Now Arriving: It's Araveen!
almost 2 years ago – Fri, Nov 18, 2022 at 01:41:36 PM

Greetings space fans! Who's ready to set foot (or paw, perhaps?) on a brand new world today? 

Art Update

Welcome to Araveen, the homeworld of the Felisi. This is Trebulin city, the capital city. You'll get to experience this seat of Felisi culture, learning, and science experiments of questionable merit. Enjoy!

 Araveen is the last of the location illustrations that we have planned for the base box. The next step for our artists is to illustrate the Items that you'll be able to add to your Passport as you play through the game. We won't be sharing those spoilers here, but look forward to finding them in Insula!

Graphic Update

Now that we have all ten of the Map illustrations for the base box, we can move forward with other game graphics. Location Cards and Focus Cards are both grouped by Location, and so the backs of these types of cards feature little bits of the Map illustration along with an official seal.

We're also working on a board for Navigation to use. It's smaller than the Mission Control Board, and it provides places to keep the piles of DISCs that the Navigator will use as your crew explores new places, and also for the location cards you'll be putting into play on the map.  

Graphics work will continue with setting up the other sides of the Location, Item, and Contact cards. 

Special Preview

In our previous update, we mentioned a plan to print some of the content of the game by the end of the year. Our thoughts were to try and print a mini-box with a preview of parts or all of Storybook 1, but as we looked into the logistics of doing so, the print costs were just too high for a short run. We're going to focus on delivering a preview digitally instead.

You'll have three options on how to consume this delicious demo preview! 

1) A print and play of maps, cards, and tokens, with a PDF of the text portions of the first half of Storybook 1 (you can print it, or use a tablet/phone to read paragraphs). 

2) A TTS (Tabletop Simulator) module which you can play through on your own, or with your friends.

3) A TTS live demo with us during Special Preview Times - we'll schedule slots that folks can sign up for, and we'll help you through using TTS.  We'll start scheduling slots in January, much like we did for our events the year that Gen Con was virtual. It was fun to hang out with game friends, and it'll be exciting to do it again! 

4) Secret fourth option: We'll have a demo table at our booth in the PAX Unplugged expo hall, although we do note that masks are required, and reading many paragraphs out-loud can get to be a little exhausting in that situation. At a minimum, you can always come peek at the cool components :) 

Update Schedule + PAX Unplugged

As mentioned above, we'll be at PAX Unplugged in December. Our next KS update will come after that in the middle of December, as we move toward sharing preview chapters with you all! In the meantime, we're continuing our writing efforts so we can get this game to your real table in addition to your virtual one!

That New Spaceship Smell
about 2 years ago – Wed, Sep 28, 2022 at 11:59:00 AM

Greetings fellow spacefarers! There's nothing quite like clambering through an airlock into a spaceship for the first time, is there? You've got the open universe in front of you, your friends in comfortable chairs around you, and that new spaceship smell wafting up from all of the fresh control panels. 

Graphics Update

Over the past few months, we've been buffing and polishing the Odyssey's dashboard. You'll notice that the colors on the Mission Control Board now neatly match the colors of the Odyssey itself, giving you one cohesive spaceship experience from inside to out. It's our plan to use this as the final game graphics (barring minor post-proofing adjustments of course). 

We also took another pass at the Momentum Cards. The fresh icons are meant to clearly convey the meaning of each different type of Momentum, so you can plug them into your Mission Control Board with confidence. 

The more Momentum you add, the livelier your board becomes. Your Operations Officer can track one, two, or even three missions at a time. There's even space for Focus cards to sit on the board so you can keep track of what's next.

Graphics work will continue into the purview of the Navigator next. This includes things like polished graphics for all of the Maps and the Location Cards.   

Art Update

Speaking of Maps, work on the final Map is progressing. We've got a watercolor-layering preview for you:

Still more color to be added, but it's shaping up nicely! With this and the MCB, we're approaching a point where all the biggest art assets are completed. Exciting :)

Writing and Stories Update

Writing continues with a special focus on Storybook 1. Chapters 7 and 8 have been getting some intense writing time. We're also running internal playthroughs of earlier chapters to keep increasing the level of polish and consistency throughout the whole story. Once the earlier parts of the story are ready, we'll send Chapter 9 of Storybook 1 into the supercomputer. 

We also have some exciting news! Our writing crew grew this summer, please welcome Mimi Mondal:

Mimi has been thoroughly vetted by Zibzab Writing Value Analysts (as you may expect, they score you based on your work's total scrabble value), and of course our own team. She'll be helping us with our push to get more stories onto your table. She's begun work on Storybook 2, since introducing someone late into the Storybook 1 efforts would be, according to the Zibzab, "anti-counter-nega-productive", a rare triple negative!

What's Next?

We're working hard to get stories ready for print so that we can produce Physical Game Objects this year, which remains our goal and target. At the end of October, we're going to evaluate what we could feasibly print at year's end and make a decision on how to proceed. This may involve a short run (exclusively for backers) of a playable Storybook 1. We're looking into multiple options with our factory and printing partners to make this happen! 

This would not affect the delivery of the full game + expansion, it would be a gift to our backers for putting up with our much-longer-than-anticipated production time for the game. We appreciate your patience, understanding, kindness, apples, and look forward to finally sharing this thing!

The Latest from Space
over 2 years ago – Tue, Jul 19, 2022 at 02:11:40 AM

Hello spacefarers! It's a sunny, warm day here on Earth (maybe a little too warm!) and we're thinking about galactic adventures!

Graphics Update

The look of the game graphics is continuing to evolve as we settle into the final look of the game. Everything physically fits together, and it's enjoyable to play, but there's a bit of room for improvement to really bring your starship Odyssey to life.

For example, we've been putting finishing touches on the Map frame artwork lately. All the tools to help you navigate new places are there and easy to view.

Next up on the polish list are our Momentum Cards, Focus Icons, and some of the details on the Mission Control Board. 

One of our bigger tasks this summer has been to finalize the processes that allow us to bring the stories from the database and lay out / typeset them into book form. Basically - we're automating things so that we don't have to cut and paste in image headers/footers for every paragraph (that would take a long time!). In addition to the standard scaffolding for paragraphs, there are a lot of icons that need to land in just the right spot. 

Art Update

Watercolors have begun for Araveen. The tiny progress photo that we've seen so far is looking good. Map painting is a long traditional media process, so it should be finished later this Summer. It's our last map artwork awaiting completion, and all that'll be left to do after it's painted is to put the frame on it like the one on the Odyssey above!

We're also continuing work on illustrations for the Passport Items and Contacts, and anticipate that work being done in the next 2-3 months. That will wrap up all of our artwork needs for the project!

Writing and Stories Update

We've just finished a round of intense revisions to Chapters 1, 2, and 3 in the first Storybook. These chapters have achieved a very nice level of finish, including connections with chapters that occur after them, so we're putting them to rest. Next up for us is writing more blurbs in Chapter 8.

Getting the stories into our blurb writing/playing system has taken a bit longer than anticipated. Your Passport save file supports replaying any Chapter that you have unlocked. This means that you might have Passport Items or Contacts from the future of the narrative. Human players can handle this just fine, but the narrative supercomputer needed some updates to be able to cope. Once that is squared away, we'll be putting Storybook 1 Chapter 9 into the supercomputer so we can write and test at the same time.

Other Storybooks are in various stages of completion, and we'll get back to them once we have Storybook 1 in a play-ready state from start to finish.

Funding + Schedule Update

A couple of folks requested an update on the financial health of the project.  Asmadi Games is in sound financial shape, and we anticipate no issues getting 1001 Odysseys to print and shipped to you all once it's completed.  Our other projects are doing fine (One Deck Galaxy is in production now, Aegean Sea is up next and will be in production this Fall), and our existing games are selling well. We have purchased 0 (zero) ponies and no magic beans (and definitely no bitcoin), worry not.

Our goal remains to physically print 1001 Odysseys content this year and get it on its way to you. It's been a rough year (it's been a rough 2 years!) but we're working through it as best we can. I'm optimistic about our goal, and as the artwork mentioned above gets completed, we'll share those pieces that won't spoil storybits (and update on the completion of other things). 

What's Next?

Gen Con is just around the corner! You can come visit our booth, we will not be running demos but will have a variety of promo cards available to hand out, along with our games and shiny pins for sale. Our artist Cari will also be at Gen Con, just down the aisle from us! Visit her too, she's cool :)

History in Space
over 2 years ago – Sun, May 22, 2022 at 07:20:35 PM

Hello Friends!

Thanks to those of you who were able to stop by and see us at PAX East, it was grand to talk about the game and to share the new passport folder in person. It folds, it holds, it's amazing and bold design! We look forward to seeing more of you at Gen Con this summer and PAX Unplugged in the fall. Plans for demos at those shows will be announced closer to those dates!

Art Update

The Artists continue to work away on the images that will bring Insula to life for everyone. We are getting dangerously close to spoilers in the art realm, but we felt good about showing you this image:

There will be adventure! Our next art projects are more in the graphic design side of things, so:

Graphics Update

We've been capturing the odd moments from the edges of working on the narrative tree to continue working on the graphics that sit around the beautiful illustrations and bring the whole thing together to create the feeling of being on board the Odyssey with your crew. 

We've had prototype / partially completed art for our location, momentum, and focus cards for a while, and we're now putting the finishing touches on to them to make them as cool as they deserve to be (it turns out, all cards want to be cool, it's just a thing that cards do). We expect to have much of this to show off in our next update! 

Stories and Writing Update

Specific text continues to fall firmly into the spoiler category, but we are still writing, and also revising. We're reading through some of the older work with fresh eyes which gives us the opportunity to laugh at it all over again and to improve it for overall continuity.  

With the updates to our Tech, we've been able to fill in some of the missing blurbs that we'd been waiting to get into the database (more on that next), so we can lock in some of the chapters that were 95% done. Hurray! 

Technology Update

New computers have been installed, and after a bit of motherboard drama everything is up and running!  Did we also install a big fancy new air conditioner so that the office won't be a billion degrees this summer? Yes! This is especially relevant as Boston braces for...95 degree May (what the hell?) weather this weekend. Benchmarks are now showing our traversal algorithms running between 5x-20x as fast on this machine as our previous cloud options, so a traverse that would've previously taken a day can be completed in a matter of hours. This is extremely helpful, and will accelerate our work both writing and verifying chapters. 

The next tech project (for me, Chris) is in now upgrading the presentation of our virtual-play website, to display a fancier simulated version of the Mission Control Board and game state. This is what we'd planned to share available to the public late last year, but got sidetracked with writing/upgrades/etc. 

What's Next?

More writing! More tech! We're getting closer to done with parts of the game, and we'll be starting efforts on translating words stored in the database into words that're properly laid out in a PDF that we can print out and do a physical test of some of the chapters in the game (with maps! and cards! and boards!). The goal is to have that in place before Gen Con, and if things are amenable to full demos there, we'll run them. If not, we'll put together a stream of us doing it here at home. Maybe even with some special guests! 

...the special guest is Ivy. Happy Spring and almost beginning of Summer, everyone :) 

Databases: Anyone got a Space Age Computer?
over 2 years ago – Fri, Apr 08, 2022 at 07:35:27 AM

(Oops, Sarah made a minor edit after me so it says the post is by Sarah, but it's actually by me, Chris! Sorry for the confusion :D )

Hello friends, and happy Spring to everyone in the Northern hemisphere! The winter chillies are fading, and being able to go outside again? Yes please.

April is a busy month for us, we (Julia and I) are traveling for the next week, and then we (Sarah, Julia, and I) will be at PAX East the week after! We're going to be in Tabletop in the Foam Brain Games booth, and we'd love to see anyone who wants to stop by :)  We will have the same super-mini-demo of 3 cards that we had at PAX Unplugged, as required-masks makes playing full chapter demos somewhat untenable. Say hello! Wave from a distance! Air hugs! It's all the social-distancing rage. 

Statistics!

Let's talk about some numerical progress: Writing-work has continued, and we've now got 1,112 paragraph-entries in the database. Things are going well, and our writers just wrapped up a 2 hour writey-feedback-slack-meets, as is Thursday Tradition. Ivy (cat) oversaw this meeting from far above the computer. She liked what she saw between naps.

These paragraphs and their commands represented a total of 7.9 million unique pathways that are traversed while playing through the game so far.

Now, you might be saying, "That sounds like a lot of pathways. How's your database feeling?"

In response, the database let out a fascinatingly unique noise that represents a combination of a 56K modem, the sound of finding a treasure in The Legend of Zelda, and a slide whistle. 

It's a few too many paths, as it turns out.

The Database

Much of my (Chris) work this winter and spring has been refining the database to make it do the things we want it to do to support the writers. There're four main things the database does.

• Centralizes all the writing work so everyone on the team can see it. This part is quite fine, and behaves like a wiki. (We also have a wiki for backstory and whatnot!) 
• Allows our Narrative Architect (Sarah) to enter the commands that follow each written paragraph into the system, which allows for the next two functions:
• Dynamically creates entries for the new paragraphs that will be available to players based on all the commands from previous paragraphs. (Essentially, it builds out the chapter as we go.)
• Tests every single possible set of choices that the players could make in a chapter, providing statistics, verification of unreachable blurbs, and verification that there are no dead-ends.

The last two functions are where the heavy work has been ongoing. Our original traversal algorithm blazed straight through the whole chapter, trying everything, doing it all with style, and then it hit a particularly tall, wide, and branchy chapter and basically exploded. 7 million of those 7.9m paths came from one chapter and would've taken 49 hours to fully execute on the server (too many, especially when the traversal must be run multiple times as we add commands and build out chapters). 

Over the past several weeks, I rebuilt it with a heavier focus on converging identical states at various checkpoints, and have been testing it thoroughly. Here's what this looks like, functionally:

You can see that there're some percentage estimates of how often a specific paragraph is likely to appear in a segment of playthrough, and also how likely it is to reach game states approaching this area (we call them Nodes!) .

The further you get into the chapter, the more potential game states there are! Ones that the database has run through are in green, pending states are red. This is from some testing I was doing today:

This view is for me and Sarah, the rest of the writers do not have to worry about our shiny-computer-totally-not-Evangelion-interface. Writers see something much more reasonable, like this:

Hey look, it's the start paragraph from the first chapter of the first book of the game!  

What this allowed us to do is identify the area of the offending-7-million-path chapter that had the problem paragraphs, trim down a couple options, and reduce it to a much more reasonable 500,000 paths (which, with the new improvements, runs much faster). Hurray! 

Playtesting

We had planned to open up online-playtesting of some chapters to backers in the past couple months, but getting the database functioning properly for writing the game took priority - we still want to get that functionality out so that you can try out some chapters, and I'll be back to working on that after PAX! 

Priority 1 is getting these stories finished so that you all can enjoy the game on your tabletops, and we remain hard at work toward that goal!