What's New Ross

Tigerwolfe asked me this question on Aug. 10th, and I didn't see it until today. The short answer to this question is: I got a new job. I've been unemployed for a year now, so this is pretty terrific news as far as I'm concerned. My "day job" is waiter, because I like the fast pace and constant change. On Monday, I started five days of training (which they wanted to get through pretty fast) and then they put me on the floor. So for the past week, I've been adapting to a new schedule. Some days I worked during the day, sometimes I trained at night.

But that means nothings been going on with Cairn. I made a lot of little tweaks to the game. Stuff that I noticed while I was working on other parts of the game. For example, I was looking at some of the species traits (those special abilities that come from your species), and I wanted to change two of them. This would affect some animals' hit points, so I took at look at those. Some things didn't make sense to me, so I created a table of all the professions and their hit points, and made adjustments. Little stuff like that.

I tweaked:

Professions. Hit points and magic points.

Species. Adjusted some of their traits. Some species had traits that didn't make sense. Squirrels are just rats with fluffier tails, so why are rats considered small and squirrels aren't? All the predators in the game were given the "shadowed" trait, but armadillos aren't really predators so why do they have it? A lot of animals have the "sense" trait, but how do you distinguish between a bat's echo-location and a mole's sense of smell?

Finishing Touches. This is the chapter that tells you how to put it all together. There are some things in there I don't like -- wording -- that has to change.

There are still some big things that have to be done. But now that I have a regular schedule, I have a sense of when I can tackle them. I'll be off this Wednesday and Thursday, so I'll be focusing on Cairn on those days. Days when I work nights seem to be good for getting some work done in the mornings. But working the breakfast shift seems to wipe me out for the rest of the day (breakfast is busy!). Happily, so far, they seem to be putting me on more dinners.

So please bear with me as I adapt to a new way of life and try to fit both SoulJar and my day job together. As always, thank you for your continued support and interest.

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