[i]For the past few weeks, I've been writing about progress on the new "Creator Tool": an updated version of the tool I made for creating the game's content that I am planning to make available to players/modders interested in creating their own content.[/i] Most of the game's content was authored in an earlier version of this tool and is organized into content groups called "Stories". Not all of these "stories" correspond one-on-one to what you might recognize as game stories. They might be better thought of as the narrative equivalent of code "modules" but I didn't want to call them to avoid confusion with ShipModules. These are essentially namespaces that group related content together and keep me from having to worry if I've already created an anomaly with id ANCIENT_DERELICT a year ago. Each story contains some or all of the following content: [list] [*] Missions: Where any of the story's logic happens. These may be actual missions that can appear in the player's log, or invisible logic missions that trigger events in response to game conditions. [*] Anomalies: A dialogue-like interaction occuring on a planet, with a ship, or celestial artifact. [*] Conversations: Like an anomaly, but with an actor associated with some faction. [*] Discoveries: A source of Research Points. [*] Factions: Usually an alien race. [*] Regions: One or more sectors and the various PersistentObjects they contain (a PersistentObject is anything in the game universe that will persist if the player leaves and comes back: planets, ships, and stars are PersistentObjects; projectiles, drops, explosions, etc are not.) [*] Ships: Any custom ship designs, typically the ships used by story's factions, but can also be things like investigatable derelicts. [*] Items: Analyzable artifacts that are a tangible source of Research Points, also used as mission objectives/requirements. [/list] For each of these, there's a panel in the Creator Tool used for creating and editing these. As of this point, I've created updated versions of most of these sub-tools. If all goes well, my plan is next week to start creating a new mini-storyline using the new tool as a test to see whether I've replicated all the necessary features and identify any bugs that show up during real use. I'll also probably tweak some existing content. Sometime after that (fingers crossed) I'll send out some invites to players who expressed an interest in trying out this tool. Since I've never released a game with modding support, I really don't know how this will go: I think the game's players are generally pretty clever and the survey suggests a lot of the people interested in this tool have technical backgrounds, but I may underestimate how much "internalized knowledge" I rely on during content creation. I'll have to see. Until next week, Kevin