The beauty and weight of frameworks

Hi folks! I have good news, mixed news, then some good news.

Okay, first, the good news: All the testing thus far for our Darklight Tower faction is going great!

• No drop-dead surprises -- enemies challenge the player without overwhelming them
• There are definitive stages of progression as the faction gains power
• Eliminating Zphenx from the equation changes everything
• Players can brave the gauntlet to steal potions regularly, or free Zphenx to use her as a vendor back at the Alchemist's Shack

Now, the mixed news: Part of what makes things possible with the Darklight Tower faction is tweaking some scripts in the Organic Factions framework. Just a few liiiittle changes have given rise to a TON of new flexibility! That's a huge win for this faction, for any others I make in the future, and for anyone else using my framework.

Updating frameworks is a lot of effort, since I have to do all that [regression testing] to make sure the old and the new stuff all works fine. So, if I'm going to update a framework, I want to do that as rarely as possible.

After some review of my latest changes, though, it came to my attention that I could bundle just a few little extra bits into the framework update, and that would give absolute ultra mega crazy flexibility for the foreseeable future.

So, the best way to proceed forward is to add in a few of these little extras, and to one giant round of tests, and then be effectively done with framework updates for a long time.

Lastly, the good news again: To really effectively test these changes, I'm going to have to create some test cases. Rather than make throw-away factions that only exist for testing, I can create some factions that use the new code, and then bundle them into the next publishing round for the Organic Factions Extension.

To keep myself from going overboard, I'm going to limit the build to only a few things -- I want this simple and streamlined to also show how easy it is to crank out. Expect some more Werewolves, Silver Hand, Thalmor, or perhaps a few others sprinkled in. They won't necessarily be as deep or powerful as other stuff I've built, but they should add juuuuust the right amount of spice to the existing world and have partial dependencies on other world changes for things to make sense.