A month has already gone by? I really need to hurry up, or I’ll be an old man before I know it. And I’m not just saying that because January was my birthday 😊
It has been a pretty enjoyable month overall. Work picked up speed both on tutorials and on XYM City, and at least on the documentation side, things are about to accelerate even more, as you are about to find out.
Writing Content
:task-docs-dev: Began work on multisignature tutorials.
:task-docs-textbook: Applied a small fix to the harvesting page to clarify that a node can only have a single beneficiary.
:symbol-shield: Corrected the serialization tables in the current documentation, which were missing information about optional fields. This issue was spotted by 御犬臀部権守 on 𝕏. Thanks for the report, and rest assured there was no ill intent.
Review
:task-docs-dev: Zero delivered new tutorials on account metadata and namespaces, which were reviewed and published. Go team!
:task-docs-textbook: Daoka completed his review of the Japanese translation of the textbook produced by ChatGPT did. In his words, the automatic translations were “generally good”, but documentation is taken seriously here and nothing is released without careful human review 😎
Daruma
:daruma-studios-logo-white: Once again, the most enjoyable part of the month was working on XYM City’s Game Design Document.
Here you have each task’s relative time distribution for this month:
This is the current status of all documentation tasks. The main line to watch is Symbol Documentation at the top, with all other entries listed as its subtasks. The bars in the chart represent how many of those subtasks have been completed. The change since last month is shown in orange.
Work this month has focused primarily on the Game Design Document:
Character sheets were written for several main characters. These include not only backstories, but also internal motivations, fears, goals, and how each character evolves over the course of the story, alongside detailed descriptions of their relationships and interactions with others.
This kind of work is slow and can feel excessive, since much of it will never appear directly in the game, but it is essential to create characters that behave consistently and feel believable 😖
Excruciatingly detailed background material for the city was also written. Why is the city shaped the way it is? Why does it have distinct districts? What motivates each district? How do their inhabitants think, and how do they perceive one another? How does all of this translate into architectural and environmental design?
This is demanding work, but unavoidable if the goal is a world that feels coherent and solid.
Although it is still early, work began on something that has been on the list for a while: asset tables. Each mission description lists the assets it requires (locations, characters, dialogues, and so on). From there, this expands into concrete production needs such as 3D models, textures, maps, sound effects, and music.
All of these are automatically consolidated into a central assets table, which allows tracking development progress across the project. Very satisfying to see it come together.
Some UI design work was also done, to give designers a clear direction and a concrete starting point.
Below are a few mock-ups for the map interface:
And here is the mission journal already implemented in-game:
Reid and I are still discussing the overall shape of the city. The original Y-shaped layout, while dear to us, is proving difficult to work with: the arms are too narrow to support larger buildings with enough surrounding space to properly showcase them.
As a result, we may need to rethink the city’s overall geometry.
February will be fully dedicated to documentation work. Hatchet has asked everyone working on Symbol to make a final push and aim to complete all remaining Symbol-related tasks.