It's been about 100 days since I uploaded a playable build of City, and although I've not been posting updates, I've still been chipping away. I thought I'd post what I've been up to, since the game in now markedly different in some respects. Since August, there has been complete re-structuring of how game events are spaced out and experienced. Before, map travel was a simple affair akin to travelling the world map in a JRPG; but I've long found this to be a bit dull, and it was a result of my initial design closely imitating Sunless Sea, sans any of the enemies and combat taking place in the overworld. As a result the map just felt like dead air between events, which is the bulk of interesting content.

To remedy this, I looked to board games. For anyone who's played Panstasz's World of Horror, that game does a great job of taking mechanics from a board/card-based game - in this case, Arkham Horror - and re-working them into a videogame format. For City, I took a look at Eldritch Horror: a game that takes the event-driven narratives of AH and transplants them into a pulpy globe-trotting adventure. Due to a shared focus on event-driven narrative, skill checks, item collection and travel, it seemed a natural fit.

So basically, City now emulates a number of mechanics from EH: players must manage 2 attributes - VITALITY (abbreviated to VIT) and GLOOM; the map has been re-imagined as a board, separated into spaces and paths; and the game now plays out in discrete turns: you can take 2 actions each turn, typically consisting of:

• Travel: Move to a new space. You can usually select this action twice per turn, but some situations prevent this.
• Rest:  Restore 1 VIT, and reduce GLOOM by 1; only available at towns. A simple way to manage your attributes without using items or searching for particular events.
• Market: Draw a "hand" of 4 items available for sale, and purchase them if you wish; only available at towns.
• Use Item: Some items can be used during the turn, typically granting a temporary bonus to Stats for any encounters that turn.

After completing your actions, you then resolve an Encounter - an event consist of a small, isolated situation with a few choices of action, typically requiring skill checks or items to succeed. These work in much the same way as they have previously. Encounters are grouped into several types, drawing from separate "decks":

• Location Encounters are based on the space you're currently on; "town" Encounters are distinct from those found on "wilderness" spaces, for example.
• Whisper Encounters involve magical actions or occurrences, or otherwise moments of research, insight and understanding. Successfully resolving them grants WHISPERS, whose function has changed to something of a secondary currency.
• Quest Encounters - Quest chains now take the form of a series of related Quest events that spawn in a specified order. These are generally what you'll be travelling around the map to reach, and resolving these events typically require some combination of spending WHISPERS, gathering items, or fulfilling other criteria, and grant significant rewards for following a Quest to completion.

In addition to the above, a space may be occupied by a Monster; in this case, you must first defeat the monster before you can resolve an Encounter. Combat is basically identical to EH: You first must pass a test against your SPIRIT stat, else suffer a mental assault, typically resulting in Gloom "damage"; followed by a test of SWORD, to simulate actual combat. If you pass this test, the monster is defeated and you can then have an Encounter; if failed, you suffer a penalty - typically VIT damage - the monster remains on the space, and you are denied an Encounter for that turn. You also have the option to use an item before combat begins, which will usually confer a bonus to stats during that combat. Though you can move onto and off of a space containing a monster, you cannot do both in the same turn; as a result, monsters function as stationary obstacles that impair movement, but can be engaged at the players will, as monsters do not move around the board after they have spawned.

Expeditions, such as those into Noc, work largely as before, with multiple events being resolved in succession. I have, however, changed how they end: Upon completing an expedition, you can now choose from several "destinations", each of which has a couple of events and rewards associated with it; so you can learn where certain rare items are found, and journey into Noc in hopes of obtaining them. Having unique events for destinations also lets me add a bit of flavour by depicting various locations within the forsaken city.

Anyway, that's enough yakking for now. It's one thing to hear a game described and another to actually play it; to that end, I'm hoping to have an updated build available in the coming months, after I've finished porting over quests and other content to this new system. I took the opportunity to rework things to make content easier to script, and I'm pretty excited with how the game plays now.