Greetings, Wingnuts and Citizens! Time for the Weekly WCRPG Update. My apologies for the posting this as late in the day as I am - it's a holiday here in the States; I slept in...
Well, as those of you who follow my updates are no doubt aware, I haven't given y'all an update for three weeks (and to be completely honest with y'all, if that weren't the case, I'd skipping the one today). The main reason for the extended hiatus is because during the period from August 15th through August 28th, I was not working on Elegy at all. Instead, I was building the initial prototype of a deck-building card game. A local board game cafe holds a Game Developer Day on the final Sunday of each month, and I wanted to have my prototype in a state where it would be playable for that event in the month of August. I chose what is probably the cheapest and yet most stressful method of building a card game prototype - to bisect index cards and create them in hand using pencil. The final product is easily editable, but I honestly can't recommend it to any aspiring game makers, particularly those of you who, like me, have been diagnosed with carpal tunnel syndrome. I did get some good feedback on the prototype and I will be taking some time in the coming month to revise the prototype based on that feedback, but I'm confident that it won't cause as much of a hiatus on the ongoing work on the Elegy project as did this initial prototype construction.
The DBG? It's not even science-fiction; it's about farming. Insert in-universe joke about a fighter pilot trying to become a farmer here.
This past week, with Game Developer Day behind me for another month, I turned my attention back to work on the Elegy campaign. My focus for the week was on the prologue of Chapter 2.2. If y'all will recall, I was in the process of translating the written text into the Kilrathi language, the last bit of work that needed to take place in that Chapter. I had a rough time getting back into the swing of things on Monday. To help, I decided to do some partial translations of the text using blocks that had been reviewed a couple of weeks ago. I think it helped, though in just my afternoon session alone on Monday I identified another twenty reverse terms that needed adding to the lexicon. In fairness, these included some terms such as 'antechamber', 'flight deck' and 'autopilot', concepts I haven't used in the story up to this point. A similar session occurred on Thursday, where the need arose for such words as 'pressure', 'overhead', 'destination' and 'deadpan'. In total, eighteen new terms were generated for the Kilrathi lexicon this past week with twenty terms re-purposed, corresponding to seventy reverse terms. All of these are scheduled to be added to the lexicon when I return to work on Elegy tomorrow. The rest of my time was spent on syntactic reviews of the text. I completed six such reviews on Monday, eleven on Tuesday and ten on Wednesday, which left just one block of text left to do in the first scene of the prologue. I forgot later in the week to do a syntactic review for this single text block, with the end result that I can't say all the reviews are done for the first scene of the prologue this morning. The remaining block segues from the introduction of the characters of Mo and Qith'rakoth to the character of Qith'raklerx and is nine sentences long, with much of that describing the garb of a Sivaran priestess (which was mainly for the sake of those who never played Secret Missions 2) and giving a physical description of the character of Qith'raklerx. She's the only character of which I've given a specific description in the text so far and I'm still not convinced it's the best of ideas given that she's meant to be a player character, but I'm hesitant to change up the text at this point. Another ten blocks in the second scene were reviewed on Thursday, and two blocks were reviewed on Friday. Friday's apparent lack of progress can be attributed to the size of the text blocks involved and what was going on in them - a lot of describing the conference arena, who was there, where they were sitting and how they appeared to Bloodeye. As of this morning, seven blocks of translation are complete in Chapter 2.2 with syntactic reviews completed for fifty two other text blocks. Another 96 text blocks have yet to see any work, so I definitely will be working in this Chapter for the next several weeks at least.
My Plan for the coming week is to continue the translation work in Chapter 2.2. I still have Chapter 2.3 on my radar, and I still have the same set of tasks to do there - finish building the Demon's Eye base statistics, begin mocking up battle maps, and slicing the Chapter's plot some more. I don't anticipate getting into Chapter 2.3 this coming week, but it's possible. I will be making a rather significant transition at my workplace over the course of this coming month; by the first of next month, I should still be an employee of the University of Oklahoma Libraries but I will - after eleven years - no longer be working regularly at Bizzell Memorial Library on the main University campus. Let's just say "that's progress for you" and leave it at that. During the transitional period I may find myself with additional amounts of free time on my hands as my regular work is placed on hiatus and the process of moving my office begins. If so, I hope to be able to use some of that time to work on Elegy. Cross my fingers that the moving process won't cut into the time instead...
Well, that's all I've got for this update. The next scheduled update will post to the WCRPG site and CIC forums sometime between 11-14Z on Monday, September 12th. Y'all have a pleasant week.