Prompt #1 for #RPGaDay2026

Discipline

I'm going to approach this one, and probably more, from a game developer's perspective. Since I'm building my own TTRPG from scratch with the intent of turning it into a video game, that's the lens I'll use here.

Discipline, by definition, can be seen from two angles: a branch of knowledge, and the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, generally backed by some form of undesired consequence as punishment.

For the first part, the branch of knowledge for me is my background in game design/development. I got my BA in that back in 2016 from Southern Polytechnic State University, now absorbed into Kennesaw State University. I've always been an avid gamer, both digital and analog — seriously, I have an impressive collection of both, and I managed to bring it all with me to Mexico.

Taking that experience — the games I've played plus what I picked up in university — the discipline I'm applying to my TTRPG is a semi-serious production stance. I started the year with a fairly "strict" timeline for myself: milestones, goals, the works. Well, real life being real life, that didn't pan out the way I wanted, and I'm currently about two months behind schedule.

Even so, I've been posting a new bestiary entry every Monday for my world. You can find those on my Patreon, Ko-fi, Discord, Mastodon, and Byte Vortex, which I co-operate. I've also convinced five members of my small Discord community to playtest the game as it evolves, and they've been a tremendous help with practically everything. The first expedition wrapped up, with both groups returning to the local hub to sell loot and buy upgrades — all documented here on the blog as Dev Logs. Each session, I aim to fix previous errors in my custom-built modules/system in FoundryVTT while introducing new things to test. Right now we're only meeting once a month due to real-life constraints, but I'd like to bump that up to once every two weeks eventually. It does give me plenty of time to fix old issues and create new ones, haha.

The other side of discipline — training people to obey rules or a code of behavior — is something anyone who's run a game with other people, digital or analog, has probably dealt with. I had my playtesters sign a very loose form of an NDA. Partly to get myself into the mindset that I'm actually doing this, and partly to give the playtesters a sense of seriousness about it.

One issue I ran into early on was having too many people in a group. Turns out three is the sweet spot for testing — two tends to feel vague, or people hold back their opinions. I haven't been able to keep four together for more than one consecutive session. Sucks, but it is what it is.

If you want to follow along with the bestiary drops or catch the Dev Logs as they happen, I'm posting weekly-ish across Patreon, Ko-fi, Mastodon, and Byte Vortex — links below.

This concludes the prompt for the day.

Links:

• Patreon
• Ko-fi
• Mastodon
• Byte Vortex 

Dev Log 4

Here we are at Dev Log #4.  I'm planning on doing these a little more often since I'm getting more into bug fixing AND implementation of things.  I think the best format for these is going to be a quick list, then sections going over the list.  So here we go:

• Fixing the market system module
• Players unable to purchase items higher than Tier 1.
• Unknown as to who is purchasing what from whom.
• Players wanted to see more information on their purchases.
• Changed the .csv format for imports.
• Overhaul for the barter system. 
• Resizing windows. 
• Fixing the wiring between NPC sheets and the market system. (buttons not firing)
• Websocket failure for the storage/upgrade NPCs. 
• Compendiums
• Overwrote the previous entries
• Design intent for future interactions/upgrades
• Character classes and bestiary entries 
• Change the headers for easier to read 
• Other
• Pop up or hover over a creature token for basic info
• Players unable to access bestiary entries
• Quest tracking
• Overhaul character sheet into character codex
• Upgrades on items 

For the market system module, the fixes were mostly minor but still had to be fixed by the next session.  On initial testing, my players were unable to purchase anything that was higher than Tier 1.  I have a total of 6 tiers, so this was a bit of a priority, especially when my players are needing to purchase upgrades before their next adventure.  Turns out, I inadvertently soft-locked this.  In the past, I was originally thinking of having things tied to player levels and tiers, but decided against it due to unwanted complications that may arise.  Simply removing that fixed it.

When the players were testing everything on the initial central hub instance, there was a lot of chaos.  I built in a chat ping that told me the transaction history with what NPC for how much and what item.  What I didn't put in there was the part of WHO was buying that item.  That was just a simple field addition.  No more chaos. 

As I progress in creating the items/armor/weapons, more information and stats are getting added. Turns out, my players wanted to see these as well.  It makes sense.  Anyone playing a game would want to know as much information as possible when investing their currency.  On my end, the GM end, I could see all of the information, so I just put that to display for my players as well.

To handle the numerous NPCs that handle different vending sectors, I decided to code the market system to utilize .csv documents.  That way I can control the inventory without having to be in the game at all times.  I can just simply work on it wherever, then click the import.  Boom, vending NPC.  While working on the upgrade NPC, I found out that I needed to add in a few more fields, so tracking down 3 files to adjust that was kind of a pain, but worth it.

When players are making purchases, I incorporated a barter system.  Originally, this was going to be handled via roleplay, but after the initial test, I decided against that.  It did make for some nice interactions, but overall it was really hard to manage when everything else is handled via player interaction (scrolling through the market, purchasing via a button press, etc).  After I implemented it, I had a player test it off hours and I had the math backwards.  Quick fix via flipping words and math.

As I keep adding more things to the game for players to interact with, I got sloppy on the window displays.  It bothered me and my players that in order to see everything, one would have to resize the window manually.  I locked the sizes and now have to work within those dimensions.  Definitely a good way to keep me in check for wanting to display everything at once.

Did a fix where the wiring between NPC sheets and the market system weren't firing properly.  The players have buttons to press in order to do tasks, such as purchasing items and eventually (now implemented as of this post) installing upgrades.  Got that fixed now.

Biggest pain I have experienced this far was trying to figure out why my storage/upgrade NPC logic wasn't working.  Turns out, this has been a bug reported on Github.  I seriously thought I was going crazy because things SHOULD be working but they weren't.  I know that this is a bit dated and I thought that by now, it would have been dealt with but I guess not.  In the meantime, I have a workaround.  I had to give my players Ownership of these particular NPCs, but they can also do some edits to the text fields.  I still need to remove that from them, much like I did for them not being able to access the storage of other players.  It's stupid, but it works.  I did this by just utilizing actor flags.

I'm going to sum up the compendiums list into a big chunk of information.  My initial entries for the classes were overwritten when I redid the entire aesthetic.  It's fine because I have all of that information saved in an Obsidian vault.  In order to keep things simple and easy for me to keep up with, I decided that for both my classes and bestiary entries, why not just create a copy/paste system?  So that is exactly what I did.  I made a macro where I simply name the entry and then copy/paste my .md file.  It then takes out sections in the file and parses it into fields.  Basically, if I update/change the core file, all I have to do is copy/paste and everything updates.  Along with the rewrite of the compendium stuff, I decided to give it a more "useful" format.  Slapped up navigation tabs and have sections that my players can access in order to learn more about these creatures.  Same goes for the class compendium, just navigational tabs and sections.  Finally, I had to redo the compendium packs banner icons that FoundryVTT uses as default.  One of my players said that the white text was hard to read on the green and blue backgrounds.  I just put in a dark slate color with some edge hues that indicate different fields.

Final stretch!  My players wanted to have a hover field pop up when encountering a creature token.  I couldn't figure out how to do this, so I instead created a pop-up window that displays the important quick-decision stuff, with a dossier button that they can click and it takes them to the full compendium entry.  Along with this, I fixed the part where my players couldn't access the bestiary entries.  Not sure what the hangup was with this, but I think it got fixed with the whole redoing of the compendiums.  I wanted to change up the character sheet.  My system had a more "involved" character sheet than the default ones I've come across in the past.  As I've progressed in creating the inventory, storage, abilities, etc, I decided that a simple character sheet won't cut it anymore.  Since one of the creatures that I created is called the Shelf-Stalker Codex, it was only fair that I implement that now.  My players now have their own codex.  It's essentially all of their information in a single, journal-like presentation.  It contains their overview, equipped gear, inventory, storage log, upgrade log, abilities (they can pick and choose which ones to have equipped before going out on adventures), quest log tracking, and a general notes section.  I had to do some adjustments when it came to showing the upgrades on items because it really didn't want to display that information most of the time.  I think that got fixed when I fixed the storage/upgrade NPC stuff.

I know this is weird stuff that you might be thinking "what's the point" and that's fair.  This game is designed as a ttrpg with the future development as a video game.  One of the things taught to us in university was that if you want to make a good video game, it has to be playable as a board game or card game or some kind of analogue game.  If I can make this happen here and now, it'll be easier in translation phase. 

Blaugust 2026

 

First time posting about this on this website. 

Blaugust is a yearly event where people from all over the internet participate in an online blogging challenge throughout the month of August (hence the name Blaugust).  It originally caught my attention because of someone I befriended on Mastodon: Belghast.

He was a genuinely down-to-earth blogger who wrote about anything and everything he encountered in gaming.  I would tune into his podcasts, read his posts over on Tales of the Aggronaut, and occasionally interact with him on Mastodon, and those interactions gradually turned into a friendship that I truly valued.  Sadly, this past July, Belghast left us.  I don't want to turn this post into a discussion about someone's passing, but I did write more about it over on Byte Vortex for those who are interested.  What matters here is that losing him was deeply saddening, and I'm grateful that I had the chance to know him, even through the strange and wonderful connections that the internet can create.  He will be dearly missed.

So what does Blaugust have to do with this website?  For me, it's a reason to become more active in sharing the game development process with all of you.  Blaugust was built around the idea of creative people supporting one another, pushing through writer's block, and encouraging people to talk about their ideas and projects.  That feels like exactly the kind of push I need right now.

On top of that, I recently came across #RPGaDay2026, which I also plan to participate in.  Between that event and Blaugust, August is shaping up to be a month full of design thoughts, worldbuilding notes, development insights, and the occasional rambling idea that eventually finds its way into the game.  Think of this as the start of a month-long thought dump: game design, lore, mechanics, inspirations, lessons learned, and whatever else comes up during development, alongside the regular Dev Logs.

If you've been following the project quietly from the sidelines, this month should give you a much clearer look at how the game is actually being built behind the scenes.  I'm looking forward to finally getting this started. 

 

Blaugust 2026:

• August 1 - 6: Welcome to Blaugust
• August 7 - 13: Introduce Yourself
• August 14 - 20: Creator Appreciation
• August 21 - 27: Staying Motivated
• August 28 - 31: Lessons Learned

Blaugust 2026 Community Builder Edition (pick at least 3):

• Post before August 1st, inviting others to join in the fun
• Make at least 5 posts that are directly inspired by a fellow Blaugster (I have no idea if this is correct but I'm running with it because it just works in my opinion) + linking to the post(s) that inspired you
• Join or create a group project
• Engage with other Blaugsters at least once a week
• Leave comments
• Join discussions on Discord
• Share posts across various platforms

#RPGaDay2026 prompts:

• Discipline
• Stature
• Poise
• Charm
• Burden
• Reach
• Mercy
• Resolve
• Privilege
• Secret
• Tact
• Loss
• Strain
• Regard
• Endurance
• Composure
• Intensity
• Directness
• Desire
• Promise
• Charity
• Grit
• Fortune
• Distance
• Familiarity
• Regret
• Hunger
• Devotion
• Labour
• Pride
• Edge

Where I Found All This

• The Herald of Blaugust 2026 - Blaugust Must Go On! - has a fantastic list of all participating blogs
• Nerd Girl Thoughts - Blaugust 2026 is Coming! - she took the reins of Blaugust 2025 when Bel had to step back
• Blaugust on Mastodon - still the place where everything tagged #Blaugust and #Blaugust2026 shows up

Dev Log 3

 

Next monthly check in! Just going to dive right in with little introduction this time.

My bestiary is now up to 26 entries. As I progress into this world building, I've started coming up with more variants in a few of the latest entries, such as the Exira and the Lanternling. Obviously, there's a bunch more that have been created with variants, but I need to stop myself from doing that "feature creep". My main focus is to get a healthy amount of variety in my bestiary by December. Once that target is reached, I can go crazy and develop more of these. I already know that I will be changing my information on my book-lore entries, adding stuff, deleting parts, etc. That's mostly because as I create these creatures and my players playtest the game, things change. Nothing will be super drastic, however. Just, information changes as the system develops. I'm starting to loosely think about the taxonomic ranking of things due to how many variants I'm coming up with. Maybe a whiteboard with pictures and string is in my near future. 

Moving on to the actual development of the system. I'm going to be honest and say that I didn't work on half the stuff I mentioned in the previous dev log (dev log #2). We've only had 1 session since the previous dev log and this one due to scheduling events for the rest of the community over in Discord. Also, I had to really sit down and work on things for this last session pretty substantially. Let me go over that now.

The market system module was a doozy of a build. I needed it to work with everything else that I've built, with room to grow for future renditions. The breakdown of this session was 2 NPCs that were vendors of specific fields, such as a Weapons vendor and an Armor vendor. Obviously, these sell more than straight up weapons and armor, but also mods and generalized items that fit within those fields, like trail rations per se.  There's another NPC who is strictly mod specialization. As of right now, he is strictly another vendor, but his role is going to get more technical once I figure things out. I'll come back to this. Next NPC is a storage NPC. I didn't get to making that interaction for my players, mostly because I had some question as to how they would like things to work. Finally, the main focus NPC in the local central hub (LCH). This one has nothing that I need to develop anything for. This NPC is essentially just a traditional one you encounter in most games. 

So the 2 main vendor NPCs were the main focus this round. I went the same route as I did with the loot-table-generator (LTG) module, where I upload a .csv file and it provides that info in a virtual store. There is a refresh inventory because reasons (which came in super handy for this last session) and some information that is for the GM eyes only. For the players, they are initially provided with all items in a vertical scroll market window, with categories listed as option sorting buttons. For example, if a player wants to look at mods only, they press that Mods button and only those things are listed. Everything has a name with information, the tier, category, slot, affinity, and stock shown to the players. There is a Buy button, which essentially just helps make things quick and efficient. There is an additional "barter roll" that gets performed once the player hits that Buy button. If they roll high, they get a discount. Low rolls get full price. This was initially done to engage roleplay, but I quickly found out that this was a bad idea. It did generate some nice chats, but overall, it was too messy. There were some options that I, as the GM, could see but the players couldn't. They voiced their opinions of being able to see a little bit of what I see, mostly in the pricing, which makes sense. 

I made it so that in the chat window, it shows who is buying what item, which then gets put into their inventory immediately. Turns out that I forgot to put in the code of WHO is buying WHAT. Doesn't really matter now since the roleplay idea is out the window, but I'm still going to do it because I want to know. 

One of the biggest problems for my players was something I soft-locked on my end. So I'm working with items that have a tier level associated with it. If you've played any kind of video game in the past decade, you would know this as a tier, rarity, value, whatever. Usually they have a color range associated with them. Since I'm a Guild Wars 2 player, you go from white - blue - green - yellow - orange - pink - purple. If you're playing Path of Exile 2 right now (as I am), then it goes white - blue - yellow - brownish-beige. You get the gist. Well, I've been working on this for this game. I don't have colors associated with things, just a T1, T2, T3, etc. Turns out, somewhere in my code (I have a feeling of where exactly this is) I have tiers being treated as player levels. My players couldn't purchase anything above a T1 item. Only way I figured this out was when people were just spamming the purchasing buttons and the chat display telling me what was going on. This was ironically also the moment I realized I needed the chat ping to tell me who was buying what. Needless to say, I need to fix this. 

The mod specialization NPC is on the to-do list of making the interaction happen. I'm not exactly sure as to how I'm going to build it. I really liked what Hellgate:London (I think it was this game at least) had for their mods and upgrades - simple. You would place the item in the main area, then click on an upgrade slot and it slotted in the mod. As for this situation, depending on the complexity of the upgrades, the player might be asked to leave that item for an adventure. I'm really not sure how to go about this in regards to managing things like this, but I've got an idea, which is going to be covered in the next part.

The storage NPC. As I mentioned earlier, I didn't around to building this one at all because I really wanted my players to give me ideas for it. Overall consensus was a grid window that showed you what was there, or even a list. I could try toggling either view, but I'll have to see on my coding capabilities for this. To further on this, someone had mentioned being able to see what you have in the storage via your character sheet. They wouldn't be able to interact with it, but they could at least SEE what was in there. I actually really like this idea and will implement it. Which this brings me to the previous section. For the mod specialization, I might add in another tab/section that shows players if they have something with other NPCs, like a pick up order or something. This could also get upgraded into the whole side quest tracking idea that a lot of video games do. But, feature creeping is real and I need to pull myself back. 

Alright, so I've got more stuff to work on, plus the previous dev log stuff to do. I'll be busy fixing things over the next 2 weeks because that is when the next sessions are scheduled. Once I get things done, I'm really hoping the pace picks up and that we can really dive into the stories. Also, my 2 groups of playtesters are going to be on separate adventures. How exciting! 

Check back next month for where things went right and where things went wrong.  You can always check my weekly posts on my Patreon and Kofi, or follow me over on Mastodon for daily blurbs.  

Dev Log 2

 Monthly check in for my sanity and to give myself a sense of progress.  As my last entry, this is probably going to be a little messy still while I try to figure out a format for presentation and sorting, but hey at least I'm doing something, right?

My bestiary has grown to 22 entries.  I have a few that haven't been publicly posted since I decided to start the weekly posts sometime in February, which I believe started with #7.  I do have creatures that technically were designed before that initial post, but I just haven't actually shared them and I probably won't.  My reasoning is simple: because I don't want to. My goal is to end this year with 52 entries, so maybe a few weeks will get more than just a single entry.  I almost did that for this week. I might actually still do that this week.  The reason for that is because this week's creature is the Porcelain Seer, which has 2 variants. That would technically bring up my number, but at the same time, it might introduce confusion with so many postings of similar things.  I already did a post a few weeks prior for the Coral Priestess and the Fraddam Seer.  Both of those are just variants of each other, but they each got their own weekly spotlight.  So I guess at this point, who knows what I will do.  I do know and confirm that I will have 52 by the end of the year, no matter what.  Might just be unpublished ones, which is totally fine because "secret surprises" are fun.

As for play testing, my current players have completed Adventure 0.  They helped me create 2 modules and inspired the system for FoundryVTT by giving me feedback of what would make things way easier and to keep the pace decent.  As a continuation from the previous Dev Log, the 2 modules I have created is a loot-table-generator (LTG) thing and a reactive-environment (RE) thing.  These are currently working within my homebrew of a game system.  

The LTG is essentially a module where I upload a .csv file that has a specific name.  I then have the ability to apply area modifiers to it, for example the player is in a food court, so the items that they are going to find are pulling from the food court modifier in the .csv file.  I can also apply more specific modifiers to what kind of loot that they can get.  I mentioned previously that there are tiers for the loot.  I can actually tell the LTG what tier, type, yes/no mods, etc to chuck into the RNG of the item generated.  I haven't really had a chance to test this out fully, but overall it does seem to work.  Also, the item generated is pinged in the chat window and automatically deposited in the player's inventory.

The RE is where I can create a tile and have it attach to so many things.  I can have the tile reveal:

• a secret area
• a hidden creature
• if a player has a specific item that causes a trigger
• if the player has a certain level of ENT they can trigger something
• if the players are in combat and pass over the tile, something can happen
• if a sound is heard/played, it can trigger something
• if a tile is triggered, a sound can play and/or a message in chat is sent

 This module, RE, has a bit of tweaking to do still.  Each session have given me a slight problem with it.  I'm not sure if I just keep forgetting to hit that "save" button or what, but I always seem to have to edit it when a player is suppose to be triggering it and nothing happens.  I've got my homework to do for this one, that is for sure.

Another module that I'm planning on making is essentially one that connects a token to a compendium entry.  One of my players had suggested the ability to either hover over a token (NPC or enemy or whatnot) and a small window can pop up that gives some brief information, such as name and/or type.  If the players decides to then click on said window, it takes them to the compendium entry.  I tried setting this up without much time and I honestly couldn't get it to work.  My workaround was to have the creature be interactive, where players can click on a link which takes them to the compendium entry.  Turns out, only the DM can see it.  I felt a little defeated on that but it's okay.  I just need to figure out why that happens. 

My homework from the previous Dev Log was to work on class skills.  Well, that didn't exactly happen.  I did manage to get the class entries and bestiary entries entered into the compendium.  So right now, my players can access their classes and bestiary entries whenever they need to.  I'm not sure how to do the skill thing yet (interact on the player's sheet/token).  Some things had actually come up during the play sessions that I feel should be dealt with first.  So my current checklist of things I need to do: 

• Double speed option if a player doesn't choose to roll for observation/perception nor loot
• Have something that locks in observation/perception rolls (apparently I've gone from a 1d20 to a 1d10 in different sessions and I just need consistency on my end). This might end up being a typed command or a button.
• Create the local Central Hub for players
• Vending NPCs
• Upgrade/crafting location
• Storage
• Quest/adventure provider
• Change the default blue image background on the compendium packs to a solid color because white lettering gets lost
• Players cannot see the creature information window (might get fixed with the new module I'm planning on making)
• Reword or revamp some part of the creature entries
• Group 1 had 0 issues with how to handle the Porcelain Seer, but Group 2 did
• Might add in the escalation part for the Threat section in the entry.  I have this for a Cockatrice Effigiel (not published as of this writing) but nothing else.  
• Reiterate that not everything in this game is out to kill you, even though it is a post-apocalyptic/dark fantasy/survival horror game.  It all depends on how the players interact with the world (a vast majority of things are indeed hostile but my players have only encountered a Digosfrag, a Tsukikago Servitor, a Calamivox Ingratus, and now a Porcelain Seer.  They didn't get really into the encounter with the Porcelain Seer because of how quickly things went, but if they stuck around for a few more turns, it was going to turn into a full blown encounter. 
• Add in a secondary option for a observation check.  The suggestion was if a player rolls high, they can get a possible loot generation.  I believe they referenced Baulder's Gate 3 for this, so I will have to revisit that. 

Check back next month for where things went right and where things went wrong.  You can always check my weekly posts on my Patreon and Kofi, or follow me over on Mastodon for daily blurbs.  

Dev Log 1

Dusting this blog off after a long time.  I won't go into the boring details of where I've been and what I've been up to.  Every month will have a progress report here.  I don't plan on going super in depth for things (obvious reasons) but I do want to keep a blog/log of my overall progress.  So without further delay, let me talk about this game!

The Grid

The Grid was originally a final game at the end of my fall 2015 semester for mobile-casual game design class.  Although the professor was very unclear as to what parameters had to be met (after numerous discussions about what is expected and what not to do), he didn't like my final game.  I felt hurt and pretty devastated by the grade I received as well as the comments it received from him (opposite of what most classmates said) in which I put it on the shelf and kind of walked away from it.  Recently, I wanted to work on old projects.  This is one of them in which I have created a game trailer and plan to continue this amazing game, even to a possible release.  Everything in this game was created by me, either from scratch or following a bunch of tutorials and mashing ideas together.