Making progress

Hey guys!  Couple three things to report:

Internal Development Wiki created
Game development generates lots of documentation.  Putting it all in one single central location has obvious efficiency benefits, but I hadn't prioritised it until now.

Behold...STONEGHOST!  We created it using Confluence.

Right now it's bare bones, but over time we'll build it up with design decisions.  This will help us work more efficiently as a team because there will be one authoritative source of decisions, game rules, writing guides, etc.

It's going to be spoiler heavy, so STONEGHOST will stay internal at least for the short term, but setting it up was something I should have carved out time for ages ago.

Miscellaneous tasks
A few more tasks on the new Interactive Big Fucking List™ have been completed:

• Lara created the UI for a secure messaging app that we're introducing in the next part of the story.  Your agent will use it to communicate with the task force
• We're experimenting with the discipline of creating writer's guides for new locations in the game.  The aim is to make locations feel consistent throughout the game (even if scenes or quests that feature them are written by different writers).  We created the first one of these, Suvarnabhumi Airport, today.
• I uploaded some more raw Illustrator files to the server in preparation for Jeff's second batch of art processing, tomorrow.

Master Skill List
Three of the systems we're planning to implement in 1.7 (money, inventory and quest log) will probably live on the character sheet somewhere.  That means we need to go firm on some character sheet design elements soon.

Skills are a key element of the character sheet, so today I worked on the game's Master Skill List.

As well as letting you know what your character can do (e.g. if your agent has Motorbike +1 she's pretty good at riding a motorbike), skills in Female Agent have an extra purpose.*  Certain skills affect your character's stats: e.g. riding a motorbike can make her more Daring.

So the skills are really important.  I'm sure we'll have at least one scene in Bangkok where your agent can ride a motorbike, but even if we don't the fact that your agent is a badass biker chick might still impact every single Daring roll in the game.

The skill list has needed some attention for a while, because some of the skills were too granular and others were too broad.  I went through it today and made some improvements to the design.  (For instance, I combined the Sidearm, Longarm and Sniper skills into one Firearms skill.  And I broke up some skills that were too broad: for example, the Cheerleading skill is now gone.  If your agent becomes a cheerleader, she'll now level up in the Dance, Gymnastics and Live Performance skills.)

I know this isn't sexy work, but better design in this area will let you create truly unique, complex heroines.  And...one part of the redesign is actually kind of sexy.  But more on that soon.

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* Is this unique in RPGs?  I haven't seen it in any other systems.  That said, the most recent version of D&D I played was 3.5.