A little update

I discovered that making a good game manual is one of the hardest steps in making and releasing a game.
For the last two weeks most of my focus has been on rebuilding it with rules clarifications and a much better visual style.

I’ve done more than a few “blind” playtest sessions in Tabletop Simulator where I only watch people play and do not intervene even if they misinterpreted the rules (which means the manual isn’t well written).
Misunderstandings rarely occur anymore which is a positive sign that the manual is getting closer to being available.

One thing I was incredibly unhappy with was the old pictures that were used to demonstrate rules and core concepts.
It wasn’t visually striking and was hard to read. It used an old co-ordinate system which used letters and numbers to designate locations on the game board.
Now the new game mechanics uses an offset system which is much quicker to play with and results in a much cleaner visual design due to no co-ordinates having to be used anymore.

After a lot of tests inside of Blender I’ve finally found a strong clean look which is much more readable and visually appealing.
Hopefully all of the new pictures will be finished by the end of today.
You can click the slideshow below to see the difference between the old and the new look.

Then the last part will be replacing text and instructions with the last few pieces of feedback from the closed group of players (You guys are the best and I couldn’t be doing this without you)

I’m also super excited to announce that Damon Theron will be working on more short stories set in the world of Interferion.
His first few drafts have been incredible to read and have added so much to the basic framework of the setting and the characters themselves.
In the near future these will all be published here on the webpage and some of them will make their way into the game manual.

Next week will be rebuilding a lot of the codebase inside of TTS because of some flaws with how it handles hosts and clients which basically stopped development for over a week now due to models loading incorrectly for some clients in the game.

I’ll also be busy learning how to do retopology with the high poly sculpts that came out of the concept art phase as the poly count is just a little too high for low end systems to run with TTS.
All in all everything gets a little closer to the release every day.

Thanks for visiting.

All the best
Mark