So, after nearly two months of working on my newest project, a role playing game, I’ve finally decided upon a name! And because I absolutely adore acronyms, I felt that I should share this one.
May I present to you: FARTS. Freeform Asynchronous/Anime Roleplaying Tropes/Tag System.
I like it. It’s funny. I giggle at it. It’s stupid funny. It’s perfect.
Anyway, as I’ve been working I’ve been learning my way around Obsidian, a wonderful Markdown notetaking app that is just amazingly powerful. There are so many plug-ins for it and it’s extremely stable. Probably the best thing I’m loving about it right now is the customization of output that I can do with it. Everything uses CSS, and if you’ve ever worked with webpages before, you’ll understand just how powerful this can be. Basically, instead of learning a new program just for formatting, like In-Design, I can just hit “Export to PDF” and have my book mostly formatted the way I want it.
There are a couple of issues that I’ve noticed though. Two-column formatting, specifically the way I want it done with the headers spanning the page, is… frustrating. I may figure something out, or I may abandon it. Time will tell as I reach closer to completion.
As far as some notable milestones, I’ve settled upon the three fonts that I’m going to be using. Comic Neue for paragraph text, Bubblegum Sans for Headers, and I haven’t quite decided upon the cover page font, but it’s either going to be Luckiest Guy or Bangers. I’ve also mostly completed the Character Creation chapter and I’m pretty satisfied with the Core Mechanics. I’ve also decided that I’m going to attempt a smaller project instead of my massive tome, just so that I can learn the ins and outs of the publishing industry.
In other recent developments, late last night, I acquired a license for Art Rage Pro, so now I can start drawing my character art. One of my many pet projects has been to learn how to draw Chibi characters, and so I’ll be flipping through this book with the intention of applying my soon-to-be-learned skills toward my book project!