I mentioned in my inaugural post that unlike the very filtered content of my other online venues, my gemlog would have more sundry and stream-of-consciousness subject matter. That's relevant because today's post is going to be more of a journaling entry in the purest sense.
I took a break from working on VVO to work on the tabletop version of Vanquish Vanguard. I've now completely prepared the current playtest campaign, which runs through level 12 (the highest "normal" level in VanVan, though I have some draft content for "epic" levels 13-16).
(...Well, that was "exciting." As I was typing this entry, I saw my cat savaging a poor garter snake that got in the house. I managed to rescue it from her and put it outside, but she had already injured it. I'm worried it will bleed to death, but I don't know anything about treating snakes, so preventing my cat from killing it outright and getting it outside was about all I could do for it. This has happened several times now. I wish I could figure out how they're getting in and block the entrance, because it's a death sentence for the poor creatures with the killing machine that is my cat on the prowl.)
Anyway, back to writing this post... I just finished creating the last adventure for the playtest campaign. One of the playtest groups is level 5 and the other (which started very recently) is still level 1, so this now constitutes months worth of material. I'm the type of GM who likes to prepare well ahead of time, so this kind of huge lead is not atypical for me.
I like to usually be working on a creative project in my spare time -- I often get antsy if I'm not -- so now that the playtest campaign is fully implemented and there's not much else to do with tabletop VanVan for a while except make tweaks in response to playtesting, the question is what project to pivot to next.
The obvious choice would be to work on VVO some more. The project is certainly off to a good start, but I do find myself wondering if it would be particularly fun in its current incarnation. I don't see the engine supporting much of anything except hack-n-slash, which is fine, but in my experience tends to get old rather quickly if there aren't some other types of gameplay to vary things up.
One solution to this problem would be to redesign it as more of a traditional MUD, which is to say, basically a text-based adventure/RPG except multiplayer. That would certainly allow for more puzzle-solving and would probably make it easier to design more varied interactions. The problem with that approach is that it would probably be more difficult to create an interesting randomly-generated environment. Part of the reason I went with the design I did was so that I could play my own game (alongside friends and family) without knowing every nook and cranny of it, and indeed, it took very little effort to get a robust and effective random map generator up and running, as previous posts demonstrated.
Still, while it would be more difficult to create good random environments for a text-based MUD, it certainly wouldn't be impossible, and it might make for an interesting challenge. It would entail throwing away some of the work I've done so far, but I hadn't gotten especially far yet anyway.
Another option would be getting away from programming and even game design for a bit (both things I've been doing a lot of lately) and doing some writing. It's been quite a few years now since my last novel, and I've been wanting to get back into creative writing. There's certainly some appeal in the idea of doing something that doesn't involve any programming, especially given that my job (software development) has been feeling quite tiring again as of late, so doing something different in my free time might be a nice break.
Well, we'll see. I might just try a few different things and go with whichever one captures and holds my interest first.
I also, mostly on a whim, ordered the Marmoreal Tomb boxed campaign, which was co-created by Gary Gygax's son, from Troll Lord Games. Reading tabletop RPG materials is something that tends to be very relaxing and enjoyable for me. I got it in both physical and PDF format, but I might wait to read it when the physical copy arrives, as I do tend to enjoy reading any long-form material a lot more from books than on a screen. All of which is to say, simply relaxing with what is (hopefully) some enjoyable reading material is another tempting prospect, and since the box set apparently has ~700 pages of content, that should keep me in reading material for a good long while. Heck, maybe I'll even type up a review of it. If the campaign looks fun enough, I could even run it at some point (after converting it to VanVan, probably), although given that I already have enough campaign material to last many months, that would likely be far in the future.
I guess that's all for now. I went outside to check on the snake and it isn't where I put it down in the grass, so it probably slithered off. If the bleeding stopped, maybe the poor thing will survive after all. Regardless, it's getting late, so time to start winding down for bed and yet another day of the endless grind tomorrow.