I dunno what it is, but any time I draw a character yawning, it makes me also want to yawn. I wonder if that means I'm doing it right? Or if it just means I'm thinking about it too hard while I'm drawing them.
Anyway, today's preview is several stages of art at once. I kinda start with that rough sketch on the far right, outline over it with a slightly less rough sketch and then move it into its position to make room for text. Then I'll add a structure to fix any problems in a bright color like red (especially for complex structures like hands), and then I start to trace over it with my final black lines after that. That's been my latest process anyway. It changes from month to month and year after year.
Then we've got a preliminary rough/practice sketch of Max and Cera. Tried to do a weird angle, idk. Might try something else.
Comic this week is Solipsus - Page 39.
Still gonna be playing Palworld on the 10th.
beta TTRPG is coming along. Editing is a nightmare. But it's my nightmare. A nightmare I'm committed to seeing through no matter how long I must suffer.
Part of the process has involved reorganizing the entire book from scratch. I'd originally planned to divide it up into three separate documents, one for basically all the gameplay, one for GMs and one for lore, but I think it makes more sense to just combine it all into one hundred-hundred page monstrosity.
Um... notable changes from the alpha so far?
I reverted weight and encumbrance back to its pre-alpha rules, gonna give them a little bit of a tidy-up. Weight limits are important when resources are meant to be scarce, but Players really shouldn't have to consider it for more than half a tick at most.
I forget if I already mentioned this but I simplified a lot of the derived stats. Having to look them up each time I wanted to calculate them was a pita. So, as an example, Pain Threshold is now just Total Brawn x 3 instead of whatever it was before, some convoluted combination of three attributes + a constant I don't remember even now. And the other three stats have all had a similar overhaul. This also means that it'll have a bit more variance for a starting character than it used to, but I'm okay with that. Because also:
Reaching your Pain Threshold no longer instantly knocks you out of combat. You can now roll to resist it and stay in the fight a little longer. But, excess pain adds to the Threat of the check, so taking a nasty hit while already in rough shape will be a lot harder to resist. Your Pain Threshold also still only goes up when you pass out.
Then yesterday I added some conditions, Starvation, Dehydration and Exhaustion. This is just so I have a much easier way to describe a mechanic I was already beginning to flirt with in a dozen different places. One of those things where if you find there's a mechanic that exists and you get tired of describing it over and over, best to just give it a name.
Sepsis also works a little differently now. In the alpha it was mentioned once in the entire document in the middle of a paragraph that kinda vaguely mentions what triggers it and that it stops Natural Healing, which is like... game breaking in a few ways. Cuz if you just skip Natural Healing you skip all the good and bad that goes with it. So it's now got its own section, and provides an alternate ruleset for Natural Healing. A terrible one. One that kills. Cuz it's generally ill-advised to get Sepsis in the post-apocalypse. Or in general.
Speaking of the alpha, it still has a lot of old references to old mechanics that don't exist any more! I'm great at this. =_=
And Jak had some feedback from the alpha that I'd left unaddressed when I fell into a slump and still as I was moving things over to shiny new beta documents. But he made some good points and I've integrated a couple of those as well. Namely damage types and Trauma exertion. Probably some others I've forgotten.
So... yeah! As far as the reorg goes, the first six chapters are in a... general state. It's definitely gonna need some extra editing passes when I'm done, but it goes. There is progress, and at the moment I have more excitement than agony. But I still hate editing. So much.