In today’s fortnightly dev log: slow progress, and a one-month hiatus.

This past fortnight has seen me plink away at a pile of necessary improvements to the game:

• Revamping the game’s RPG statistics from an overly abstract, kind of boring set of four (Physical, Human, Natural, and Preternatural), to a sleek, perfect, endlessly attractive six (Observation, Subterfuge, Power, Control, Grace, and Flair).
• Revamping the game’s Injury system, so that injuries don’t disappear at the end of an expedition, and instead stack for progressively negative effects.
• Implementing some uninteresting but useful UI and quality of life changes.

It’s going…okay? I know what I need to do, and so far I haven’t had any problems with the nuts and bolts of development. What I have had problems with is: being an adult living in the world, walking around and doing things.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that being alive is difficult. Being alive and functioning at somewhere between 60 and 100 percent efficiency doubly so. This month, a lot of things have been thrown my way, from visa issues, to health issues, to day job issues. I won’t bore you with the details, since this isn’t LiveJournal, but suffice to say it’s been pretty full on.

This has taken a bit of a toll on the time I can devote to development. I will be quitting my job as a teacher at the end of this month, and going freelance as a translator/interpreter, which will give me a fair bit more time for game dev, but that switch has also naturally thrown up its own roadblocks.

In order to devote time to game dev I need these little things called ‘money’ and ‘money for rent’, so I’ll have to pick up work when it comes my way. Sometimes that work will be a pleasant drip feed, and other times it’ll be an awful work spigot shooting lukewarm, foamy work all over my hands and face.

This spigot has just shot three weeks of intensive interpreting work my way, and turning it down would be very silly indeed. So for the next three weeks (and the week after that, since I need to go to Tokyo and sort out the switch to a new visa) I’ll be taking a break from The Red Market.

I’ll be thinking about it a lot while I’m gone, and I’m honestly surprised by how much I’m looking to get back to it once all this is done. So it’s not goodbye, it’s just ‘see you in a bit’. In the meantime, let me tease the next major update:

The next major update for The Red Market will include all the improvements I mentioned at the top of this post (and those in dev log #12), as well a new, secret monster. I won’t say much about this monster except that you won’t find it by normal means: you’ll need to open yourself up to watery tragedy before it turns its hollow eyes your way.

I’m also hard at work on a new major series for my blog, tentatively called RPG Autopsy. In that I’ll be playing through RPGs of all kinds, and trying to figure out what makes them good (or what makes them terrible). Look for that, and the next update for The Red Market in mid-late April.

Bye for now,

Nick

(And remember, you can follow me on Twitter by clicking here. The current early version of The Red Market can be played online here, if you haven’t already.)