On Already Announced Things and the Lack of Polls

I recently picked up the pace and so far we have 8 out of 36 lobbies more directly acting on the territories and 6 out of 32 renascents with a couple of new behaviours to show.

For now I'm really enjoying the preliminary tests. This might well be one of those things only I seem to get excited about but I love how much more lively the colonies are now. With the Power Imbalance social context in effect in favour of The House of Alcrhousse for example I could see Alchrousse's banners and statues in all the populated areas, frequent military parades and people arguing for and against secession from the mainland. Unpopulated areas meanwhile were the home of  those unpatriotic enough to be hiding from the secessionist mobs and self-appointed tax collectors.

The new renascent phases are also forcing me to think in new ways about these characters. Maybe I said something like this last time but I really feel like I learn new things about them during this process and I genuinely find myself moved and even surprised by them at times. Sometimes some of my least favourite characters show a very interesting facet of themselves and sometimes my personal picks turn out have a somewhat icky side to them, which is great because that's just how real people work after all. The Lambda Swashbuckler for example started as something of a comic relief and has since been steadily earning my sympathy with almost each new development.

 

If you're the kind to follow those things, you'll soon see the usual Testing and Proofreading item show up on the sidebar as well, but this won't mean the release is anywhere near completion as it did other times. Rather that, considering it's going to be a somewhat heftier task, I'm going to start sooner and space it out further in order to keep it from delaying the release more than necessary.

Considering the average length of the text I've already gotten in and the remaining stuff to do, putting aside the occasional piece of code the whole thing is probably going to add somewhere around 260 standard Open Office pages of text to the game, give or take a couple dozen. The good thing about this is that at least if I fail to get the quality right I can still rely on the quantity when the time comes to pat myself on the back.

Now, the problem with this is that there is a limit to how many posts I can make about having done more of the same thing, so unless a bunch of new tiny features find their way into the game in the following months for me to write about, we'll have to make do with my meagre charms and lore posts in here.

I was considering setting up a number of polls to find out more about how people play the game and what things are the most interesting for the most people during this time. Unfortunately, Blogger seems to have decided at some point to remove the little sidebar polls for some reason and I don't want to send you to some sketchy third party site for them to collect your data or ad you to death, so there goes that plan.