Brand New Pi

 I recently bailed on Twitter and FB because attempting to promote Titanomachina is pointless, and as my own personal hobby these days I figured I might as well do it somewhere that let me post actual writing on a subject. I'm maintaining the Twitter account somewhat because I've found some fantastic artists on there, and it's my only method of communication with them, and to check out what they post in the future. In the meantime. I've also drawn back from Dakka Dakka again, and in time hope to quit browsing that site entirely. Which is why I'm reviving this old Warhammer 40k blog and re-purposing it to suit the hobby that replaced it. 

Some backstory: Around 2010 I went back to school to become a technical writer because I was flat broke and that was what was on offer. While I was there it occurred to me that I could use the training to do what I had always talked about doing, which was writing a game with a rule book that wouldn't see the kind of problems I had seen in Games Workshop products. Needless to say that notion is a pipe-dream, as usable documentation for games is very much secondary to art, background, and some semblance of a game to frame it, commercially-speaking. 

However, I started writing a game that I had always wanted to play, Adeptus Titanicus. To that end I dug up all the Titan-related material I could find and use those narratives to create a game where players could imagine themselves Irvine Hecate, Princeps of the Imperius Dictatio, or some similar Titan. This stayed on low-boil until about 2017 when, despite the warning signs I was not prepared, I decided to take it to Kickstarter after it had left its roots in AT behind. 

Needless to say after publishers passed on it, the two Kickstarters I ran failed, and failed so badly they made me wonder how exactly I had managed to talk myself into being so ill-prepared. My lessons are essentially two-fold: (1) I had convinced myself it was not a vanity project when it is very definitely a vanity project, and that's bad for a commercial product, and (2) I had not properly gauged the relative importance game buyers place on art and widgets. But you know what? Thanks to the Pandemic I have managed to release the game for Tabletop Simulator on Steam, reusing assets to bring the experience to the virtual tabletop and do a little development work in the process. 

The process of getting the game working on Tabletop Simulator has lead to some convergent development in both the solid prototypes I've found a hobby in building for myself, and in the virtual game available online. It's something I want to write about, as writing helps me organize my thoughts and acts as a wonderful self-soother in a time when I am under some stress to boot. 

The latest implementation is me going back through the initial models of Titans I put up when I finally figured out how to do so last year around this time. I've figured out how to crunch the size of the .obj files down to fit into the game, and so I've gotten around some of the technical constraints that made some of the initial starter-configurations kind of weird to use. Part of the design of Titanomachina is that the Titans themselves are modular, which is a feature it has inherited from the original Adeptus Titanicus game, with the benefit of giving players a way to customize the Titans they play, and a list-building component the game itself. I'm looking forward to discussing these features in this blog. 

Here's the link to the game, and you'll need a copy of Tabletop Simulator. 

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2091149334