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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • And another update this morning! GOG and Steam Deck Kickstarter is now approaching 87% funded.


    Update 6: GOG and Steam Deck

    🐉✨ The project is now over 85% funded!

    Greetings Demanders!

    This is just a quick update to let everyone know about a couple of things.

    Firstly, we’ve been listening to many of your comments requesting a GOG version of Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand. So we’re happy to announce that we’re committing to releasing a GOG version of the game! Our goal is to get it to backers as soon as possible after our Steam release.

    Secondly, we’ve heard your requests for the game to be Steam Deck compatible. Instead of evaluating that topic after the campaign, we’ve reviewed it now and decided that we’ll definitely support Steam Deck! This support will be added as soon as we can after our Steam release. Even though the game’s primary design is for mouse and keyboard, we designed our UI framework from the start to be flexible enough to be adapted for controllers. Our earlier hesitancy to support Steam Deck came from the fact that we’ve never attempted this before, making it hard to estimate the additional dev time needed. That’s why it will have to come on the heels of our desktop release. But the whole team has played a LOT of console RPGs, so we are resolved to take it on!

    Once again, a big “THANK YOU” to everyone who has supported this campaign, including the recent backers of our Personalized Quest tier – wow! We’re going to have lots of fun working with you on your rewards, and with everyone else who has pledged on one of our Limited Tiers. ☺️

    In Gratitude, Ossian Studios


  • And another update this morning! GOG and Steam Deck Kickstarter is now approaching 87% funded.


    Update 6: GOG and Steam Deck

    🐉✨ The project is now over 85% funded!

    Greetings Demanders!

    This is just a quick update to let everyone know about a couple of things.

    Firstly, we’ve been listening to many of your comments requesting a GOG version of Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand. So we’re happy to announce that we’re committing to releasing a GOG version of the game! Our goal is to get it to backers as soon as possible after our Steam release.

    Secondly, we’ve heard your requests for the game to be Steam Deck compatible. Instead of evaluating that topic after the campaign, we’ve reviewed it now and decided that we’ll definitely support Steam Deck! This support will be added as soon as we can after our Steam release. Even though the game’s primary design is for mouse and keyboard, we designed our UI framework from the start to be flexible enough to be adapted for controllers. Our earlier hesitancy to support Steam Deck came from the fact that we’ve never attempted this before, making it hard to estimate the additional dev time needed. That’s why it will have to come on the heels of our desktop release. But the whole team has played a LOT of console RPGs, so we are resolved to take it on!

    Once again, a big “THANK YOU” to everyone who has supported this campaign, including the recent backers of our Personalized Quest tier – wow! We’re going to have lots of fun working with you on your rewards, and with everyone else who has pledged on one of our Limited Tiers. ☺️

    In Gratitude, Ossian Studios


  • And another update this morning! GOG and Steam Deck Kickstarter is now approaching 87% funded.


    Update 6: GOG and Steam Deck

    🐉✨ The project is now over 85% funded!

    Greetings Demanders!

    This is just a quick update to let everyone know about a couple of things.

    Firstly, we’ve been listening to many of your comments requesting a GOG version of Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand. So we’re happy to announce that we’re committing to releasing a GOG version of the game! Our goal is to get it to backers as soon as possible after our Steam release.

    Secondly, we’ve heard your requests for the game to be Steam Deck compatible. Instead of evaluating that topic after the campaign, we’ve reviewed it now and decided that we’ll definitely support Steam Deck! This support will be added as soon as we can after our Steam release. Even though the game’s primary design is for mouse and keyboard, we designed our UI framework from the start to be flexible enough to be adapted for controllers. Our earlier hesitancy to support Steam Deck came from the fact that we’ve never attempted this before, making it hard to estimate the additional dev time needed. That’s why it will have to come on the heels of our desktop release. But the whole team has played a LOT of console RPGs, so we are resolved to take it on!

    Once again, a big “THANK YOU” to everyone who has supported this campaign, including the recent backers of our Personalized Quest tier – wow! We’re going to have lots of fun working with you on your rewards, and with everyone else who has pledged on one of our Limited Tiers. ☺️

    In Gratitude, Ossian Studios




  • New update posted a couple of days ago! As of this morning, there is 1 week left in the Kickstarter, and they are 82% of the way to their goal. Kicktraqs has them trending towards 107% funding.


    Update 5 - Pathfinder Rules Implementation

    The project is now over 78% funded with over 5,600 backers!

    Greetings Demanders!

    I’m Kevin Smith, lead programmer on Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand, and in this update I’ll be getting into more detail about about the remastered Pathfinder Second Edition rules implementation we’ve been working on.

    At Ossian Studios, we know that there are two types of RPG players: those who want to spend at least six hours on the character generation screen, and those who want to jump into the story as quickly as possible. Consequently, we have designed our character creation screens to seamlessly support both styles of play. You can pick from a variety of fun pre-generated characters, or you can create a completely custom character and drill-down into all the details by selecting from hundreds of options, including Feats and Spells. As many of you already know, the Pathfinder character generation process can be extremely complicated, but we are working hard to make it both fun and easy to understand by providing a highly flexible sheet-based user interface that rivals any other CRPG on the market today.

    After character creation, as your party gains experience from adventuring, you’ll be able to level up any party member using just a single mouse click. Alternatively, you can delve deeply into any character’s details and hand select every level up option imaginable.

    As part of a robust level up system, we hope that our backers help us unlock the Multiclass Archetypes stretch goal because this will unleash a vast array of powerful and highly customized characters! Pathfinder’s Multiclass Archetypes can be used to create exciting combinations of different character classes. You’ll be able to customize your own character, and all of your party members. But remember that all of the enemy NPCs also benefit from Multiclass Archetypes, so expect more unique and exciting new challenges during strategic combat encounters.

    Behind the scenes, our Rules Engine orchestrates everything in the game, from Exploration Mode to Combat Mode. The Rules Engine directly loads a huge amount of tabular data that was extracted directly from the official Paizo rule books (thank you Archives of Nethys!). Supporting the Rules Engine are our generic frameworks for Feats, Spells, and Actions. We have tested both the Rules Engine and the frameworks by implementing hundreds of Feats, Spells, and Actions up to tenth level. The frameworks can support the addition of new Feats, Spells, Actions, and even Character Classes with relative ease.

    From the very beginning, we knew that this would be a Pathfinder Second Edition game, rather than a converted First Edition game. Although we began developing this game long before the Remastered Pathfinder Rules were invented, Paizo graciously provided us with very early access to the new rules. Consequently we’ve had a significant amount of time to adapt our custom game systems to support the new remastered Second Edition rules.

    Developing a game of this size and complexity is certainly extremely challenging! What are some of the things we tangle with on a daily basis? The sheer quantity of Feats and Spells that we are implementing is a huge challenge (I actually love implementing these!). The Pathfinder Rules, although very well designed, have many unique edge cases, which are not well described. We often have to pause and debate exactly what should happen in various complex scenarios. As much as possible, we stay true to the Pathfinder rules-as-written, but also adapt where necessary to make a better CRPG experience.

    Despite these many challenges, we have already implemented all Second Edition core Ancestries, Backgrounds, Classes, Deities, Heritages, the vast majority of Class Features, and all level-up benefits including gained spells and spell slots.

    After the game is funded, we’re looking forward to interacting directly with our many backers to help prioritize key game features, and even debate how to resolve some of those tricky rules edge cases! Please help spread the word about the game so that we can attract more backers! Thanks for all of your help so far!

    *🐉*

    After receiving some feedback on our sold-out Limited Pledge Tiers, we’ve decided to add some additional quantities of these. We are happy to bring you:

    15 Personalized Mark Editions
    10 Personalized NPC Editions
    5 Personal Framed Portrait Editions
    5 Personalized Magic Item Editions
    

    And don’t forget that all our pledge tiers include everything from the previous tiers! For example, the Personalized Magic Item Edition includes the Framed Portrait, Personalized NPC, and Personalized Mark limited rewards, on top of the Digital Tabletop Edition. That’s quite a stack of rewards! 😃

    Thank you again for supporting our campaign!

    In Gratitude, Ossian Studios


  • New update posted a couple of days ago! As of this morning, there is 1 week left in the Kickstarter, and they are 82% of the way to their goal. Kicktraqs has them trending towards 107% funding.


    Update 5 - Pathfinder Rules Implementation

    The project is now over 78% funded with over 5,600 backers!

    Greetings Demanders!

    I’m Kevin Smith, lead programmer on Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand, and in this update I’ll be getting into more detail about about the remastered Pathfinder Second Edition rules implementation we’ve been working on.

    At Ossian Studios, we know that there are two types of RPG players: those who want to spend at least six hours on the character generation screen, and those who want to jump into the story as quickly as possible. Consequently, we have designed our character creation screens to seamlessly support both styles of play. You can pick from a variety of fun pre-generated characters, or you can create a completely custom character and drill-down into all the details by selecting from hundreds of options, including Feats and Spells. As many of you already know, the Pathfinder character generation process can be extremely complicated, but we are working hard to make it both fun and easy to understand by providing a highly flexible sheet-based user interface that rivals any other CRPG on the market today.

    After character creation, as your party gains experience from adventuring, you’ll be able to level up any party member using just a single mouse click. Alternatively, you can delve deeply into any character’s details and hand select every level up option imaginable.

    As part of a robust level up system, we hope that our backers help us unlock the Multiclass Archetypes stretch goal because this will unleash a vast array of powerful and highly customized characters! Pathfinder’s Multiclass Archetypes can be used to create exciting combinations of different character classes. You’ll be able to customize your own character, and all of your party members. But remember that all of the enemy NPCs also benefit from Multiclass Archetypes, so expect more unique and exciting new challenges during strategic combat encounters.

    Behind the scenes, our Rules Engine orchestrates everything in the game, from Exploration Mode to Combat Mode. The Rules Engine directly loads a huge amount of tabular data that was extracted directly from the official Paizo rule books (thank you Archives of Nethys!). Supporting the Rules Engine are our generic frameworks for Feats, Spells, and Actions. We have tested both the Rules Engine and the frameworks by implementing hundreds of Feats, Spells, and Actions up to tenth level. The frameworks can support the addition of new Feats, Spells, Actions, and even Character Classes with relative ease.

    From the very beginning, we knew that this would be a Pathfinder Second Edition game, rather than a converted First Edition game. Although we began developing this game long before the Remastered Pathfinder Rules were invented, Paizo graciously provided us with very early access to the new rules. Consequently we’ve had a significant amount of time to adapt our custom game systems to support the new remastered Second Edition rules.

    Developing a game of this size and complexity is certainly extremely challenging! What are some of the things we tangle with on a daily basis? The sheer quantity of Feats and Spells that we are implementing is a huge challenge (I actually love implementing these!). The Pathfinder Rules, although very well designed, have many unique edge cases, which are not well described. We often have to pause and debate exactly what should happen in various complex scenarios. As much as possible, we stay true to the Pathfinder rules-as-written, but also adapt where necessary to make a better CRPG experience.

    Despite these many challenges, we have already implemented all Second Edition core Ancestries, Backgrounds, Classes, Deities, Heritages, the vast majority of Class Features, and all level-up benefits including gained spells and spell slots.

    After the game is funded, we’re looking forward to interacting directly with our many backers to help prioritize key game features, and even debate how to resolve some of those tricky rules edge cases! Please help spread the word about the game so that we can attract more backers! Thanks for all of your help so far!

    *🐉*

    After receiving some feedback on our sold-out Limited Pledge Tiers, we’ve decided to add some additional quantities of these. We are happy to bring you:

    15 Personalized Mark Editions
    10 Personalized NPC Editions
    5 Personal Framed Portrait Editions
    5 Personalized Magic Item Editions
    

    And don’t forget that all our pledge tiers include everything from the previous tiers! For example, the Personalized Magic Item Edition includes the Framed Portrait, Personalized NPC, and Personalized Mark limited rewards, on top of the Digital Tabletop Edition. That’s quite a stack of rewards! 😃

    Thank you again for supporting our campaign!

    In Gratitude, Ossian Studios


  • New update posted a couple of days ago! As of this morning, there is 1 week left in the Kickstarter, and they are 82% of the way to their goal. Kicktraqs has them trending towards 107% funding.


    Update 5 - Pathfinder Rules Implementation

    The project is now over 78% funded with over 5,600 backers!

    Greetings Demanders!

    I’m Kevin Smith, lead programmer on Pathfinder: The Dragon’s Demand, and in this update I’ll be getting into more detail about about the remastered Pathfinder Second Edition rules implementation we’ve been working on.

    At Ossian Studios, we know that there are two types of RPG players: those who want to spend at least six hours on the character generation screen, and those who want to jump into the story as quickly as possible. Consequently, we have designed our character creation screens to seamlessly support both styles of play. You can pick from a variety of fun pre-generated characters, or you can create a completely custom character and drill-down into all the details by selecting from hundreds of options, including Feats and Spells. As many of you already know, the Pathfinder character generation process can be extremely complicated, but we are working hard to make it both fun and easy to understand by providing a highly flexible sheet-based user interface that rivals any other CRPG on the market today.

    After character creation, as your party gains experience from adventuring, you’ll be able to level up any party member using just a single mouse click. Alternatively, you can delve deeply into any character’s details and hand select every level up option imaginable.

    As part of a robust level up system, we hope that our backers help us unlock the Multiclass Archetypes stretch goal because this will unleash a vast array of powerful and highly customized characters! Pathfinder’s Multiclass Archetypes can be used to create exciting combinations of different character classes. You’ll be able to customize your own character, and all of your party members. But remember that all of the enemy NPCs also benefit from Multiclass Archetypes, so expect more unique and exciting new challenges during strategic combat encounters.

    Behind the scenes, our Rules Engine orchestrates everything in the game, from Exploration Mode to Combat Mode. The Rules Engine directly loads a huge amount of tabular data that was extracted directly from the official Paizo rule books (thank you Archives of Nethys!). Supporting the Rules Engine are our generic frameworks for Feats, Spells, and Actions. We have tested both the Rules Engine and the frameworks by implementing hundreds of Feats, Spells, and Actions up to tenth level. The frameworks can support the addition of new Feats, Spells, Actions, and even Character Classes with relative ease.

    From the very beginning, we knew that this would be a Pathfinder Second Edition game, rather than a converted First Edition game. Although we began developing this game long before the Remastered Pathfinder Rules were invented, Paizo graciously provided us with very early access to the new rules. Consequently we’ve had a significant amount of time to adapt our custom game systems to support the new remastered Second Edition rules.

    Developing a game of this size and complexity is certainly extremely challenging! What are some of the things we tangle with on a daily basis? The sheer quantity of Feats and Spells that we are implementing is a huge challenge (I actually love implementing these!). The Pathfinder Rules, although very well designed, have many unique edge cases, which are not well described. We often have to pause and debate exactly what should happen in various complex scenarios. As much as possible, we stay true to the Pathfinder rules-as-written, but also adapt where necessary to make a better CRPG experience.

    Despite these many challenges, we have already implemented all Second Edition core Ancestries, Backgrounds, Classes, Deities, Heritages, the vast majority of Class Features, and all level-up benefits including gained spells and spell slots.

    After the game is funded, we’re looking forward to interacting directly with our many backers to help prioritize key game features, and even debate how to resolve some of those tricky rules edge cases! Please help spread the word about the game so that we can attract more backers! Thanks for all of your help so far!

    *🐉*

    After receiving some feedback on our sold-out Limited Pledge Tiers, we’ve decided to add some additional quantities of these. We are happy to bring you:

    15 Personalized Mark Editions
    10 Personalized NPC Editions
    5 Personal Framed Portrait Editions
    5 Personalized Magic Item Editions
    

    And don’t forget that all our pledge tiers include everything from the previous tiers! For example, the Personalized Magic Item Edition includes the Framed Portrait, Personalized NPC, and Personalized Mark limited rewards, on top of the Digital Tabletop Edition. That’s quite a stack of rewards! 😃

    Thank you again for supporting our campaign!

    In Gratitude, Ossian Studios




  • The ability to arbitrarily and retroactively remove all traces of yourself from a discussion you had in public, via a quasi-persistent medium has always felt to me like a violation of everyone else in the discussion, but I, too, come from the forum space, where you just don’t do that. The microblogging space doesn’t seem to care, and the microblogging space currently dominates fedi. It kind of feels like a culture clash to me, and one of many reasons why forum-fedi and masto-fedi probably don’t need a whole lot of cross-over.

    I know there are safety concerns around harassment campaigns and the like, and things should change and evolve in response to stuff like that. And it’s not at all clear to me how something like this interacts with the EU’s Right to be Forgotten. But forum users posting on forums, though distributed, are much less likely to be a disruption to those forums than masto users who don’t even know that they’re posting on forums, while behaving in ways that are normal for their space.





  • We tried and tried in big and bigger Collider to find any trace of dark matter. I think scientist begin to find anything else that could explain the cosmos (even if it is flawed), because dark matter seems more and more unlikely, after all those year looking for it

    We’ve spent years and years eliminating the low hanging fruit – as one should do first – but that doesn’t resolve the dark matter problem at all. The more exotic types are really, really hard to detect in particle colliders the scale of which we can readily build.

    It would be nice to say “we looked for it, but it doesn’t seem to exist”, but we can’t say that. We’re nowhere close to saying that. Detecting particles that are hypothesized to only interact via gravity is insanely difficult.