Iteration 2 Retrospective

As promised, at the end of every Iteration, I post a summary of the iteration for those who want to just dive in without my droning on about the whys and wherefores. And so, here it is:

• Psi Wars: Iteration 2

Looking Back

I expected Iteration 2 to be much better received than it is.  I'm not saying people disliked it, I just expected it to make a much bigger splash than iteration 1, and it didn't.  I suppose in retrospect that makes sense.  People tend to be excited when something new happens, because something is more than nothing, but each iteration is only an improvement on the idea.

Overall, my views are down, but not by very much.  I think this is to be expected as well: Everyone tunes in when a new blog starts, and then a portion of them tune out when they realize the current content is not for them.  For example, one of my largest posts in the past year has been my announcement that I would start a blog.  Since then, I've been pretty consistently at about 2400-2600 views "a month" (blogger keeps a running tally).

Word is getting out, though.  Someone dropped a link to the blog on reddit, and I've managed to get onto a sight called "Feedly."  Douglas Cole's GURPS Day is starting to funnel traffic my way: He's now neck-and-neck with Dungeon Fantastic for the amount of referral traffic I get. Incidentally, joining him for Melee Academy resulted in one of my more popular posts: Wu Wei.

Google+ remains a better option for me than Facebook, though I'm not sure why.  Most of my posts on facebook generate a small amount of traffic and get, perhaps, one like.  Google plus, however, inevitably results in a like or two, often more than five, and generally more traffic.  Given that facebook is supposedly more heavily trafficed, I find that odd.

Edit: Oh, I forgot my traditional break down.

The winner of the most liked character this time around was Dun Beltain.  He was also the most viewed.  The most liked template was the Space Knight, but it was also one of the least viewed.  The Spy was the most viewed.  The most liked post of this iteration was the first one: Adjusting the rules, of which I approve (I think it was the most innovative and broadly useful of the posts).  It was also the most viewed.  The second most viewed was the post on adjusting templates, which I also approve of.  When I spoke of expecting this to make a bigger splash than it did, I refer to those posts, and they certainly did make a splash... I was just surprised Iteration 1 seemed to generate more discussion and likes than Iteration 2.

Looking Forward

The next iteration is technology, because you can't run a sci-fi game without carefully defining your tech.  This is the heaviest iteration I've done yet, and it took me the entire month to put it together.  I originally had it set up for nearly 4 months of posts, but I took a gamble and condensed it down into several data dumps, so we're going to have a very busy two months!

• Next week is all your basic technological concerns, from FTL to infrastructure to gear.
• I'll discuss robots, how they fit into the setting, and how to make use of the robot templates in Ultra-Tech to rapidly prototype your own robot companions
• Then we get into ships.  And we go on and on about ships
• First we playtest the space combat system, find its flaws and its strengths.
• Then we rewrite the space combat system to better fit our vision
• Then I discuss how to use, and modify, the various ships given in the GURPS Spaceships series for campaign
• Then I discuss how the various choices I've made impact the game design and the templates, including introducing a few additional rules to cover more general technological concerns
• Then I'll rebuild the old templates (and introduce a few more!) and run one last playtest to see that it all works.

I hope you like Ultra-Tech as much as I do.