewolves with only two players was many iterations ago, so the information I got from that is completely obsolete now.  And what I got from this one was that, with only two players, it was a lot harder to mitigate an early imbalance compared to a larger group where multiple players are all messing with each other.  I'm not sure yet what the solution to this could be, but I'm going to wait and see how things go with the new police rules before I work on this.  So in any case that's still a few more test games needed before I start hunting for publishers again.

Too many games, too little time

 Lots going on lately, across multiple games.  Here are the various updates for the last couple weeks:

• Werewolves of London got knocked out of the Cardboard Edison competition, which is not too surprising when they have ~350 games submitted and only take 21 finalists (which I think was still more than they usually do).  But my scores do keep moving up compared with games I've submitted in previous years.  Besides that, the judges who looked at Werewolves were almost unanimous in that they liked the theme, they liked the overall gameplay to the extent that they were able to assess it, but they wanted combat to work differently.  So that's something for me to polish up before I start submitting this one to publishers.
• Dolomball was back on the table today, in a very stripped down form so I can get a better sense of what actually needs to be in the game and what doesn't.  I got some good suggestions for that, and (with encouragement from today's playtesters) I got more comfortable with an idea that I had already been considering - dropping the link to the existing IP and no longer being constrained by trying to fit with how someone else defined their aliens in their game that, honestly, has nothing to do with my game except for my trying to shoehorn it into the same universe.  I definitely appreciate the support that I got from the folks at Galileo Games as I was getting this started, but trying to stick to the Dolomé has definitely let me to make some decisions that have detracted from gameplay, so it's time to let that go.  Which of course means I'm going to have to go through that title change thing again.  But in any case this one is probably going back to the back burner for a while because I also need to talk about...
• Scales - a new game, this time not based on a song title but on a little pun that- I actually don't even remember how it came up.  But someone said the word "scales," and I said "that should be a song about dragons learning to play musical instruments," and now I've got some rules sketched out and a 0.1 alpha prototype almost ready to go.  It's a cooperative game where all of the dragons are not only learning their own instruments but also they're in a band, and the goal is to get good enough to win the battle of the bands at the school talent show.  Once I have the basic materials together I need to get a test game to make sure the core gameplay works, and then I've got some bells and whistles to add, but I'll talk more about those once I know that the game is ready for me to add them (and that that's actually even the direction that it's going).

METAL!

I know, I've been quiet lately, bouncing between game revisions and other non-game things (which therefore don't go on this blog), but I do have one quick bit of news for today:

Neon Knights has hit copper bestseller status on DTRPG!