I never said Armageddon Chess would be “revolutionary”. In fact, I said the exact opposite, that it was made under the production restrictions of “make a game you can send someone in an e-mail”. When I was here last time you guys told me I should make a simple prototype game, that's what Armageddon Chess is. It's exactly what I was told I should do, so I did it. It was the suggestion of people in these forums. My blog is a preview of a 14 game universe, focused on the over all story of the 4000 year long timeline that ties all of the games together. It includes a both playable game and a design document for a computer game. That story is written around, and often redefines the lyrics of the songs. That is the only true storytelling/writing ability I would attempt to lay claim too, I am pretty good at writing around and re-defining the song lyrics. I am confident that anyone who has actually read the story, including paying attention to then lyrics along the way, would support me in that. It really does work, maybe you should try reading the story. “...And the stars look down.”
Pirate Dawn is not badly organized. It might not be the way that you organize your design documents, but it is not badly organized. It's just not what you are accustomed too. Everything about each individual subject is together on one place. Corporations, ships, weapons, devices, etc. The alpha-numeric reference system will direct you to other sections whenever information in another section is relevant to what you are reading. Certainly, you wouldn't want to blend sections together, mixing corporations with weapons for example. Reorganizing it would simply mean reorganizing sections. Switching sections G and L for example. This also allows for whole new sections to be added to the document without needing to re-write or re-organize any other sections, all you need to do to add a whole new aspect to the game/section is add any needed references. This isn't meant for the players, they won't ever see this. It is for a development team to use. If you think it should be re-organized I could quickly re-arrange the sections in whatever order you think they should be in, but mixing information from sections would be a bad idea for a design document. You might do that in the game manual for the players that the document eventually gets edited into but for purposes of designing the game, the structure of the Pirate Dawn document is better than that. All the information of each individual aspect of the game is all in one place with referencing to things from other aspects of the game that are relevant. You often need to bounce around the document to read everything about a single subject, just like in the SFB rulebook, but that inconvenience is worth it to keep each aspect of the game together in a single section without mixing any other subjects into that section. It is not badly organized, it is just an organizational structure that you are not accustomed to using. I'm sure I haven't done this anywhere near as well as SVC does, he has a lifetime of experience doing it this way. He certainly does it a lot better than I do, but it is a very useful way of organizing a “working document” to make a game.
The Kaufman Retrograde concept I described in the previous post is a good example of the types of things that you can't see in the Pirate Dawn, and so you aren't fully appreciating what is actually there. If you look at the design of the ships in Pirate Dawn you will notice that the ships have forward firing weapons, aft firing weapons, and swivel mount weapons that can fire either forward or aft. This isn't just something I thought was cool, this is a part of making the combat of Pirate Dawn balanced on an “open map”. This is not an easy thing to do, it takes a great deal of knowledge of the tactics of space combat to achieve balance on an open map. The ships cannot fly fast backwards, they are restricted to about 1/3 speed when thrusting in reverse. The forward, aft, and swivel mounts then allow me to tailor each ship to function in a balanced way on an open map. To blunt the effect of the Kaufman Retrograde. This is only one example of many things in the Pirate Dawn design document that are “invisible” too you because you don't really understand how this type of combat functions and what the issues are. This is not an insult, or bragging, we really do have this down to a science. Not me, the SFB community, I am simply an expert in this body of knowledge. There is a lot more to the Pirate Dawn design document than what it appears to be on the surface, it is a carefully crafted combat environment that works within the “laws” of “2D ACM without gravity”. I'm not guessing, I already know how it works, and what you are seeing in the Pirate Dawn design document is something that not only works, but works in a very good way. I've resolved a lot of issues that many SFB experts would think are not solvable issues in that design document. It is much more than it appears to be on the surface.
If you are willing to allow this new thread to continue I will expand on the discussion of the Kaufman Retrograde. If not, I guess I will just sit in a corner somewhere and wait to die. I can't believe you won't even allow me to speak, won't even allow me to try.
