March Update
about 2 years ago – Thu, Mar 31, 2022 at 01:47:39 PM

Happy Spring everyone!

I'm not sure about the rest of you but I can't wait to get to some better weather, winter wore out its welcome a long time ago. While we've been hiding inside, March has been a great month for progress on SYNAPSE. I got a lot more accomplished than I expected to, and it's really starting to become what I had hoped it would.

Most of my focus this month was on working through all the gear/equipment, melee weapons, ranged weapons, clothing/armor, and vehicles. All these things have ended taking up just shy of 30 pages, and I've expanded further on most of them than I originally planned on.

For clothing/armor I ended up with 32 different items, which I then broke down into 7 different "slots", allowing you to mix and match a little and have some extra control over how you build out your character. Each of the items have different protection ratings from others in its slot and some of them even offer extended abilities beyond just helping to reduce damage taken. This is a bit of a rework from the original concept, and I feel it just adds more choice and immersion while not slowing down gameplay which is always a plus.

There are 16 different melee weapons, each of which offer differences in reach, damage, and abilities. From these you can reskin until your hearts content as they should be able to cover pretty much every modern hand-to-hand option your players can toss at you.

Ranged weaponry is a little more expansive and has 24 options, again each with different ranges, damage, and abilities. It covers pretty much everything in a modern setting and should be more capable of adapting to whatever you need.

Now... vehicles... this section got a big bump. I had originally planned on there being some vehicle options because they do come up in most modern games from time to time. But as I dove deeper into writing it I realized I wanted it to have some of its own rules, simple things that can allow you to utilize vehicles all the time and not slow down play. They are handled much the same as another character/being and just feel more alive now. In addition to that I also opted to create categories for them and have included multiple stat-lines within those categories so you have lots of options at hand. Each vehicle type offers its own special rules and there are even some simple options for upgrading standard cars and trucks. All in all there ended up being 8 vehicle classes with a total of 31 different vehicles spread across them.

Gear/equipment also seemed to grow to 47 items, each with their own in-game use. I'm sure I'll expand on these even further as things pop into my head but it's currently a really healthy mix of things that should fully cover the needs of most players and at worst case offer a very solid framework for you to include anything random that pops up during play that isn't covered.

Lastly, as I was working through all of that I also started preliminary work on a section of the book that wasn't even a thought prior to this month. And that is dealing with "insanity". The more I dive into this world and its strong focus on psionics and how they are fueled, it just made me feel that there needed to be more risk there as they are inherently dangerous to both the user and anyone affected by them. In SYNAPSE, psionic powers are fuelled by characters/beings pulling energy from the fabric that holds our reality together in order to use their powers. As that fabric is unravelled it only makes sense that things can potentially reach through, after all we already have a whole section of combat dealing with temporal disruptions. This is also especially apparent when looking through the lore of the Fleshbenders and how they came to be. This section of the book won't be dealing with your typical insanity as I feel that mental health is something best left for the professionals and is much too important of an issue for me to even attempt to tackle in game form. Instead these will be forms of otherworldly madness and mania that is almost "offered" to the character in return for strange new powers and abilities they may not have access to otherwise. As these beings from the Elsewhere slowly attempt to manipulate and turn the minds they touch, they do so under the guise of "gifts". There's a lot still to unpack and work on here, but I think it will add to the experience in many positive and unpredictable ways.

For April I mainly plan on focusing in on the 6 short adventures as well as continued work on psionics (it's a huge section). This means that for those of you getting custom NPC's, I'll be initially reaching out to you at the beginning of May so we can get those balls rolling.

One final thing I want to quickly touch on is my schedule, when the Kickstarter was launched roughly 6 months ago there was something we we're aware of at the time, which is that we'll be welcoming a new tiny human into our family this June! This is amazing and exciting and I couldn't be happier. The only downside is that my timelines for SYNAPSE were made without that knowledge in hand. So over the last few months I've been trying to do everything I can to set myself up for success following the arrival of our new bundle of joy. I'm hopeful that I can get far enough ahead that we won't get delayed anywhere along the way. But I just wanted to be fully transparent and for everyone to be aware that there may be a short period of time coming up where lack of sleep and a newborn have me a little scattered or working slower than normal. Baby brain is a thing!

That's about all I've got. AshHillArt is currently working away at a large bundle of artwork for the NPC dossiers and the Enemies (I've included a couple of their very early sketches below for pieces I'm especially excited for) so everything is going well on that front. Otherwise, I guess I'll chat with you towards the end of next month, and hopefully I have as much good progress to share as I did this time around!

Thanks for your time & take care :)

-Nick

February Update
about 2 years ago – Mon, Feb 28, 2022 at 07:00:44 PM

Morning everyone,

As usual I'll try to keep this short and sweet. First off there won't be any new art throughout this update, this batch is running a little behind (my fault) but overall we're still well ahead of where we need to be. So expect to see some more things on the next one ;)

Most of my time on the game this month has been spent working on the additional effect levels for each psionic power along with balancing their mastery requirements and experience costs to learn. It's obviously the largest section in the book so I want to make sure it gets a lot of the focus. Any other work time has been spent on fleshing out the Temporal Disruption charts, which is just a really fun thing to work on (your players should get a lot of fun from it alone).

All in all things are chugging along nicely, and everything is still pointed towards the targets I set for it (Huzzah!)

As a side note I'm teaming up with my friend Jay at Immersive Terrain (check out their YouTube here)  to host a Trash to Terrain community based terrain building comp through the Cardboard Dungeon Games public Discord (which can be found here). It will run the entire month of March, is open to all residents of Canada/USA, has two different entry options (diorama and trash build), and offers prizes of a TTCombat White Box and a $50 gift card for the CDG Webstore (which can be found here). So if you plan on doing some terrain building this month anyways, might as well try to win something while doing it! Full details will get posted in the trash_to_terrain channel in the Discord which will go public the morning of March 1st. Hope to see you in there :)

Lastly, the world is a very volatile and scary place right now. I hope you're all safe and healthy, and implore you to check on neighbors, friends, and family to make sure the same can be said about all those who exist around us. 

Take care and chat soon.

-Nick

January Update
over 2 years ago – Wed, Jan 26, 2022 at 02:42:30 PM

Morning all, here's our project update for January, this should be short and sweet.

This month turned out pretty much how I'd expected it to. Case counts here went through the roof, the city I live in experienced it's worst numbers since the pandemic began, and that resulted in schools (and a lot of other things) being closed pretty much right since our last update. So we had our little one home with us all month and they still will be for at least a little while longer. Ultimately this meant my time to work on this got cut way down in the last 3-4 weeks.

But that doesn't mean no progress was made! I still managed to get a bunch of writing done as well as work on page layouts, designs, and generally how I want to book to feel. So now while I'm writing and updating, all that work will be done within this new framework which should save some time down the road. That's the long way of me saying "I'm where I expected to be since we talked last". It's months like these why I made sure I added additional time to get this done, I knew there would be some unavoidable delays along the way.

The next batch of artwork was also finished up (a couple of those pieces are in this update), and we're prepped for the next round of them to get underway next week. So it's full steam ahead there.

The only other thing I wanted to touch on was in regards to those several people who backed at the Kitchen Sink level and need to have NPC's designed after them. I'll be starting that process with you either late April or early May. I want to make sure I have the adventure frameworks fully planned out, and more of the general artwork for the book taken care of so that I can focus in on those NPC's and make sure they turn out awesome. 

That's it for now, hope you're all healthy and doing awesome. 

-Nick

I am your Spam for today (Cover Vote)
over 2 years ago – Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 09:58:02 PM

Me again... again.

Three updates in one day... this is a record for me! (my apologies to your inbox)

The last update about the covers has revealed to me how attached to certain versions people are. I'll admit that caught me off guard. So to prevent myself from having to answer a bunch of comments with similar answers, get us all on the same page, and to make things as fair as possible to everyone, here's what we're going to do.

Covers will be shelved for now, it's a future issue anyways, and I'd prefer to spend my time getting the actual game rules 100% done since that's what really matters.

Having said that, closer to the time I need to make a final decision on things like cover art, we'll take it to a vote, with everyone getting a say on the final artwork that will be used for the respective version of the book they'll be receiving. So people receiving the Limited Edition cover can vote on that, and people getting PDF's or the standard cover version can vote on that one. I'll mock up a few different options for each version, including the original ones in the campaign, and you can decide what ones get used. 

I can't think of a better way to do it.

As always thanks to everyone who reached out, open dialogues are always the way to go. And we'll cross this bridge together when the time comes.

Happy New Year :)

-Nick

December Update
over 2 years ago – Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 06:42:58 PM

Happy Holidays everyone! Hopefully we're all over our self induced food comas by this point, just in time for another one at new years ;) As always I'll aim to make this as quick and to the point as possible.

Where We're At

Currently I'm exactly where I wanted to be at this point. Our other project released on time, the first bundle of artwork from AshHillArt has been received (with a few pieces being shown in this update), and I'm ready to roll ahead with getting SYNAPSE completed as my main focus.

Where We're Going

This is where things are a little more up in the air. Restrictions and closures are beginning to come into effect again. Should schools end up being closed (we should know more in the next week), and our little one unable to attend JK, it puts me in a position where all my design and other business related work gets shifted into the evenings so that I can look after him during the day. Obviously this would result in a lot less hours being available to me in the short term. But it's not all doom and gloom!

What's the Plan?

Since I can't control everything, I am doing my best to control what I can. I've decided that instead of completing all the writing, then working on layout, then prepping for printing, that I'm going to do them all simultaneously. So my working rough draft to this point will be migrated into a document pre-formatted for the printers, and as I continue finalizing the writing for each page, that page will also have it's layout worked on. I'm hopeful that this ultimately results in less bouncing around, and less times that I need to "handle" everything to get it into a finished state.

The other thing I'm already working on is reducing other time sinks that come into play towards the end of development, like Backerkit. If you've never used Backerkit, it's a fantastic platform, but it can be a massive time investment getting everything set up and ready to go so that you don't end up with issues. And instead of spending dozens of hours months from now, it's already done! Other than doing a last minute check on shipping fees prior to sending them out, it's ready to be approved. This saves me a lot of time and stress later on which is fantastic.

The work process is obviously one that will evolve over the coming months, but as long as I keep rolling with the punches and finding ways to trim back end time off the project, I'm still very confident in the timelines laid out in the campaign regardless of what scheduling changes I need to make.

Anything Else?

That's pretty much it for where the project is at. The next batch of artwork will start getting worked on next week as I dive into things here. Our next update will come at the end of January, so we'll see where everything has progressed to at that point. If you want to keep up to date with little bits of info between now and then, or just want to chat, you can always find us on our Discord. Drop in and say hi!

If you're just looking for last minute holiday deals, PDF's of our past releases are currently upwards of 50% off until January 1st, and we've got a sale going on some other things in Dungeon as well. Check it out if you're into it.

As always, thanks for your time and support.

Cheers

-Nick