🥳 v0.3 Rises 🥳

It has been a long 7 months of work on this complete overhaul of the game. The themes are stronger, the mechanics tighter, and the vision clearer. Arise v0.3 is a wholly different animal than what came before, but is much better for having undergone this metamorphosis.

For the first few months of work I was keeping a changelog in a notepad doc, but eventually it reached something like ~25,000 words in length, and I realized I had basically just written an entirely new game using v0.2 as a basic outline or inspiration. So no changelog, as it would be much shorter to list the things which haven't changed. 

The (new) ABDCEngine is still the game's heart, refined to a new standard and much closer than before to being "ready for primetime" as a functional SRD that others could build upon. The game is still about a party of adventuring heroes finding themselves, fighting monsters, and exploring the ruins of the worlds that came before. It's still a tactical game using a grid. 

Most other stuff is different now, though. lol

What's In the Box?

v0.3 is a full game at this moment, but it is neither feature-complete nor content-complete. The goal with the ensuing v0.3x patches to follow is to finish building the scaffold, and calling what comes out the other side "v0.4", which will mark the first version in beta instead of alpha. v0.4 will be the first feature-complete version, and we'll focus on adding & balancing content from there until it's also content-complete.

Roadmap

v0.31. The first major patch, which I've already started work on, will have more background options, items, and enemies. But most importantly it will have the first of the playtest adventures, The Halcyon Nest. I do not expect people to actually try to play v0.3 because a game system with no adventures to even look at is a little hard for some folks to see how all the pieces are supposed to fit together. v0.31 will be what I consider the first "fully playable, no caveats" version of Arise.

v0.32. The second major patch will be adding still more enemies, and Disc 2 abilities to all the aspects, backgrounds, classes, and disciplines. This will bring the playtests into the middle-level range, unlocking Disc 2 content. I'm not sure yet if I'll have time to finish a Disc 2 adventure (The Scarlet Court) in time for v0.32's release, but I'll try. If not, it will come out a couple weeks after v0.32 comes out.

v0.33. The third major patch will add a third dose of new enemies. Filling out the bestiary in this gradual way, the goal is eventually to get to 5 of each NPC family, for 65 enemies, plus 5 example bosses, for a total of 70 foes in the playtest doc. The intention is for v0.33 to also bring Disc 3 abilities, and eventually a Disc 3 adventure (tentatively titled The Cataclysm Clock).

If these patches get out of hand, and I feel like I need to split them up into two releases each, I will do so, but for right now, the intention is to do it in three major patches. I'm shooting for 1.5-2 months per patch, but I still have a day job and several side-gigs to keep the lights on at home, so we'll see how that works out.