It looks like there’s a big pile of disparate parts that I desperately need to start putting together. I’ve got all the ingredients for a really delicious gumbo, but currently I’m just repeatedly eating handfuls of raw onions.
I made a crazy amount of progress on Troubadour in the last month, but also found out that I’m not the only horse in the race, so it’s become a higher priority to take all of the other modules and experiments from the last couple years in this world-building space, and start putting those blocks into a unified Faewood Forge application, something that really blows peoples’ socks.
Tome has sat on the backburner for over a month now, but I fired up the dev environment again and was reminded of how much potential there was in there, especially in the context of a more unified web app. Some of the new concepts I’ve learned when endlessly re-writing prompts and gamestate objects has changed the way I think Tome would ideally work, in order to lend itself to a better integration across the rest of the big picture.
In short, the idea of Tome, Squire, and Troubadour is going to be replaced with a more solidly built, integrated single application that has a clean interface and allows for all of the functionality that was originally intended for the 3-part project/application. The new application will be called Tome & Troubadour.
Tome & Troubadour will be an AI-driven TTRPG simulator, driven both by high-quality curated content that gets officially released to the application, but also by integrating the functionality of the original Tome app to allow players to create and share entire worlds, campaigns, characters, and any other cool entity they dream up and define. The metaobjects of Tome will become the populating data for Troubadour in custom campaigns and settings that players can share with one another and rate.
I still intend to create Squire as a free tool that can standalone, as well as integrates with Tome and Troubadour to accept created worlds and characters and etc, so that they can be used in real in-person tabletop campaigns as an awesome DM companion. You’ll DM like a DJ with all the cool shit right at your fingertips, nice n’ easy-like.
New roadmap in general; will be testing ongoing new AI functionality and gameplay, as well as getting the alpha distributed so folks can help me fine tune it as we figure out what the next obstacles will be. It’ll help improve the game sim, as in the coming weeks and months I start building out a much more solid and scalable architecture for the new Tome and Troubadour.
Check back. I’m going to make this thing really fun, and I’ll need your help.