Polishing ... and waiting

Things are coming along well. I have the website up and it's running but I have not openned up the Closed Beta yet. I'm waiting to hear back from Charles Kramer, my lawyer. He's taking his jolly sweeeeeeet time! Hah. Anyway, that's to be expected. In the meantime I'm working on the site polishing things up and trying to find whatever bugs I can before the Closed Beta starts. It's coming along great. I've fixed one serious bug and have polished up some reports which look a little better now. The entire site needs a look-n-feel overhaul but that comes after the nuts and bolts stuff. Anyway, quite exciting, despite the world falling apart and all. Yay.

Tinkering

Well, things are coming along, the website is up and working, but I'm having some technical issues with the application. Just a few, but still they're quite annoying. I have on my development server code that works fine, but when I put it on the production server being hosted by a third party company, bang, stuff breaks. Their answer: "Recode". I'm like... uh, I shouldn't need to do that. But that's how things go in the real world. SO I'm working on getting it all together and making a final round of fixes to the last short list of stuff that doesn't work yet. The good news is that 99% of the site does work. Yay. :)

The Prismatic Wall

Ok, well things are moving along with the legal stuff in regards to the Elthos Web Application project. It's very complicated stuff. Much worse than physics or neuroscience (which at least makes logical sense). I call it The Prismatic Wall. You go in thinking it looks pretty and colorful, and you come out with seven kinds of fatal injuries. Yay. But anyway, I'm slogging through all that slowly (and expensively). Once I'm through with that then I can launch the site in "Closed Beta" Phase. However, even then, I still have some thinking to do regarding working with The New York Group. Wanna do it, but the terms are too difficult for me. I'll try negotiating. More on that topic another time...

The Beta Phase

A lot of hard work and six months later... I have uploaded, finally, the Elthos ODS Web Application online for the Closed Beta Testing Phase. Everything seems to be working. The Closed Beta will be for friends who I have invited to kick the tires on the application for a while, and provide bug reports and feedback. I'm also considering working with the old New York Group on a more advanced concept for the game system, which would take us between one and seven years to complete, with probability set on about two years. That's a long time. I would also have to relinquish some control over my side of the project, and to some degree a certain amount of ownership. Not necessarily crazy about that aspect, so I have to think about it. In one case I will continue to work on and improve the application over the course of this year, in the other case I will put this down for a while and work on the Advanced Aspects with the New York Group. I'll give myself a week or two to mull it over.

Anyway, I'm very excited to have the application online in any event. While not open to the public yet, I have met my goal for 2008! Very happy about that! :)

The Story of Elthos

Another step forward was taken in my agreement with Jarod this weekend. He will be picking up on taking the story from the game test this summer and turning it into a children's book. I'm very much looking foward to working with him. I've known Jarod since 2006 when we co-created the Literary Role Playing Game Society of Westchester and he's been both a help and an inspiration since then. The Yahoo site has posted as of today 1996 message, and we have a host of materials in the Files, Photos and Database sections.

Jarod is extremely talented. I'm really looking forward to seeing what he will come up with for the "Revenge of the Weasel King". We've already discussed that for simplicity sake we're going to take some liberties with the story line as I originally wrote it, which was a story-form of Gamesmaster's notes really. While it is very story-like, it isn't exactly a children's book the way it's written. It follows exactly what the characters said and did during the game, and for that reason it really doesn't conform to standard story structure. For example, in The Revenge the story takes place about a month after the "War of the Mice and the Weasels" which was created by the 12 kids I ran the Elthos RPG Game Club with in 2004. That's a great story in it's own right. But this summer we played the sequel. So there's a certain amount of backstory material that is not evident in The Revenge of the Weasel King, but pops up intermittently. So what we're going to do is reshape the material so that it makes a better book. The purpose of the book is to demonstrate what the Elthos World is like, and to show off one of the adventures so that other Gamesmasters can have a good idea of where I am going with it. The other purpose is to produce a children's story that will be fun in it's own right. I think Jarod will do an amazing job, based on the previous writing I've seen of his, and on the initial edit he did. This is very exciting!

Stay on Target ... Stay on Target...

I am steadily working toward my goal of publishing the Elthos ODS Web Application and ODS Rules book online by January. It is a lot of work, but I'm making progress and think I should be able to do it. The publication of the Web Application will include all of the Phase I features I have in mind, and even a few of the Phase II, such as, if all goes well, Object Sharing between Worlds. That is a bit of code that I am going to implement this weekend. If that goes well then I will probably publish the site without the payment system, and then add that the next week. So progress is being made in the programming department. On the other side of the shop the creative team is tooling away mightily. The Tarot Cards are coming along fantastically. And I have a very good Editor / Creative Writing Expert who is helping me to craft the first Elthos RPG Novelette. That's exciting. I hope to have that illustrated as a children's story as well. So all in all things are coming along. Slowly, but surely.

Inching Closer to Production

Well, it's taking a long time, but I'm definitely making steady progress. It's pretty exciting for me. I started out in 1978 with a rules system which was loosely based on the first three RPG rule books and from there GM'd my little heart out for three decades. Along the way I became a programmer in order to program my little system into something useful for me as a GM. Now, after one major rules simplification (MAJOR SIMPLIFICATION), I am almost ready to host the application online ... after 10 years of programming effort (well, most of the 10 was spent working on a prior version of my Rules system into a vb6 application, but that's been put on the shelf for the time being). All in all, I'm quite pleased! Soon... soon... soon it will be online... and then ... I can actually USE the darn thing finally! :)

Anyway, Summer 2008 play testing as pretty much concluded. We wound up with an 8 Chapter story named "The Revenge of the Weasel King". As is common in RPG stories there are a number of loose threads left remaining which can be picked up later to create another book. So for now there are two books. "The War of the Mice and the Weasels" and "The Revenge of the Weasel King". The Tarot deck is also coming along very nicely!

Once I get the application online then I can start using it in earnest to fill in the Elthos World and that will be the next leg of the journey. Stay tuned.