Okay, so, my attempt to update my progress on the hour has turned into every other hour. Skills took me longer than I expected, in part because I indulged in my love of specificity and in part because I had to stop and consider some sub-systems for performance skills (I loathe the idea of a general all purpose entertainer skills) and for knowledge skills that are culturally bounded. I’m pleased with what I came up with for both cases, although as with the entire document as a whole, the presentation will probably need to be unified and cleaned up.
I have two hours left in the day. I suspect that to reach my goal of having a completely playable, self-contained if simple game, I’m going to have to make the equipment system more bare-bones and abstract than I would like; i.e., define weapons and armor in terms of general classes, and pretty much leave everything else up to improvisation. This is partly because of time constraints, but partly because I’m trying to make a base system that is universal and agnostic to setting, which means either having an incredibly large and detailed equipment sytem with everything from stone knives to phaser rifles (not going to happen in one afternoon) or leaving the equipment system skeletal, to be filled in for particular settings.
With that in mind, I’m going to proceed and try to wrap this up in the allotted time as planned, but I’m setting further goals for myself: take time to develop this bare-bones system into something more fleshed out for particular genres/settings, using a similar approach to this. I’m going to start by expanding my 8 hour game design into 24 hours (not concurrently! Rather, three working days) to turn it into a high fantasy adventure game, with appropriate equipment system, magic system, etc.