January: Updates from the Forge

[Jubal]

January 2017 Issue

EDITORIAL

The first month of 2017 has whistled by, with plenty of great project having outings across the Exilian website! After an exhausting and frantic second half of 2017, the forges of Exilian show little sign of slowing down. Outside what's covered in this article, we've had the announcement and release of Valar Morghulis' Ice and Fire edition, a great fantasy Rome:Total War mod that's now running on the Alexander engine with two new factions.

In other site news, we can also welcome Glaurung back as Basileus for the next six months, and GMD as Spatharios, and say a special thankyou to Comrade_General who's moving off the main staff team to the new honorary title of Permanent Despot of RTW in recognition of his many years of service to the site. Many thanks, CG! We're currently restructuring our staff and looking for new helpers, so if you're interested in helping out with staffing or content creation - whether that's helping make content for our YT and twitch channels, writing for Updates, or helping with our social media - please do get in touch with Jubal, Glaurung, or another senior staffer.

All that site news covered, without further ado, onto this month's Updates from the Forge (which is on time for once! Huzzah!) Once again, all articles written & edited by your very own Jubal!

CONTENTS:

• Postbug level editor released!
• Putting the image into Soundimage
• A Roleplaying Fool's Errand
• In construction: Space Shipyard!
• The Jolly Boar Kitchen - a solution to hungry work

Postbug level editor released!
Hemingway Games have returned to their fantastic little puzzle-game Postbug, centred around a ladybird with a passion for postal deliveries who dodges spiders and navigates around falling rocks... with a level editor! This potentially huge expansion of the game is being developed to allow players and level designers to create their own levels and puzzles, with a simple toolset but a vast range of possible creative options. The feature is still in development, but players can already build and play their own levels and shareable links to levels will hopefully be coming out soon.

Check out Postbug, play & discuss the game, and have a go at making your own levels at the links below:

Exilian Review Thread

Play Postbug

Putting the image into Soundimage
This month, Eric Matyas of SoundImage announced a big new expansion of the SoundImage library to include graphics textures as well as the massive range of sound and music clips already in place! This new texture library will be a great free resource for modders, game developers, and those doing a wide range of other projects. It's another great expansion to the already impressive resources that SoundImage offers.

There may well be upcoming restructuring in how the site works - there will certainly be new textures and sounds, with more being added every week. Whether you're a developer, artist, graphic designer, or just someone looking for textures for a project, SoundImage now has a lot to offer and it's a great project to support.

SoundImage Textures Thread

SoundImage Website

A Roleplaying Fool's Errand...
From the Utherwald Press forums we're now getting some fun testing writeups of campaign ideas, the most recent being the start of the "Fool's Errand" campaign plans that came out in 2017. In this first episode, our slightly less than dashing heroes Arnie and Brick "the Brick" are hired by machiavellian crime boss Ferret (there's something about ferrets, isn't there?) to head out and retrieve a mysterious package from a bank vault in an abandoned town. Adventure ensues, with aeroplanes, rival gangs, and ferocious monsters, and it's still only the first session! Will our heroes survive? Why is Brick called "the Brick"? Who is the mysterious locksmith Karla who's been sent with them on their journey? Honestly, I still don't know the answers to all of those questions, but reading the session one writeup is definitely the first step to finding out!

Whether you're a GM, a player, or just want a good read, the campaign writeup is great and well worth a look. For GMs especially the game master's notes add extra perspectives on the story that could be helpful when planning and thinking about your own future ideas, plans, and campaigns.

Utherwald Press on Exilian

A Fool's Errand: Session One

In construction: Space Shipyard!
In development from new member KSGuills comes "Space Shipyard", a game using the core mechanics of FTL with a wide range of additional features and ideas planned and many new assets in development. The game focusses on your ability to keep a ship running during combat, so your crew can repair the damage, the weapons and other systems can keep running, and you can - hopefully - win the day.

There's a great amount of content planned for the game; the focus is on building a system for 2-player battles, but there will also be a fully developed, procedurally generated single player campaign mode and a wide range of options for how to build and construct your ship. The ship construction will be constrained and developed by a skill/tech tree that you can work to build up and develop as you play the game. There are also plans for area effects including nebulas and extreme temperature effects that your ship will need to deal with as well as the threat of your actual opponent.

With a great deal of content, and friendly devs happy to answer questions, this looks like a great one to take a look at - head over, give some feedback and ask some questions, and watch this excellent project develop!

Space Shipyard Exilian Thread

The Jolly Boar Kitchen - a solution to hungry work
Tired of your art or game dev work? Running out of ideas for things to eat in the evenings? Or are you a budding chef who could share quirky and interesting ideas with your fellow creative folk? Either way, do come along and check out the Exilian food forum, the Jolly Boar kitchen. This month we've had a featured recipe from Jubal, who's been making Pelamushi (Georgian grape pudding) - it may look a bit like a brain on a plate, but we're assured it tastes considerably better, and only needs sugar, flour, cornflour, grapes and walnuts to make!

If you want to find out more about this, post some recipes of your own, or just chat and get ideas for food to eat, do take a look at the food forum at the link below.

Enter The Jolly Boar Kitchen

As ever, if you've got something in development or want to help write Updates, get in touch! There'll be lots going on around the site in the near future, including our traditional Cyril & Methodius Day celebrations on Feb 14, and hopefully plenty more new projects and games turning up, with a LIFE beta in the offing and new Norbayne material being published all the time. Stay tuned for all of that and see you for the February edition!

Best wishes and take care, until the next issue of Updates from the Forge!