I’ve been pretty bad at making development posts. The problem is when I write one, I’m not developing… and I’d rather be developing than writing posts. BUT I figured since I’ve made some progress on the newest version of Street Wolves that I’d give an update.
Catching Up
If you’re new around here, my setting Street Wolves for Savage Worlds has been pretty successful. And while I could keep just riding that and releasing adventures and what not I found myself a few problems, but here’s the two biggest:
1. Not everyone wants to buy Savage Worlds in order to play Street Wolves. It’s an uphill battle trying to reach folks in the general population that isn’t buying into the Savage Worlds scene.
2. As much as I like Turbo Edition, it isn’t as gritty as I wanted it to be. You can scale it up fairly easily to do a lot of high octane action. While some may prefer that I really want a version that’s closer to my original vision that’s more neo-noir and dangerous. And also I wanted something less crunchy (rules heavy) than Savage Worlds.
So I started working on a new version, this time taking the Year Zero Engine by Free League. Year Zero (or variations of it) power most of their popular games. What I like about it is light weight and the heroes are less over the top heroic, plus they’ve got a whole stress/resolve thing that matches nicely with what I had in mind for the Drive system that’s found in Street Wolves.
Coming Up with a Name
One of the first things I needed to do was come up with a name. I really didn’t want to call it Street Wolves: Year Zero Edition or something like that. For one they don’t do that with the Year Zero games. After thinking about it, I did feel like it was worth including the word “Zero” in some respect, and since in the setting lore (more in that in the future) the term “Zero Hour” worked. So there we have it, Street Wolves: Zero Hour.
Writing
I got cracking on the writing by taking the Year Zero Engine SRD and picking the options they have available and also figuring out what I need to add. For their Talents list is pretty short.
Overall though, I’m trying not to get bogged down into many small details. My main goal is to get a Quick Start version out first. The Quick Start version is going to be a very stripped down preview of the game, but with most of the core stuff in there so you get how it works. That means I have to have some pretty big things set up like the way Drive is going to work (which I think I just cracked).
I think I’ve got a pretty good handle on a lot of the big stuff, it’s just going to be a lot refining through:
Testing
So far I’ve tested Street Wolves: Zero Hour once. I really only needed some bare bones stuff done before I headed into testing. I was familiar enough with Year Zero Engine to be comfortable running my first session. I used a new adventure that I wrote, because I like to make things harder on myself, I guess. But it was fairly straight forward and a good test (it’ll likely come to Turbo Edition (aka the Savage Worlds version) someday. Anyway, that first test was enough to get my feet wet and I discovered some issues. So I went and tinkered a bunch and I’m gearing up to test again.
My next test is a little more ambitious. I’ll be using the Street Wolves mini campaign Heart of Glass. Since it’s a slow burn investigation, I feel like it’ll be a really great fit to ease into the various aspects of testing the system. Plus, I really want to run it again because I love it.
That’s It… For Now!
Okay, so I got some of my thoughts and progress out in blog form. Now I need to get back to making games!
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