March Update

Happy March, spring is here! Or so I'm told.

Well, I survived a swathe of storms battering the UK, even if my garden shed didn't. In-between battening down the hatches, I've been iterating through the first 60 pages of the rulebook, which covers character creation, skills, character advancement and a timeline of the setting. My primary focus has been cleaning up the text, simplifying the language, fixing typos and laying it out. I'll upload this as soon as it's workable. I'm also having this printed and spiral bound, mainly because I find it easier to proofread when it's in physical form and I can do so at my own pace. But also because I'm going to be doing some fairly intensive playtesting over the next few months, both black-box testing and with my gaming group, something I'm looking forward to.

Finally, I've also been sourcing some art for the rulebook. It's a little disparate; some RL pictures that look 'punk enough to fit the Perihelion vibe, a lot of environmental art of Earth and Mars, and most recently some concept art for weapons, vehicles and the like. All of this is licensed, stock art, so it's entirely possible it's stuff you might have seen elsewhere on the 'net. I'm mostly sourcing it from ArtStation. In plain terms though, right now, as this is a labour of love and one I intend to give away for free, my budget doesn't stretch to thousands of pounds of bespoke artwork for the game.

The other approach I've been taking, which is much more in theme with the setting, is using AI to generate some of the art. Character profile pictures I've been generating with https://artflow.ai and I've been dabbling with some code on my laptop to produce other images (not very successfully...I need to work on training the AI a bit better). The more surreal stuff, such as the cover image to this post, has been generated with StarryAI. Hey, at least they've not achieved self-awareness and started criticising my  writing style...yet!

On which note, that, as they say, is that. Until next time, stay safe and as always, stay frosty.

-- Andy