Who are the Lords of Illic? Originally the world of Illic was a setting that I created for dungeons and dragons. It is a remastered version of a map I made for my first dungeon game set in the world of Illic.

If you look at the map above you will be able to see a lot of circles - each one is a town and every single one of those towns has a name. Which sounds cool except when the names are "Kou" or "Blacber" or "Ytern Cosson". The first session began in a small town in the forest near Ace Archery in game. The town was called Lumbridge (a name helpfully provided to me by my friends, I have never played RuneScape). The players began their journey in the small prison there under the watchful eye (or eyes) of three-eyed-joe.  I could recount the whole journey thanks to a collection of handwritten journals on Illic lore and upon flicking through those journals recently all I can say is...  My abilities as a game master have improved a lot in the last... ten years? I have run many much better games with the same group since (not all Illic based).

Lords of Illic is vaguely set in the world after the events of the fourth of these campaigns - a reboot of the original game. Though in many ways it is kind of an afterthought. The game is called Lords of Illic because on the day I wanted to start the project I needed a name for the repository. I wouldn't have imagined that I would still be working on the game years later.

Which brings me to another point. Illic is a more traditional fantasy setting, rather than the more anime-like setting in the game. In the beginning I need sprites so I used fire emblem characters fanart.

It was an interesting journey to get from there to here, but that is easily another blog post/s. I started by making designs of characters which were similar to the characters already in the game. From there I expanded the cast of characters based on what I felt like drawing and well... It ended up very different from any of my campaigns I ever run. 

So who are the Lords of Illic? I think it will be exciting to find out.

All of which is a bit of a ramble but the main point of the matter is that I want to give a game development blog a go. I don't know whether anyone will take the time to read it, but for the past five years of development (and three or four years of an old build being posted) of this game I haven't written anything and that made it impossible for even one person to read about the game. 

For a while I have been dreaming of publishing Lords of Illic. The idea fills me with excitement but also a sort of hopelessness. I am the type of person who vastly prefers tinkering with Lords of Illic over talking to people. The idea of making TikToks or writing Twitter posts doesn't appeal to me in the slightest (to put it politely) whether I will or not I will give that a go only time will show but... Was there any real need to jump into the deep end to start off with? I don't think so at least. So I will start writing (blogging?) about Illic here and if someone does stumble upon the game and is interested there will be that little more there. A wise man (David Deutsch) once said "problems are solvable" and then he wrote it in his book "The Beginning of Infinity." It is a dense book on the philosophy of science which covers a lot of difficult subject matter (such as string theory), but in the end it all boils down to that one sentence: "Problems are solvable." If something is too much for you to handle, you just need to break it down into manageable chunks. If you don't know how to solve the problem you just need to find the next step in the right direction. Which is exactly how I managed to turn Illic from a dream in my head into what it is today and hopefully one day into a finished game. Recently I have had to painstakingly rewrite most of the code in my game, something that took a lot of weekends in the last year. It would be easy to feel like all the time I spent before was wasted but without the desire to try things and learn well... I don't know where I would be or what I would be doing. What I do know is that I never could have gotten to the point where I could redo everything better. It isn't something limited to game making of course. It is just a part of being human really.  I might have gotten a bit too far into inspirational speech territory but I'd like to think it would be possible to inspire someone (writing it out at least makes me feel better).

Since this is an announcement... What is coming up for Illic? The first thing is the character Ilenia has gotten a redesign. The banner shows her new sprite for those who have keen eyes. I will also be adding background music to the game - something else I hadn't tackled because it felt overwhelming. There are a host of bug fixes as well (progress indicators were completely broken for one thing). There are still some much needed bug fixes I haven't tackled I'd like to include so it will be a week or two until I post the next version. I'd also like to tackle a splash screen of the characters when they activate their ability charges but we will have to see.

Until next time.