Update #50 - On to the New Year!
almost 5 years ago – Mon, Dec 30, 2019 at 01:32:47 PM

Hello everybody!

Sorry this post is a little later in the month than usual. It's partly due to the craziness of the holidays, and partly because we wanted to save post 50 for the last one of the year.

With that said, we hope you all had a great holiday and want to wish you all:

Happy New Year!

Our New Years resolution this year is to finally finish the Galloping Stars project and release it to everybody who's been patiently waiting. We do apologize that it's taken as long as it has, and that it'll still be a few months more. Unfortunately, these things do happen, though, and all we can do is keep doing our best to push forward.

While the book is still being translated from notes, and tweaks are still being made as play testing finds little issues, we do have something to show off to you all today. It's the first little piece of physical product, and we are quite excited about it, despite it's small size. We present to you the actual Galloping Stars logo pins that anybody who pledged at the Captain tier or higher or who purchased one as an add-on during the surveys.

Please note that the pins will be shipped along with the books whenever those are ready to go. This is to save on shipping so we don't have to spend the money to ship the pins separately.

For those wondering what the logo represents, it is a hoof (inspired in part by the Star Trek logo, and in part by the "hoof shoes" that the princesses wear in MLP:FiM), in front of a shooting star. The pins themselves are die struck soft enamel lapel pins with a standard military clutch attachment on the back.

And with that, this post, along with the current year, comes to a conclusion. We'll be heading into the new year with our goals in mind and a fresh drive to keep going with the project. Look for more posts as things move forward!

Once again, Happy New Year to everyone reading this!

- Project Lead Spirit

Update 49 - Cards Charged for Shipping and Add-ons
about 5 years ago – Mon, Nov 04, 2019 at 09:22:44 PM

Hello everybody!

As stated last update, cards have been charged for shipping and add-ons. We want to remind you that the project was delayed in the last update by another 3-6 months, but we decided to charge the cards now so you all can stop floating the funds.

However, there were around 19 cards that failed to charge. This could be due to insufficient funds in your account or your bank denying the charge, flagging it as fraud. If either of these is the case, you'll have to fix that on your end. We will retry any failed cards (this will NOT attempt to charge any account that was successful already) once a week on every following Monday, so please try to have things set by then.

If your card still has failed to charge by the time we are finally ready to ship out, you will not be able to receive your final rewards. Please be aware of that fact.

Thanks again for your patience and understanding with the delays.

- Project Lead Spirit

Update #48 - Card Charge Date, Project Delays, and Some Explanation
about 5 years ago – Sun, Nov 03, 2019 at 09:29:52 PM

Hey everybody!

We want to let you know that there was a slight delay on charging cards (originally scheduled for the 1st of this month). The charge will happen in a little less than 24 hours from this post, around 5-6pm MST, Monday, Nov 4th.

This, however, does not mean we are ready to put the project out just yet. Unfortunately, there is looking to be one more 3-6 month delay. We aren't going to put an exact date on this one to give us a little more flexibility, but we're going to restructure our schedule to try and be ready to ship by the end of period, if  not earlier.

Some might ask why we're charging cards now when we aren't ready to ship yet. Well, the main reason is so we don't have to ask everybody to continue floating the funds. It probably will mean we might eat a little bit of extra cost in taxes this coming year, but we feel it's on us to sort that out instead of making everybody continue holding on to the funds.

Now, I feel we owe everybody a bit of an explanation for the project mentioned above. We touched on it a bit in the previous post, but it's mostly due to some organizational issues. This includes things like notes getting a bit scattered, time management and scheduling issues, and some communications breakdowns. We've been working to get these issues sorted out and are finally getting back on track. In addition to more regular team meetings, we've added a couple of new volunteers to the team who will be helping to get things done. A big part of the disorganization stemmed from a lot of the work starting to fall onto me alone as other team members got busy, but now we're starting to divide the work up a bit more again in order to get things moving once more.

Thank you all so much for your patience and understanding, and we look forward to putting out a quality RPG system for you all still! Keep an eye open for the next few updates. In one of the coming ones we'll actually have a smaller, but still pretty neat reveal for all of you!

- Project Lead Spirit

Update #47 - Changes During Play Testing
about 5 years ago – Wed, Oct 09, 2019 at 12:01:59 AM

Hey everybody,

I want to start by apologizing for just how late this update is. I wanted to have it out closer to the beginning of the month, but things have been even more chaotic here than normal. Progress on everything has been slow, mostly due to some organizational issues. But, we are sorting through those issues and doing a bit of restructuring to hopefully make things move a bit more efficiently. We'll keep ya posted on how things are going over the next couple months.

Anyway, you're here to see what changes we've made over the past few months from our play testing!

Changes to Galloping Stars Rules and Mechanics

To start off, we want to insert a disclaimer that this may not be all the changes we've made or that will be made before the final release of the product. In fact, some of this may even be changed further still before release, so please keep that in mind as well.

Here are the tweaks we've made, changelog style for ease of reference:

Character Creation:

- Speed has been changed to [(Agility + 3) x 5].

- Throwing Skill added.

- Initiative formula changed to [5 + (Agility + Courage)].

- Perception formula changed to [5 + (Intelligence + Luck)].

- Reflex formula changed to [5 + (Agility + Luck)]. Additionally, lighter armors now provide reflex bonuses (lighter = higher bonus) to help those builds not geared toward armor/hp tanking.

Character Advancement:

- Buying an Attribute Rank now cost 10x/15x the rank you're going into, up from 5x/10x.

- Buying a Skill Rank now cost 5x the rank you're going into, up from 3x.

- Talents are now broken into tiers, with each tier costing a set amount to buy a talent of said tier. During character creation, you can only take Talents of tier 1.

Game Mechanics:

- Critical successes still only happen when a dice rolls its maximum value after having exploded once. However, critical failures now only happen when a dice rolls its minimum value after exploding once. This may seem like a strange change, but was done to balance the odds of both outcomes to be more even.

- Active perception (previously just passive) added as a [D10 roll + Perception Rank].

- Initiative roll (previously just a passive value) added as [D10 + Initiative Rank].

- Keen Senses now also allows you to use your Perception instead of your Intelligence when Tracking.

- Minor balance changes to spells, equipment, various mechanics, etc.

And those are all the major changes we've made from all the other updates we've made. Some other new mechanics and such have been added, but those you'll just have to see when we put out the final book.

For now, though, that's the current update. We'll put out another one either later this month or early next month, so keep your eyes open for that.

See ya next time!

- Project Lead Spirit

(Quick) Update #46 - Surveys Locked. Card Charge Date For Shipping/Addons Moved.
about 5 years ago – Fri, Aug 09, 2019 at 09:47:26 PM

Hey everybody,

Surveys successfully locked on Wednesday. There were still a handful of uncompleted surveys, even after all the final warnings. If you were one of these 6 remaining people, you will be unable to receive your rewards. 

After some deliberation, we've decided to move the date for charging cards for shipping and addons closer to when we're getting ready to ship things out. This is to ensure that we have the final product ready and up to standard before we take any more funds from you all, just in case there are any more unforeseen delays or anything. The current tentative date for charging cards is now November 1st, 2019.

Thanks for your understanding with all these date changes! At the start of next month we should have an update with some of the changes we've made over the course of play testing, as well as maybe a small sample of some equipment art. See you then!

- Project Lead Spirit