Hey everyone! It's been uh… 2 years which....whoops. Sorry about that, we weren't trying to leave you hanging without declaring an actual hiatus, but the situation developed (in a manner which was not necessarily to our advantage)
So we have some good news and some bad news:
The good news is, we're back at it!! We're shoring up the system, writing the next update, and doing some long term planning that will....Hopefully make this a
lot easier and prevent any more ridiculous soft hiatuses for everyone's favourite collection of crabs
The bad news is these overhauls are a lot like rolling over a rotting log and collecting bugs. Constructs & Cages (the system I started design work on many many moons ago) is a mess. An awesome, incredible, worthwhile mess, but a mess nonetheless. Ya boi
@KlinkerKing has poured blood, sweat, tears (courtesy of
@TheCount 's greed), and ichor into it with me, and we are going places with it. What was once a system for Dyokinians to duke it out in is shaping up to handle units of all sizes, creatures of all shapes, and physiologies mundane and magical with a modularity that should frighten the Great Space Crab themself!
I want to briefly touch on what ground us to a halt and what's brought us back now of all times
2022 was a rough year for both of us. We ended up in a situation where the stress of our offline lives was affecting our ability to fix the
clunk charm of Constructs & Cages, and making it a lot harder to reach the mighty and powerful QM consensus we need to punt out updates with any regularity.
So why now? Well it turned out that we needed a few secret ingredients to scuttle out of our seclusion (in no particular order):
I had to go away and play Lancer. Turns out experiencing more ttrpgs can really help you figure out solutions to major flaws in your grand designs
We needed something to do together again - Klinkerking and I are great friends but we've not had a lot of hobbies in common recently. Turns out that our desire to spend time together will make us look at Constructs and Cages and say "yeah, yeah, we can totally fix this this time"
We love the Crabby cave!! We actually have another quest that's on hiatus (Mercenary Boot), and it was ah...Not much of a competition for which one we were going to call back from beyond. Sorry Italy! We love you, but carcinization really has come for us all!!
On that note: My life is inescapably tied to researching crabs for completely unrelated reasons! Once for the Crabby cave? Could happen to anyone! Again for a Lancer Mech? Pfft, coincidence!! A third time for a Pathfinder character?? Ok my life is a joke and I have been consumed by the Great Space Crab. (did you know I have a favourite crab species now? I know the scientific name and everything!!)
So what are we doing? How long until we open the doors? Are the Sheltered critters of the Crabby Cave cruising for another bruising?
Yes, yes, we can neither confirm nor deny these allegations!
Ok but more seriously:
We're
dramatically improving our back-end documentation it wasn't *bad* before, but it was a little...cluttered? So we're getting more docs, more spreadsheets, the whole shebang. Some of them have autocalc features!! We might even experiment with a roll20 game where we can have macros for our rolls instead of....Ah, doing it all manually
We're changing the resolution mechanic and vantage. It's a bold choice, but 3d6 and messing around with which dice you keep is way more computationally expensive on our poor brains than my limitless ambition bargained for! It turns out less rolls =/= less calculations, at least not always - in future we'll be rolling d20+vantage, where vantage is a smaller dice that gets bigger and more reliable when stacked (smallest sits at a d4, largest at d12, with no less than 8 steps each way compared to the old 3. Basically, old vantage was hella stronk, and insufficiently granular: this will make it a lot easier to reward you for decisions you've made, but will nerf a few traits, skills, and features that grant vantage - we might increase the amount of vantage they grant if they feel too weak!
We're giving everyone more skills!! Ok, technically we're increasing the skills per level and formalising levels into an officially tracked thing. Basically this lets us cost skills more appropriately, create skill chains that make sense, and sidestep some nasty limitations on skill design that were causing
our greed to choke on its tears. This will possibly lead to mulligans, but we're going to be extraordinarily sparse with them, because it's actually really hard to tell what in the blazes half these changes are going to do on a micro level, and we want to avoid a slew of votes over it, as well as any major disruptions to continuity. If there are any specific changes we announce that you feel will lead to past choices screwing you about, we will be happy to discuss them, and we'll run a vote on what changes want mulliganing if there's a popular enough demand (that vote is waaaay easier to run than an actual mulligan, and gives us time to prepare for any likely mulligan votes)
As for how long… I won't speculate too concretely. We've picked up enough momentum that I don't want to keep everyone in the dark, and the next update doesn't require the full suite of modularity, so with a fair wind and a smile from fortune, we could maybe, just maybe, make your collective greed choke on its tears sometime towards the end of the next two weeks… Conversely, we could hit an evil dastardly snag that rings our next update out to the end of the next two months
And for the last question… Well, actually, we really can't confirm or deny these allegations!! Stay tuned!!