Boy has it been a while... For the one of you that might read this, I hope you missed me

Since I can't carve out the time to write up campaigns anymore, I think I'm going to use this space as a place to keep track of our progress while working on Undestined. Jacob and I have still been working on Undestined. We've been scheduling 2-4 hours once a week to work on our game and kept to that most of the time. This allows us to keep tweaking our classes and systems based on what we've learned from the week's play-testing session. It's a pretty good rotation, but the workload seems endless. It's been hard to imagine ever settling in one something we could call "complete". I'm just very grateful for our dedicated group of play-testers willing to play our home-brewed game week after week with no end in sight.

We've got a pretty major campaign in the works at the moment. It's all pouring out of Jacob's brain and is really helping to build the lore/setting of the world. Each of us play-testers has at this point 5 characters spread throughout the world of Undestined working thru campaigns that seem to be weaving into one another. Each one presents a new threat to the status quo of the world and our characters are sometimes the driving force behind that change, and sometimes trying to stop it depending on who we are playing. He's weaving together what seems to be a masterful set of campaigns. It's not surprising given his over 20 years of experience creating and running campaings, but I'm always impressed nonetheless. I can't wait to get it all down on paper for someone else to dig into. The fact that someone else has ever gotten lost in a world that we created (like with the other posted campaigns), blows my mind. That's the dream.

My "new" job that I got over two years ago which pulled me away from getting these campaigns posted monthly has been incredible. It does keep me busier in mind and body than my previous job, and it makes working on Undestined more difficult. It did give me one thing that will help us though. I recently learned about using the Agile methodology for software development. At the company where I work, we apply this methodology to a lot more than just software development and it works wonders. We've applied some Scrum ideas to our Undestined work, and seeing it on paper gives me hope that we can and will have a finished game.

Speaking of the actual game, Undestined, I don't think I've ever discussed what it is in too much detail. It's a medieval fantasy tabletop RPG. We currently have 7 races and 32 unique classes. Each class has 8 unique abilities that you gain as you level up. Each of these abilities starts out as a core ability and can be mastered up to 4 times to increase its power. To fully unlock any one class you'd have to get to level 40. That's up to at least 40 levels for all 32 classes. There's a lot of content we've been working on and I'm surprised with how close we are on the classes. They feel like they are in a really good place finally. One of our primary goals with Undestined is to allow for player creativity as much as possible. One of the most enjoyable things in roleplaying for us is finding new and unique ways to build our heroes into what we want them to be. Our masteries and the choices involved in picking them is the driving force behind this. It's a lot of fun and I can't wait to share it with more people someday.

There's an enormous amount more I'd love to ramble on about for Undestined, but I'll save it for future blog posts. Hopefully I'll have another in about a month. Feel free to share this around if you know someone who might be interested in our journey to a complete game.

Jason McCracken

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