I mentioned that I've been running into blockers because I haven't had stuff in order on Exoworld, but I'm a little hesitant to leave some half-finished things in their current state.

As a result, I've been splitting my work between getting the gear framework in place and working on the stuff that I feel pretty comfortable on.

For the interest of keeping things organized, I'm going to be splitting things up as I go through these updates by dividing them into categories of what happened recently, what I'm going to get into next, and where I'm going.

Recent Developments

That means, in part, the setting. I've been going through and doing brief blurbs that cover the action going on in each part of the setting. I'm not 100% satisfied with some of them, namely when I feel like I've covered more of a theme than events, but I've now got two of these bits for each of the six portions that I have divided the setting into.

I've been going over gear, mostly armor but also weapons, and establishing the categories they're going to fall into. This is important because it's a blocker on character traits, which will sometimes synergize with gear.

I won't craft examples of individual pieces of gear other than a couple very loose sketches to illustrate the system and force me to reconsider it later instead of just not thinking about it until the time comes to revisit gear, but right now it's going pretty well. I also want to define the qualities of weapons and armor that might interface or be parallel with character traits.

There's also a tie to combat, which I gave a cursory read over and nudged a couple pieces of just to align the different weapons and ranges.

I'm not including a lot of bespoke mechanics for things like stealth and whatnot, so gear is predominantly focused on this, but there will be some pieces of gear that interface with standard mechanics and others that provide situational benefits.

Next Couple Days

Right now I'm just going to round out the qualities list for armor (largely complete) and weapons (especially those that might interface with special enemy types like bosses and swarms).

Once that's said and done, I hope to get started on character traits. There's really no rhyme or reason to where those are right now. I'm hoping to remove the Exemplar drawback system and replace it with a caste system that's a little more mechanically complex but should make a more lore-immersive experience. This also means that Exemplar traits are easy to come up with, since they'll just go along the four or five playable castes' needs rather than need to be broadly generalized.

Originals are getting Expertise as their unique mechanic, which I've already described at length. I was toying with the idea of giving them technology like physical augmentations, but I've decided to make these into a gear item instead. There aren't a whole lot of things like that in Exoworld, since the intersection with transhuman themes takes place with the Exemplars and not the Originals so much, but it's cool sci-fi to have bounty hunters with robot arms, and it doesn't feel fair to limit that to one background.

As a result, to supplement Expertise I'm giving Originals a whole slew of separate abilities based on the dichotomy of things like street smarts and the school of hard knocks or having knowledge and traditions from Earth to draw upon, though these won't be mutually exclusive to any character.

There's also a certain gut feeling and chutzpah element to the Originals, who don't have the comfort of adaptation that the Exemplars and Spurned have.

Spurned get many wacky adaptations and instinctive benefits as traits, though I've already talked about the adaptation mechanic at length. They're basically humans with a lot of artificial engineering and spliced transgenics applied, and they're more likely to have the requisite senses to have strong instinctual reactions to things. Their traits also handle things like integrated armor, giving them a similar purview to the Exemplars' castes but with much more flexibility within a single character.

I base the Reaction traits on the idea that each of the little nanite drones can do its own physics-defying nonsense. They're going to be somewhat sparse during this pass, since I'm going to update them with specialized mechanics.

For instance, they're going to have an active ability that lets them move their allies during combat, something that supports characters in heavy armor that restricts their movement.

They will also have a healing ability, mimicry, and a number of "utility spells" to cover things that might not be mechanically represented but are nonetheless useful (think of these like D&D cantrips that do things like lighting fires; the game might not care about fires all that much but they're still capable of being significant during the story).

Before the Next Update

I don't know that I'm going to do it before the next update in entirety, but I'm really going to hit the character creation system. I'm hoping to get character creation in by April, which would mark playtest readiness as far as I'm aware. There might be something else I'm missing, but I feel like I've done this enough times that by the time I'm 21k words in I know where I'm going.

One thing that I'm considering is whether I want to put vehicles in Exoworld. I couldn't really make them work in Hammercalled to my satisfaction. Though I had some fun times playtesting them, they never really fit well as part of the system.

I suspect I might make them fit in to Exoworld better, just because of the dynamics at play and my greater experience this time around. Plus, Hammercalled was more of a granular system and scale was an issue where I don't think it'll be in Exoworld. The question is really whether the return on investment is worth it either for the game's development time and for player experiences as a whole.

Wrapping Up

Progress has been slow, but I think I've hurdled over the last of the major speedbumps. I expect to hit the 25k word mark by the end of the month, which should be interesting because I'm planning to write a (non-Exoworld related) novel in April.