You can listen to me chat through my objectives for the second edition here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=694bwtpMcq8
More videos here.
https://youtu.be/_EdoSBNtOn0?si=U-TbP6Od1W5vVrCe
This is a complex project to make a complex game simpler and more modular. As a lot of the job is re-organising and re-structuring information, I want to be able to develop and author it in a very non-linear way, so that I can move quickly from section to section, maintain rules sections as leaves in a tree, not blobs in a linear document, and use sync’d blocks of rules to avoid copy-pasta errors. This is an experiment for me: all the game books I’ve written so far have been composed in word processors, such as Google Docs, which force a linear structure (which is ideal for the output of the manuscript, but less ideal for my “Pepe Silvia wall” compositional style).
I also want to be able to publish this rulebook live to the web, in a way that is very easy for me to update, easy for you to navigate and read, and also easy for me to take down again once the beta period is over (this is a commercial Osprey book, after all).
It’s also a nice writing environment, as it uses the markdown keyboard shortcuts I’m familiar with from other applications.
You may need to force refresh to get updates sometimes.
The world of A Billion Suns has been inspired variously by Issac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, Dune, Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game series, Neal Asher’s Polity books (I loved The Technician in particular), Iain M Banks’ Culture books, Ken MacLeod’s Corporation War series, Insurrection by Dan Abnett, Hyperion by Dan Simmons, the worlds of Star Wars, Android: Netrunner, Warhammer 40,000 and EVE Online, Phillippe Druillet’s batshit Lone Slone books, the Valerian comics (and honestly I quite like the movie), The Fifth Element, Blade Runner, and, you know, some Alien movies.