All Quiet on the Honian Front

Greetings friends!

It's been a while since my last post and for that I need to apologise. Due to a viral attack, lack of sleep and a heatwave I haven't had the energy to open my eyes most of the time, never mind post a blog.

So you are probably wondering where we are, right?

Well where we left off we had just released the V0.1.6.2 rules pack.

Since then we have been redoing the scenario missions, including scrapping most of them entirely with new ones, like Assault of Precinct 313. It was fun but just really work in its current form. We also merged some together, like Domination and Double Domination are now a single scenario.

We have made the occasional tweak here and there, to a stay here and there, nothing ground breaking. The main thing however has been three fold:

1). Adobe inDesign
My collaborator; Tom has been most kind and during my bout of pure lethargy, taken the reigns and converted what was a .doc file into the publishing software inDesign. I don't know how much of what has been done can be safely released to you Joe Public, but it looks good! The layout, graphical style, etc, it looks like something that I myself if it were in hard copy form would happily pay real money for.

2). Tidying Up
So with the import into inDesign, that seemed the perfect opportunity to streamline a lot of things, go over a lot of it and tweak to make it flow better, sound better and correct typos and inconsistencies.

What we're looking at here is less raw game design, but more tidying the whole thing up and what I would call 'the boring but necessary stuff'. Remember, with the release of 0.1.6.2 we basically finished the core pack and now need to tighten up the screws and make sure what framework we have created is strong enough to support the weight of others.

3). Lastly and possibly most interesting is a bit of work on Book 2. I can't reveal much about this, but it will allow you to take your gang/troop/force into a very different game and compete for their lives against a truly inhuman foe. Tied in with this has been numerous discussions over how things need to be handled; like progression of our named Mercs. We have already read about some in the short stories like Jinn and Karus who will be recruitable special characters, but we had to look at how stories evolve characters. This raised questions on how should the characters be reflected? Should our Mercs be stagnant and unchanging, or should they get new profiles as the story/books are produced, and how should players determine which to use? All of this has been engaged in depth, and I am super excited to reveal all this in time.

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I have also appeared on the Flock 'n' Awe podcast where I had a good 2hr interview about the game, and I have been trying to get a little painting done all the while indulging in videogame bliss and trying to grab as many hours sleep as possible.

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So that's the current state.

Yes everything is quiet on the Honian front, but do not think we are sitting on lorals. Far from it.

Anyway, I need to grab more of that before mentioned sleep, and so until next time; stay safe and be excellent to each other!

- Your friendly neighbourhood Doctor Loxley