The third update for Blood Royal, and already they're starting to come a bit late!  What can I say except sorry - I would have got it ready for you last week, but the small matter of a pre-release tournament for Torment, the new card set for Magic:the Gathering, got in the way, so here we are, better late than never.

On the programming side, things are coming along steadily.  By the end of February (or sometime in March at the very latest), I will hopefully be making the front-end program available for you to play with. This will sit on your PC, take the data from the turn results, and let you look at your domain and plan your next turn.  As with all programming tasks, the initial estimate of work is always to low, and I'm revising my work as I go, but hopefully this should be ready for you to play with within that timescale.

Another fifteen expressions of interest in the game during the past couple of weeks takes us to 75 signed up as interested; if everyone hangs on for the game to start, we'll be doing all right to run two games, I think. I hope so, anyway!  Thanks again to those new people for their kind comments about the website and game.

Some people have queried what I intend to do about dropouts, or missed turns.  This is, of course, the bane of online games, and something that will inevitably happen.  There are several strategies for coping with this which should, I hope, complement each other.

Firstly, I purposefully set up the website and began looking for playtesters in advance of the game being ready, so that by the time we begin, some of the potential dropouts should have already fallen by the wayside.  These monthly updates give me an ongoing idea, from responses and queries, how interested and enthused people are about Blood Royal.

Secondly, given the way the game is structured, with players having to manage demands from the network of allies around them as to their actions, I am hopeful that the decision-making software for the NPC positions will be able to step in and take over for long-term or short-term absentees.  It might not make the most sensible decisions in line with a player's expectations, but it shouldn't do too much damage, and we could just put it down to the effects of a surfeit of lampreys, or an attack of insanity brought on by inbreeding (this is the aristocracy, remember!).

Thirdly, we should have enough players that some will be reserves, able to step in and take over if an absence becomes long-term.

If anyone else has any ideas on other strategies, please let me know!

I don't have much else to add at the moment.  Now it's back to the programming workbench for me. See you all next month.

Regards

James