COGG is a hobby, a passion, a labor of love. Treating it like a job counters that for me. There are some things about the game that I currently don't enjoy, and as a result it's making it difficult to muster up the steam to develop for. Some of this has been brought up before, like the idea for the ability trees, and some potential changes to how skill limits are approached. I won't dive into any of the specific details here, but the overall issue has been that I just haven't enjoyed actually playing the game as much as I should, which is a bad problem to have for a passion/hobby project. I should be building the game I want to play and be wanting to play it. Playing it often, so as I do I have more ideas for new things to add that would make the game feel even more fun for me (and hopefully other players).
For a long time, CLOK's main page described the project as being in "alpha," because I had wanted to maintain the freedom to make big changes when they felt necessary (whether for players or even just for myself). When it was brought up that this "alpha" label might be discouraging people from trying the game, the text about being "currently in alpha but open for play with ongoing events" was updated to:
And I really like that. I don't want to fret over semantics about whether "alpha" or "beta" or whatever else is the correct term. So I'm just going to put that text at the top of the COGG main page (replacing "CLOK" with "COGG") and call it good. Bask in the freedom to be able to develop the game how I want to develop it so I can personally enjoy it, and enjoy following ideas as they strike me.CLOK is a dynamic thing, in that both its world and its mechanics are constantly changing. The world can change based on what happens in it and how the player characters act (or don't act). The staff are constantly developing, altering, and tweaking mechanics. If you take a break from CLOK for a few months, it might be a pretty different place when you get back.
To this end, I'll probably continue holding off on roundtables for a while yet. Maybe make them a monthly thing, or maybe try to redefine their scope so they're more about world/lore stuff without the "what is being worked on and when will it be done?" They were starting to feel like a weekly checkin with my boss, preventing me from following those exciting development idea butterflies because if I did, I'd feel guilty after having previously said that I was working on something else. I know it'll drive some people crazy to have very little in the way of structure and roadmaps and all that, but that's just the way I work best when it comes to personal passion projects. All my favorite work that I'm most proud of has been a result of having a shiny thought and sprinting off in pursuit of it. The super structured approach just results in my resenting the things I'm "supposed" to be doing because I inevitably end up putting off new exciting ideas for them. The recent tabards/patrols update happened because I couldn't sleep that night and wanted to just do something because it sounded like a cool idea even though I was "supposed" to be focusing on Octum stuff.
So, here's to more chasing of butterflies and slapdash implementations of shiny ideas that are too fun to ignore, and to considering big ideas that may shake up the status quo from time to time.