My continued experiment in designing in the open, TinyFate 0.4, is now up online.

It is a mess.  I got some fantastic feedback on 0.3 (THANK YOU ALL) and the result has been ripping into the structure of the doc with meathooks, and as a result,t he current flow is just wrong.  I skip over sections, have sections out of order or repeating, and generally need to reflow the whole thing.

But I’m posting 0.4 largely to keep myself honest.  It’s alive, and I’m slowly moving it forward, and the current version is bad enough to provide me incentive to get to 0.5 as soon as possible. 🙂

TinyFate continues to be a wonderful test of my assumptions.  The reality is, I could absolutely run the original version as written, in all of its index card glory.  The act of writing a full version of it has been an exercise in manually unpacking decades of assumptions and seeing if they hold up.  And some of them don’t.

It has also been an opportunity for me to test the publishing options available for free or cheap today. This version is produced using Sphinx, a free bit of software that lets me write everything in slightly styled text files (in the RST format, which is like but not identical to Markdown) and it autogenerates the website and epub. It’s fun.  I haven’t pushed it particularly far yet, but it offers particular promise.  Because it lets me stitch together multiple files in the same doc, it is easy to re-use and re-organize content.  That means that – in theory – the same RPG could be formatted in one version for reading and another version for reference.  Don’t know if it will actually work yet, but it’s a very compelling prospect.