Had a frustrating experience at a game shop tonight. I'd just bought the fantasy combat game "Tail Feathers" ( https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame...../tail-feathers ) and brought that, only to have to put it all back away because I'd forgotten one necessary set of cards out of the unreasonable number of doodads and tokens and counters it has. I'm now regretting buying it. (Also because the plastic minis are nicely detailed yet so hard to distinguish that they cry out for detailed painting that I don't have the time and inclination to do.) Afterward, I got three other people to play the pony RPG card game "Buck: Legacy" and had such a bad time we quit and I question whether I'll ever play that one again.

Looking back on my review of "Buck", I did notice some of its problems. It has confusingly written rules with nonsensical or misleading terms, heroes can get KOed by sheer luck before the player has done anything, KOed players get to sit there and watch their friends play, and if you do get the right spells/items it suddenly becomes trivial to be knocked out. What I liked was that sense of "being a fantasy adventurer rather than a collection of stats", and I still agree with that. I also still like the idea that there's an experience in between adventures, so that the life of a hero doesn't consist solely of the dungeon crawling, and dislike that this town experience is basically just an item vending machine. If there's going to be a competitive element it could be done in a way like "Dungeoneer", in which the heroes are cooperative but their players accumulate Bad Stuff points that the other players use against them like a rotating GM.

It seems like there's an undiscovered happy medium in between board gaming, PC gaming, and D&D-style RPGs. Something that takes advantage of players' imagination while providing enough detail that players uncomfortable with freeform have some guidance. Few expensive physical pieces. Simple rules. Something like... the Fate RPG but done with a mostly abstract board and cards and pawns, something like the abstract Piecepack ( https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1639074/piecepack ) system but more thematic. At no point should players be eliminated, co-op or competitive play should be possible, and there should be the chance at a "legacy" game where a group develops its own unique recurring setting.

Edit: Link to the Buck review is https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/17.....und-hooves-fun .

Played two board games tonight and another new one a few weeks ago.
Bloodborne:
The party is a gang of monster hunters. Our designated final boss was an evil spider with the rule, "Any hunter who dies twice is eliminated from the game." This is a game where it's expected that you'll die a lot. You have 8 hit points and monsters can do greatly varying damage; several weapons for the heroes are designed to make your "allies" lose HP too. In our case we got the high side of "greatly varying" and the entire party died on turn 2. Then a few turns later, I misjudged when to rest and took 4 HP damage at once, eliminating me. Well, that was quick!

The Big Book of Madness:
You're students at what is obviously Hogwarts (down to the scarves and fonts) and have foolishly opened one of those cursed tomes. Now you must build up your powers while fending off the monsters' curses. This is a co-op deck-building game in which you start with a specific character aligned with one of the four elements and a slightly themed deck of various element cards rated 1-3 points. You spend these each turn to buy better element cards, or buy spells, or cast spells, or pump energy into defeating the various monster curses (eg. "put 4 Air tokens on this by X time or Bad Thing Y happens"). The spells are interesting things like "spend 1 Water to put a card into reserve for later" or "spend 3 Earth to cause an earthquake that destroys all Madness cards in anyone's reserve pool". Nice use of theming, and the rules encourage you to specialize. I went with being a Water/Air specialist. Still I felt like there could've been a stronger sense of actually doing things, because "I buy a 3-Water card with these 3 points of Water" or "I spend 2 Air to put 2 tokens on that curse card" feels too abstract.

The Madness system is pretty standard deck-building: you get useless cards that get stuck in your deck. Worse, they actually can't leave your hand by default, and a full hand of them kills you off. There are a bunch of powers for either temporarily discarding them, destroying them (better, but depletes a supply that kills everyone if it runs out) or curing them (returning them to the supply). I thought that was a neat idea with various gameplay effects, like using a spell to reset someone's deck without them gaining Madness for shuffling. Unfortunately, destroying cards is really easy with the basic Fire spell and the way we played, there were a ton of Madness cards in the supply, so there was little point in fancy powers for handling them.

Unfortunately we were also playing this the wrong way; the game's owner is someone who doesn't seem to have a good grasp on the rules of her own games. (Imagine what happened when we tried to play "Pandemic" and she insisted on adding the "In the Lab" expansion that makes the cure-seeking process much more complicated.) So we had the curses/monsters advancing once per complete round instead of once per player turn, ie. 1/4 speed, and it was like "Harry Potter" if the villains didn't start showing up until year 3 or so. Still, I enjoyed the sense of building up magic power and specialties. There probably could've been done more with the sense of learning and fighting, partly because fighting monsters consists entirely of filling up the curse cards with tokens. I'd play again with the proper difficulty rules.

Also: Tiny Epic Western:
From the makers of "Tiny Epic Kingdoms", a cleverly designed, small, cheap game I own. In this one you're buying buildings in a tiny (epic) Western town with a "worker placement" mechanic. Meaning, you have 2-3 wooden dudes you can place in various spots to harvest resources or do some other action, based on which site you put them on. The gimmick is that your workers get into gunfights whenever they have to share a space. On one hand you want to pick sites that nobody else wants, to be sure you don't get your dudes shot and their actions negated... but several rules encourage you to pick fights anyway. For one thing, whoever's won the most recent fight at certain points gets free resources. (In contrast, a supposedly pirate-themed game I once played seemed to have no reason for you to ever fight other players.) Then, you spend resources to get buildings. You can only have one usable on your property at a time (the most recent on you bought), and the buildings are themselves sites that your dudes can visit to do things.

This game is a great example of theming. The resources are Gold, Law and Force. The buildings are all things like saloons and telegraph offices. The "dice" are bullet-shaped. Gratuitous gunfights are encouraged. Most interesting is that there are mini-poker cards placed between the buildings, face-down (once we knew what we were doing) and each player has one. The ranks are 1-5 and you form hands in a fashion similar to Texas Hold'em using the cards next to a location you're interacting with. There's a gambling aspect involved in everything you do, from using your cards to gain resources to investing in particular symbols on the buildings you buy, not knowing in advance which will be the most valuable. Yet it's not totally chaotic like Fluxx because you have some sense of who's winning and there's a fairly clear goal. I'd definitely play this again.

The expedition was going poorly due to bad luck. The crew were dispirited and exhausted. Then we reached a village, where the locals attacked us not with spears but with encouraging words and smiles. My crew got cheered up so much they decided to stay for an "indefinite vacation".

On the second attempt, we had much better luck, but I committed a cultural faux pas that I really should've seen coming. (Not a bad random roll, but a bad decision.) At least I got extra supplies out of it. We'd traveled around enough to have multiple encounters with the natives, which gave everybody a boost to their conversation skills. Yvonne had misgivings, though, because I'd stolen a mask and she felt bad about it. When we reached the overly friendly village, this time we dazzled and praised them until the grumpy chieftain gave us a treasure to go away. Winning in a friendly way had different effects than devious or violent approaches would've had. At no point in either attempt had we hit another person, although we severely hurt the feelings of some scorpions.

I have fought hundreds, maybe thousands of fantasy battles where the assumption is that slaughtering all in my path is the only victory. I'd like to go back and try "Fallout 4" again to remind myself that 90% of that world consists of people with names like "RAIDER SCUM" who exist to have their heads blown off. Why haven't games like "Renowned Explorers" (and of course "Undertale") been around for decades?

---

About "The Curious Expedition": I bought this as a bundle with RE. It's on the same exploration theme, to the point of having you do around 5 expeditions and competing with other explorers. (Though RE beats you over the head with the competition part; the villain is a Frenchman named Rivaleux.) "Curious Expedition" uses a hex map where most tiles are empty and the main mechanic is spending time and sanity (!) on movement. Combat is purely dice-based, and I don't think I've ever done more than one point of damage out of 8 or so needed to kill a bear. The goal of every expedition, to anywhere, is to find a golden pyramid. Along the way there's always a temple where taking the treasure sets off a trap that starts destroying nearby tiles. The character skills and interaction seem very basic, eg. I had a guy leave because he's an alcoholic and we ran out of booze. The exploration mostly consists of moving across the empty map, so it doesn't feel like I'm accomplishing much, and the characters don't have specific skills beyond a rare dice-roll mechanic. So, I can't recommend this one as much even though it's superficially very similar.

This novel is about a clan of were-cats in the modern world, who try to kidnap a scientist and steal his research into their "Affliction". The attempted theft is part of a fight between a Polish/North Korean alliance and a Polish-American family, whose daughter Pawly went missing for years and who's just been rescued/kidnapped by her family's friends. The story is advertised as military SF, but the focus is really on the family and friend relationships as the characters converge on the stolen gadget that can help the were-folk.

I had trouble juggling the names of the characters. Sometimes it's simply because of switching between someone's first and last name, as with Manuel Latharo who's called Latharo by the narration until suddenly he's called Manuel, or Natan "Nat" Opoworo and Nikodemos "Niko" Opoworo who are also both called Opoworo. Sometimes it's a character speaking a name with an accent, as with Tommy/Tomasz. On p.130 it's because of a nickname, an actual name change and a similarly named character in the same scene. I had to go back and reread that part before deciding that of four names on the page, Milda, Milena and Lena are one person but Ewelina is another.

The story flips between several viewpoints: Pawly, Hana, Niko, Lenny, Dory, Mawro, Alex, and more. (The fact that these are similar-sounding androgynous syllable pairs is a subtle problem too.) Since their various flashbacks also add a shift of time and place, I sometimes got lost. On p.54 in particular, a flashback is introduced in a park, like so:

"A flicker of light caught his eye. Lenny glanced up to view a bright white void swallow up the children, the playground and everything else before the shock wave slammed into him. He flew over the back of the bench into the air. His arms and legs flailed about until he impacted the bulkhead behind him... he slumped to the deck below."

It's a deliberate attempt to blur my understanding of where and when the scene is happening, as a sort of PTSD effect. It works, and it might be a good thing in a story that doesn't already have an ambitiously large cast. As is, I'm still not sure of the full significance of the "Chah Bahar" battle that was so important to the characters, and was startled late in the story to find that Lenny had gotten this far without knowing Pawly is a were-cat. I mistakenly thought that Pawly vanished for nearly ten years after her first transformation, but instead she got beaten unconscious by her family (to snap her out of her "Rage"), joined the military, and only later vanished after Chah Bahar.

Another moment of puzzlement came in the same chapter as the "Ewelina" bit. The story was following Niko's group meeting new people, and I realized that I wasn't sure where Pawly and Hana were besides that they'd both been seen in the same general forest area. While I was trying to follow what was going on, the story jumped into a multi-scene flashback to a sea battle involving yet other characters. A more important flashback about Pawly's first transformation starts with only a blank line (not the symbol used in some places), fills the rest of Chapter 4, continues into 5, then returns to the present before 6. So, the story rapidly shifts between people and time periods and places without providing clear signposts such as chapters with names or time/place/POV headers.

Now, about the plot. As the back cover explains, there's "a feud between opposing werecat clans... that has raged for years". Late in the story we meet one of these clans, based in a Polish national park. Which is the opposed clan? I'm really not sure, since they were working with the Koreans for a while and Pawly's family expects to be welcome among them. What's the basis for the feud? Well, besides a grudge at centuries of mad scientists hurting the Polish tribe, Hana is angry about her parents having been killed, and Pawly is angry about her father's death. Maybe the opposing clans are Hana and Mawro versus Pawly's also-small family? All of these "Kindred" have a rule, "Harm not the Children of Affliction", but Pawly and Hana repeatedly fight with lethal force. Hana's first reaction to a threat, for instance, is to start chucking poison darts the size of crossbow bolts.

I would like to have seen more about the Kindred themselves, including the Polish tribe. There's some interesting background setting information here about a secretive group of "Afflicted" creatures with an international bond and creed. We don't get to spend significant time learning about them, though. I can't tell you how this "Rage" thing works, for instance.

What is the role of Pawly, shown on the front cover and starring on the back cover? If I unravel it in chronological order: She transformed unexpectedly as a teenager, offstage, and vanished for a while. She's then seen in one scene as a vigilante, but is rescued/kidnapped by her family that wanted her back. She then rides along with her family as they go to Poland, and becomes one of many people trying to guard/capture the box with the science equipment. What major decisions does she make or how does she grow as a person? What does she actually want? Would the main conflict have played out differently without her, since she's not present in most scenes? It seemed like she was a minor character.

What's at stake? Both sides want to conduct research into how this were-cat thing works. The bad guys already have special earrings to help them control their changes, but they're planning to deliver the stolen equipment to North Korea. Some of the support staff behind Hana and Mawro mention "Great Leader", but Hana and Mawro don't seem to care about helping North Korea and are only interested in the feline research. Kim's country doesn't play a role other than to get some American agents involved, on the theory that an advanced gengineering device would be dangerous in Kim's hands. Mawro's stated goal is "the path by which he could set his clan's course right" by researching the transformation. I'm not sure what that path actually *is*, though. There's a mention of the hope that the Polish cats will become able to leave their forest, but really they're capable of that already, especially if they can get the control earrings Mawro already knows how to build. What's the reason behind the whole "Masquerade" of hiding were-cats' existence? Fear on the part of the Poles. Nothing stated for Pawly and Hana's factions. It's the default assumption of an urban fantasy world where such creatures exist, and it's not really justified or questioned here. Both the US and NK governments know about the weres, for instance.

I fear that I've misunderstood the story, and that rereading the whole thing might help. Take my comments on confusion with a grain of salt, because Hurricane Irma and other distractions interrupted my reading. Even so, I rarely have this problem and did make an effort to flip back and reread some parts. I would like to see a revised version of the book that tries to limit the viewpoints, rearrange the flashbacks, indicate where and from what perspective each distinct section/chapter takes place, make it clear what exactly the villains are trying to accomplish, and give Pawly an important role if she's to be the main character.

I'm thinking about another possible Ren'Py experiment in game design. (That's the same engine that the Pha'Ret thing is in.) It looks like there's a market for interactive stories in this "visual novel" format, but with a division between (1) basically pure text, (2) three or more busty anime babes, and (3) remarkably detailed RPG statistics. I wouldn't want to make some excruciatingly complex RPG and shoehorn that into a format meant mainly for conversation trees. On the other paw, I want to see meaningful decisions in a game rather than a story where you read through page after page of text and the only interactivity is that you can request tea versus coffee. And obviously I'm a writer and not a visual artist.

For a second test, I want a scenario with a little conversation in it. I've been thinking in terms of a battle system and a wasteland scavenger scenario (like I built in Twine once). But a "recover from being turned into a centaur by banging around a magic school" scenario might help practice with conversation too.

I've also thought about using Unity for this but that has its own advantages and drawbacks. If what I want is primarily a story then Unity is probably overkill -- but it does allow for some greater flexibility. Ren'Py assumes that the entire game is basically one conversation that might be broken into scenes, rather than a game that has conversations in it.

My goal for this line of thinking is to try using Ren'Py to make a game slightly more complex than "Pha'Ret", featuring conversation, and testing out an unusual type of conversation tree. Probably similar to  skiesofsilver's "First Light Hotel".

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B075PW8VGH/
My new book "Perspective Flip" is on sale! (Cover art by Anatariva, http://www.furaffinity.net/view/24269010/ .)
This story collection is about transformation: people whose species and sex are changed by everything from advanced space colonization technology to a botched deal with the devil. The collection ranges from science fiction to fantasy, from serious to ridiculous, and focuses variously on the transformation itself or its aftermath.
If you're interested in other sorts of transformation, see my book "Mythic Transformations", which is still up for a free preview on Amazon's Kindle Scout site, https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/E4HYC05L3LI8 , where you can nominate it for Amazon to buy the rights. I've also got a kitsune themed story collection early in progress.

https://kindlescout.amazon.com/p/E4HYC05L3LI8
My short story collection "Mythic Transformations" is up on the Kindle Scout system! What this means is that Amazon will consider buying the rights to it. If you nominate the book to get their attention, and they agree, you get a free copy! If they don't, well, you get a total of two e-mails.

If you're interested, please visit the Kindle Scout site, which requires only an Amazon account. On my book's page you can read a 5K-word excerpt and/or click "Nominate", which costs you nothing. Thanks for any support!

I'm looking for suitable art to license for a book of TF+TG stories. The characters include an ottergirl on a magical island, another otter in a high-tech lifepod, and a vixen actress. I was thinking something like http://www.furaffinity.net/view/8053186/ , but it has to be clean. There was one by Angrboda that I liked, a reflection of an ottergirl in a wetsuit in a high-tech room, but it's unlikely that I could license that (it was a commission) and there are other factors involved.

So... Know of anything good? The stories in this collection are somewhat lighthearted but not ridiculous, so I'm looking for something in between toonish and super-serious.

I just finished the first draft of a 12K word Tales story that needs major rethinking. Besides that, I'm not sure what should be next.
-Arms of the Jotun: A little steampunk action story set in 1925 Germany. (I'd like to write something I can try marketing to magazines.)
-The Inward-Facing Dragons; Lifepod: Two more "serious" nonfurry stories.
-Striking Chains: Rewriting a fantasy novel.
-Liberation Game: turning a chunk of a Tales novel (~40K words) into a full novel and incorporating the dangerous robotics and religion themes developed in "Learning To Fly".
-"Burning Forever": A third attempt at this failed Tales story. Not sure what direction I could take it because it involves a complicated messy controversy and my attempt to simplify things turned into "Bad Guy politician is a jerk".
-Another attempt at a TF erotica collection, either a follow-up to the other one (with more variety this time) or focusing on taur TFs.
-Interactive fiction. "Dragon Fate" has mediocre sales so I'm not sure if a big new interactive fiction project like "Island Tail" makes much sense.

Thoughts?

If you're interested in TF+TG stories, you may like the new short story collection "Expecting Fur", now on Amazon. This collection features revised, expanded versions of the stories "On the Edge", "What Happens In Vegas", and "Meet Someone New", along with the longest two stories, the all-new "Mother of Invention" and "Blossom Spa".

Hello! For marketing purposes I'm trying to get up to 10 Amazon reviews on Thousand Tales. If anybody feels motivated, please consider leaving a review of that book. (Reviews welcome for any other book too.) Don't feel compelled to call it a daring thrill ride of epic proportions or tell readers about the astonishing vistas of unforgettably sexy imagery or point out that it should become a big-budget movie starring Matt Damon as a skunktaur.

"Lifepod" is a good example of what I consider a weak story. A guy does some stuff, but there's no larger significance to it. There's also not much conflict for something involving a starship crash. The hero's personality doesn't really change either because there's not much internal conflict. What's there is, "guy is proud in the end that he used his technology to become somewhat independent of tech, because he can catch fish and build an ordinary fire". If I were to play that angle up I'd rewrite the story to emphasize that he's very dependent in the beginning, and terrified of being alone, and makes some kind of moral decision that probably involves the otter TF, changing his attitude toward technology and being a shipwreck survivor. I'd also want actual conflict such as a threat to his omniprinter, so that he might risk his life to protect a machine. But what exists in this story is "guy is transformed, the end". So I don't like it.

On a related note this is why I'm skeptical of some of this "LitRPG" stuff. If the action takes place literally inside a game, then you're saying up front that none of it matters because it's "just a dream". You then have to justify why the audience should care by saying "people are mentally trapped in the game" (which means you're writing science fantasy). Or, "the hero needs to win the game for external reasons". ("Ready Player One" is all about the loser hero wanting to win to keep the bad guys from taking over; "Project Daily Grind" has the hero trying to earn real money for his kid's medicine; in "Learning To Fly" the hero fights basically to establish a tradition of How Things Are Done). Or, "there's a mysterious secret thing in the game itself that has larger significance" (the AI is dangerous, the game gives you superpowers IRL, the designer left a hidden thing the hero's curious about). the <s>otternative</s> alternative is that you don't write about a game so much as a world that happens to run on game logic. Eg. "The Slime Dungeon", in which the hero controls a standard fantasy dungeon but there's an in-universe reason why there's a regenerating maze full of monsters and treasure.

I got an interesting reaction somewhere that I mentioned "Learning To Fly". Someone went off on a rant about how transhumanism is stupid and some of its cheerleaders (Kurzweil, Yudlowsky) are cranks. Most interesting to me was this person's point about how techno-utopia fails to help most of the world; it's something for a few rich Westerners. In LtF and the series in general the characters worry a lot about how to continue being relevant and useful now that they live in a techno-utopia. Their world really is mostly for a few rich customers, not counting the many people who play Thousand Tales as a normal video game, but the situation starts to improve by 2040 thanks to the characters' actions. Once again I'm at that "time barrier" in the timeline, where I want to know what happens after uploading starts to be available to more people and uploaders start to become a serious threat to humans' jobs. I'm proud that I am at least exploring this theme instead of just going "live in a video game, whee, awesome!"

Huzzah! "Thousand Tales: Learning To Fly" is live on Amazon!
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071V9B4JX/
Meanwhile, "Extra Lives" is free this weekend!
https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Tal.....dp/B01NCAER2M/

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B071V9B4JX/
"Thousand Tales: Learning To Fly" is now available for pre-order! The Kindle edition arrives on May 5. The print edition can't be pre-ordered but will release on around the same date.

This book is about Sky Diver, a formerly human pilot who's become a pegasus in the virtual world of Talespace. The place is supposedly paradise, but adventurers like him are the ones who can make it into a functioning society -- if it doesn't get taken over by trolls, first. Transformation, magic, and a silly war await!

https://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Fate-.....dp/B01FVPVEFS/
"Dragon Fate: Interactive Fiction" is on sale for 99 cents, in case you'd like to see the full version with all the locations and endings!

I'm re-releasing both the original "Thousand Tales" book and "2040: Reconnection". I wanted to clean up a continuity error created by "Learning To Fly" and some lesser things, but as I do that I'm making bigger changes. "Tales" will now include more stories and new text. If you're interested in buying either book, hold off for a few days so you can get the new editions. (it'll be no more than a week for the e-book editions; I'm nearly done. Print edition I care less about so that might take another week.)

I'm bothered that when the characters sit down to play the game and nothing terrible happens, the story they're in ends! There does need to be conflict, but considering the game-focused nature of the setting, the characters should also have some breather scenes with little angst.

"Learning To Fly" will go to final approval by the end of this month if I have to give up on the current cover art to do that.

105.4K words, and the second draft of "Learning To Fly" is complete! The next steps are some mix of taking a break from it for a few days, and fixing up the proposed new opening (which will make this even longer), and doing a spellcheck (done!). After those, I need to do a proper edit because this is 2/3 new material and bits of it are probably stupid. Would anyone like to beta-read?

My biggest concern here is that I've got a slew of characters, and readers might well be confused. A few are just brief shout-outs, but the actually significant cast includes a lot of named characters including "Peat", Lexington, Ludo and Misha from other stories. Unfortunately, another problem is that it's not quite logically consistent with the events of "2040: Reconnection", so I may need to revise that.

All in all, though, it was fun to produce this long, silly/serious thing, and an achievement to finish a novel much longer than any other I've done so far!

https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Tal.....dp/B00Z2Y2AF2/

The original novel is free this weekend! Reviews appreciated.

Meanwhile, "Learning To Fly" is at 80,000 words and winding down. I expect to finish the second draft within a week.

https://www.amazon.com/Thousand-Tal.....dp/B01NCAER2M/
My book "Thousand Tales: Extra Lives" is free this weekend! It's a collection of science fiction stories approachable for those new to the setting. In this future, immortality and transformation are there for the asking* and everybody** wants to be your friend!

*If you're rich enough or do enough favors for the ruling inhuman AI. Price drop pending major R&D, legislation, negotiation with a cyber-dragon, and multiple explosions.
**Offer may not include terrorists, insane AIs, politicians who aren't actually evil but will still jerk you around, pony trolls, amnesiac brothel managers, and the self-proclaimed Forces Of Evil ™.

http://www.deviantart.com/users/out.....o/tempest-tale

I'm calling a halt to the "Tempest Tale" project at last. I've been very distracted from it and have gotten to the point of having a game with nearly all the features I'd set out to build (mainly excepting random quests and gaining new perks over time), which makes further development mainly a matter of polish and writing more content. Because the game is obviously pony-focused, the potential audience is pretty limited and people will necessarily call it fanfiction. I want to move on to other projects.

I've learned from this project. First of all, it took discipline to assemble a "complete" game as opposed to a tech demo. Second, making that transition meant being forced to think about things like loading a large set of items/quests/&c from external files, and having various incidental screens like an equipment menu and a shop screen. Third, I had to think about UI design. I'd do things differently in a new game, possibly including a drag-and-drop system for equipping items. I'm not developing for the SNES and don't have to ape its interface. Fourth, I gained some Unity-specific experience about details like "you can't easily save any class inherited from the MonoBehaviour class." Fifth, I went through several iterations of a key game mechanic: the battle or adventure system. Starting with a crude prototype and getting valuable feedback from people willing to tell me "this part isn't fun", I thought about the use of randomness, info and choices available to the player, and how many clicks it takes to do something.

The final result of the battle system still didn't turn out very well, but it at least gives me some ideas. For one thing, true 3D dice or slot reels aren't just decorative; they provide important feedback. Had the player been able to see the next symbol about to appear, the timing difficulty wouldn't be so hard. I focused on doing bare-bones mechanics first, then adding decoration as effort permitted (very little, as it turned out), but may have swung too far by ignoring the need to keep the player informed of what's happening.

I was able to put together something kind of fun with a bare minimum of graphics and sound, by focusing on gameplay instead of how Unity encourages developers to think about 3D animation.

What's next for me in game design? I don't know. I'm thinking about several distinct things. (1) Having finally played the card game "Buck: Legacy" (2E) I'm brainstorming what I would do differently, and imagining a very different game with the same basic dungeon crawl concept. (2) AI. I have neglected AI for a long time and would like to try it again, doing some experimental little game in which characters remember you and talk about what they're doing. But aren't there already a bunch of games where little fantasy villagers maintain their village? (3) More interactive fiction. In particular I've already written a chunk of an otter TF/TG Twine game I want to publish this year like "Dragon Fate", but I've been putting very little work up on DA and FA lately. Maybe I could do a much smaller Twine game for free public display? (4) Something with that wizard game idea. I'd seen the Kickstarter for the visual novel "The Pirate's Fate" and thought "why can't I do that?", then got immensely bogged down in designing very different and more complex game concepts.

In any case, "Tempest Tale" has been an interesting experience. Thanks to the people who tried it out and provided feedback.

"Thousand Tales: Extra Lives" is now on Amazon for 99 cents! This collection includes stories of the 2030s' most influential game, starring uploaded humans, AIs, and other players looking to make the virtual world worth fighting for. Reviews appreciated!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01NCAER2M/

Also if you type "Thousand Tales Extra Lives" into Amazon you get a listing for mermaid tail blankets, which are kind of neat too. =)

Tempest Tale v0.7 is now available! https://lexington-games.itch.io/tempest-tale (PC/Linux download). New content, countless tweaks and fixes, near-certain doom against a druid. (Difficulty needs work!)

If you're interested in "Tempest Tale", my pony-themed RPG, I'll be keeping it updated here:
https://lexington-games.itch.io/tempest-tale

I've just put up a new demo there. The Web-based version that comes up on the top of the page is the result of finally getting Unity 5 to behave with the Web player, but it's not worth the trouble for me due to some technical problems.* That version doesn't let you save, and part of the UI will be messed up unless you go to fullscreen by clicking the icon below/right of the game's frame. The properly-working downloadable version is below that if you'd like to give that a spin.

New features include more item code and content, unique character powers, and the revised tavern. Next are Chapter 2 content (already sketched out) and the random quests system.

*(After much experimentation with the roughly 20-minute build cycle, I found out the poorly-documented truth: you can't use try/catch C# statements if you're building for the Web player. Even now that I know that, the awkward, limited form of data saving that's available makes further Web development of this game impractical and makes me question the value of HTML5 for games. So standalone it is.)

It's come to my attention that people who bought "2040: Reconnection" on Amazon before the content update, did *not* in fact get the new material. The old edition has 5 chapters, the new 12. If you currently own the old edition, then you can contact me for a free copy of the new edition in PDF or MOBI format.

Sorry; I wasn't aware that Amazon doesn't automatically push content updates to people who bought the book previously. (Even if you tell Amazon to re-download, you don't get the new version.) I apologize for the unintentionally misleading advertising.

I've now finished chapter 5 of "Learning To Fly", total nearly 26K words for the story, and I don't know what to do. Status:
-The story seems to be about Sky Diver's decision to embrace being a new species both physically and mentally, and to some extent morally. He's embraced the pegasus part and the mental changes that go with it. Whatever he achieves from here leads him to decide that he does/doesn't want to remain one of the "ascended" who has an altered moral sense.
-There's also a conflict about his involvement in Earthside problems. Does he keep his promise to stay in Hoofland for a solid month, is he tempted to break it, and in the end is he eager to venture Earthside or does he not care?
-There's a war going on, which has two aspects. There's the conventional struggle for territory and power between factions, but also an unwelcome influence by griefers who don't care about winning so much as causing havoc among the {stream of profanity} pony players who they dislike both for the pony thing and for having a number of millionaires who abandoned Earth with their money. The fated ending of this war is that the world is somehow literally reshaped, a unicorn named Gentle Sun becomes a new Noble replacing the griefers' Sunward Ho, GS accepts the same mental changes that Diver and Harvest Moon have, and a religion springs up to treat the Nobles as gods. How do I get there and make it about more than the heroes conquering in-game nodes? How does their moral development affect their ability to not just fight the griefers, but win them over in some way?
-Does anything happen Earthside in this story?
-How do I juggle the mass of characters? Danio the zebra interests me but this isn't his story. Key and Kingsfoil get screen time but are currently not involved. Poppy is showing up about now but isn't in the story yet. Gentle Sun might actually be Nimbus, which raises the conflict of whether Diver leaves Noctis in both senses to follow the new ruler.

Oh, and if you're interested in Hoofland, note that "2040: Reconnection" has been re-issued at about double the length, including a version of the pony-focused "A Matter Of Taste" story and other new material.

A few people elsewhere said "hey, is this book 3 of a series? I don't see the others!" Turns out Amazon prominently says "Book 3" for "Coyote" but doesn't say "Book 1" or 2 for the others.

"The Digital Coyote" is indeed the third book of the Thousand Tales series, but it doesn't assume any knowledge of the series. You can jump right into the game with this book. ("2040: Reconnection" doesn't really require knowledge either, but it helps.)