So it's been a long while since the last one so there's some kind of large updates. The first is that I'm rearranging the priority on my side projects because there's two things I really want to get ready to go in time for EverFree NorthWest.

The first is the Pony Tabletop RPG "Ponies! Ponies! Ponies!" like the Bunworld rpg it's a playing card based rpg rather than a dice game. It's going to get a hardprint as a kind of zine. Currently I'm 14 pages in, including placeholders for images and logos, and have finished the intro, character creation, and the first of the gameplay section. The goal is to have this ready to do a beta print in time for the con so I can show it in the Tabletop gaming room.

The second is that I wanted to try doing some badge commissions. Both shipped and available for pick up at the con (at a discount). The first is based on the classic "Only idiots sit in this box" (but with custom text), the second with YCH as the Evergiven blocking the canel, and the third is the Alphabet Busts I used for the posters in the muppet comic. I plan to open these commissions once I have both the blanks for all of them (including the poster one) and once I decide on a price and have at least one completed sample for each.

On a less pleasant note this does mean the other side projects are shelved for the moment. Though with one exception they're not canceled by any means.

Now that one exception is the old Patreon comic Cutest Hell. The comic never really got a good reception and as the plot was so reliant on a specific art style (which I also don't think I quite managed) I have to admit that I don't quite have the heart to continue that one.

To end on a more pleasant note it's being replaced with a new comic. The new one is another scifi series called Star Jumpers. Eventually it's going to replace SIS (once that series runs its full length) in a few years. Until then it'll upload to Patreon with a 10 page delay before being released publicly. Unlike SIS the new series is much more humor oriented and much more episodic. It follows the adventures of a trio of freelancers traveling the stars and the various shenanigans that occur.

The first page is already up on my patreon, though it's not yet made public.

https://www.patreon.com/inhumaninterest

I hope none of these changes are too obnoxious and I hope you can keep enjoying my work.

Lost a good chunk of the month to a combination stupid workplace BS and to a depressive episode. Things seem ok now, but it definitely screwed up my productivity for a lot of the month.

S&W: Added Introduction, reformatted to 2 column for the bulk of text and with a placeholder image. I'll be following this for most of the manual I'm thinking. I know some that get designed for wider prints use three columns but I think that'll be harder to print.

Pyg Sygn: Sketched out the first of the scene transitions, I've decided to handle those as a temporary mask/foreground over the background of the new area. I also found my old files, it looked for a while like they'd been lost in the change of my hard-drive but I'd actually just forgotten where I put them, chalk it up to stupidity but that would've been basically all progress lost. Also backing up those online to avoid this in the future.

Fanny: Noted out current matrix stats for several of the rooms, if the game stores the stats for the rooms as a matrix and only references individual cells it'll be easier to export as save data and make the game more compact. Place holder room for title and menu screen done. Planning to layer the menus between a new/continue screen, and then an overall menu. That way the game loads the file with the trophy matrix and the completion record along with current restaurant stats instead of my needing to figure out how to make two separate save records.

Imp: Inked and cleaned the line art for the one of the clan pages. I'm planning to keep these as low contrast monochrome in the background behind the text. It means none of the glamor shots of larger RPG's but it also avoids the pages looking bland or blank.

Oscar Helios: Small work on chapter 2, only 600 words but see intro to this update.

PPP: Wrote the description for the various stats.

So yeah, November can eat a bag of bloody garbage and I'm glad to see its backside. I'm hoping to see December sucking a little less.

Sadly October was not one of my more productive months. Stuff got done but I spent more than a few weeks getting a solid beat-down and losing my personal time. Still, Some updates:

I finished the race entries for PPP. They each get only one major ability, with a physical buff for the Earth ponies, which I'll admit is a little similar to the official rpg, but most of those abilities open up other tables down the line that expand on it if the player so chooses.

Finished the first scene in chapter 2 of OH and opened up on the second scene.

BG sketches for Pyg Sygn got finished for one of the death scenes, a general parking lot scene, and part of the scene for the ranger station.

Finished moving the rough notes, just stat listings and scribbled ideas, for Bun World over to the official notebook where they're being organized into the same form as the final book. I also finished ability tables for small blades, which is the new division for swords/knives/etc.

Like I said, not my best month, but I'll take progress where and when I can.

So, it's been for-EV-er since I last posted one of these. I suppose it shouldn't come as a surprise that, like pretty much everyone, the last couple of years kind of kicked my ass. As a result I didn't get much done on all of the side projects.

I want to fix most parts of that. First thing is that I'm adjusting how I pursue these side projects, instead of doing two at a time and switching every couple of weeks or something like that I'm going to do one at a time and cycle every time I post the next update on the comic.

There's also some more projects that got added into the mix.

So the current list of projects is as follows:

Previous Projects:

* Shamans and Wizards (TTRPG): first draft is finished, working on collecting all of the pieces into one print file as a PDF.

* Pyg Sygn (Visual Novel): Writing is finished, working on the sketch pieces for each of the pages.

* Fannies (Sim game): Completely rebooting as I'm changing it to an independent game instead of a fan game.

New Projects:

* Imperium (TTRPG): First draft is finished, reformatting it to a new page size since the 1/4 page size was proving difficult to work with.

*Bun World (TTRPG): Working on rough draft, filling out all of the ability tables

*Ponies, Ponies, Ponies (TTRPG): Working on rough draft, finished intro

*Oscar Helios (Novel): Working on rough draft, finished first chapter

*Comic Organizing/Site Building: Finished sorting comics on IB, Sorted SIS and TMinus comics on FA, sorted first arc of BNJ on FA

So this time aside from some general updates on all the projects there's two major announcements regarding the normal webcomics and the Pyg Sygn project respectively.

I'll save those for last so to begin with, this last week had the playtest party go over one of the intro scenarios I want to compile for starting players. It consisted of searching a house haunted by the spirit of a roomba for a missing child. It was fun and went pretty well. I think it might have had more chaos with a larger or more diverse party (currently the test team is a two person party). It also gave me a chance to check some balances on saves since they were a much larger mechanic for this mission.

Fanbears has seen probably the least progress, which isn't a bad thing since there's still progress and it's one of the two longer-development projects so some slow periods are to be expected. The Interview layout is the current step. Right now what I'm addressing is the method of adding the procedurally generated interview questions in a format that allows the player to choose them and have that properly tracked by the program.

Now Pyg Sygn has had a lot of progress. I've been updating fairly often on twitter but the event map was finished and the actual programming and writing is the current process. The intro has been scripted and the first of the four major areas has been scripted. The process plan is to finish scripting on all of the game and then to go back and add in the audio-visual components. I'll also try to get the intro finished first so it can be posted as a demo.

The larger announcement for Pyg Sygn is that the project and schedule scope and the scope of all future game projects has been adjusted to include two comics per game. The idea is that each game will have a short (1-10 page/panel) intro and outro comic. For Pyg Sygn these comics will be titled Rot and Ruins respectively and will take place before and after the events in the game. The change in schedule is that now the planned date for Pyg Sygn is for a late September/Early October completion of the intro comic and the game. Regardless of that I'm planning to do the public (patreon release will be as soon as the project steps finish) releases with Rot on the first week of October, The game somewhere in the middle (Weekend of the 18th most likely), and Ruins on Halloween.

The larger announcement for the webcomic is that I'm planning to shift for to a twice a week update schedule. I'm building up a buffer first but in two weeks I'll make the shift. Next week I'll open up a poll as to what should be done with the second update (whether it should be from the same series as the other update) and the week after it I'll add the second update to the schedule.

Also for the month of September I'm going to place S&W and Fanbears on the backburner so I can focus on getting Pyg Sygn finished for Halloween.

So, as I mentioned on the last weekly comic, this is going up early since I'll be on the road much of tomorrow en route to the last Bronycon. It's just as well since it's been a while since the last of these was posted.

So, Shamans and Wizards has continued the play-testing run and identified a few more points about equipment that had to be clarified. Such as the function of the rate of fire state on ranged weapons. The upside is I'm already seeing the playtest group indulging in the spray-and-pray tactic this encourages. (When attacking additional attacks up to the weapons rate of fire can be made with a culmative -5 penalty on each new attack.). It has been about as effective as I'd hoped. The play-test sessions/campaign is about 3/4 of the way through and once it's done I'll bury myself deep in applying the lessons from this and advancing the game instructions another edition number.

For the Fanbear Sim the entire animatronic room and it's functions have been completed and tested. The Human Resources room (Menu for managing employees) is 90% done with the remaining percentage revolving around programming in the interview process and the background check process. For the time being these will ping off of placeholder values as I haven't settled on the final list of employee traits.

Pyg Sygn has definitely had the most progress. The event map is completed and I've moved onto the programming that map into the game itself along with the actual writing for narration and dialogue in each scene. In that area the introduction arc is completed and I've moved onto the main portion of the game. Hopefully that will be completed before the end of August and I'll be able to move onto the illustrations for the game.

As always thank you all for your patience and I hope you enjoy these final products when they reach completion.

So, if you follow my twitter then you probably noticed the post saying the status update for this month would be late. If not, then I guess this counts as informing you.

The main reason it was late may also make this one of the shorter status updates. I basically spend most of the last few weeks in incrementally more extreme crunch-time on several of my college assignments. It reached peak last week with a major project deadline and two midterms on the same day. But I'm through the pinch and hopefully that will accelerate things somewhat.

That said, it does mean there's not much to say about what has been accomplished so most of this will be what is planned for this month.

For S&W the test session had it's first round go off with very little in the way of hitches. My personal highlight was seeing people utilize the "spray and pray" mechanic resulting in someone emptying most of an automatic shotgun into a doorframe. More than points to change on the system it highlighted some changes to make to the test scenarios themselves, namely that there's a bit too much combat/skill use in them. Over the next month I should get the next part of those test sessions completed and move some more sections over to the cimpiled document. Specifically the goal is to get over to the Magic/Perks sections (the two least organized and most expansive)

For the Fanbear Sim I've made a small amount of progress fixing a bug I found where at any level above the base for the room the game would try to read non-existant employees and crash. This has been fixed by adding in the missing employee data as blanks.

For Pyg Sygn the event map is almost completed and only needs the final segment written to leave the map completed. From that the next stept is programming the script, writing the detailed narration, and illustrations.

Hopefully this month will be more productive and I won't end up quite so dead at the first of April.

Alright! Month two of the new system and it seems to be working well, this one will be a little more streamlined since I've already posted an introduction.

1: Shamans and Wizards is trucking right along, but, while most of the equipment section has been organized and moved to the print format there's a new delay/progress. I'm running another test session with the current version and it's resulting in my needing to make some more edits, most notably:

•  Added an occupation section
•  Adjusted the starting funds so that all characters start with a minimum of $100
• Corrected some typos involving a mix-up between Attributes and Attribute Bonuses

So progress of a different sort is happening and that's still good.

2: In the sim game the HR system has progressed to the point that the "hiring" and "Firing" systems are working in a bare bones sort of way. Though at the moment the resume format and the text haven't been enstated so right now it's giving the choice to buy or sell employees. While that's appealing in a bitter humorous sense it's not what I'm going for so that's the next step.

3: Pyg Sygn is coming along nicely as well. I said it would be something that moved along a lot faster than the other projects and so far that's been correct. The story mapping is now a little less than halfway done. Once that step is done the next one will be to program the scene progression into the game, then the writing, and then the images and sound.

Also the early access Patreon comic is back up and running, so if you'd like that's an option available.

https://www.patreon.com/inhumaninterest

So the first part is to update the status of the three ongoing projects under the Inhuman Interest banner.

1: The oldest of which is 'Shamans and Wizards' which if you were not following my tumblr is the tabletop rpg system I'm writing. Currently this project is moving between the stage of being around two dozen documents (separated by chapter and subject) to the stage of being a single document that can be printed and downloaded more readily for the next step in editing. This is also part of the second restructuring for the book as I work to make sure the single document is ledgible and doesn't do weird things like split a chapter title across two pages. This porcess is at about the 25% marker having finished the Intro, Race, Classes, and Skills sections. While normally that would be a much larger percentage the Perks, Magic, and Items sections are all less furmulaic in layout and so will take much longer to reduce down to the single document.

The next step is to run the second round of testing, while it's likely most of this will be in games run between me and gaming groups off and online it will also be available on my patreon. Though if you download the test version from that I'd ask that you let me know so that I can get feedback on any test sessions. In nomral project terms this would be Version 0.06 and this would be the Alpha testing phase.

2: The next oldest project is the business sim game. I haven't mentioned this as much before online but the game, working title 'Freddy Fanbears Pizza' is currently being assembled piece-meal. That is the individual major components are being completed separately so that coding and elements can be just pasted into the final version. At the moment the 'Bot Bay' system for managing the animatronics has been finished and, due to their simularities, the 'HR Dept' section is the new focus. Right now these are only being brought up to some rough 8-bit graphics for the alpha since most of the really important work between editions will be programming instead of graphical.

3: The third project is something on lower priority but which is still likely to finish before the others since it is lower in scale as well. It's a proof-of-concept VN called "Pyg Sygn" inspired by certain horror stories. This is currently at the stage of having the two longest story routes and the shortest route mapped out for writing and narrative structure.

I'll try to make sure to produce a monthly update like this just after the monthly Patreon comic goes up.