Good evening, everyone!

It's been a little while since the last update. I had a whole list of things I wanted to get pushed out soon. I had just finished and released the Atlas classes. And then I was contacted by Need Games and informed that, despite my best efforts, I still rode too close to their trade dress. That was two weeks ago, and since then we've discussed things a little more and I got it somewhat sorted out what the particular issues are. The most obvious and understandable one is the orange "gemstone" on the main pages. That has been removed, but the other request is going to take a little more time to fix... and will likely necessitate a complete rework.

The diamond shapes that contain pixel art are classified as looking too close to the official books, and must be altered. The simplest solution would be to change the shape to something else, like a circle, but as the entire aesthetic was built around this shape, I feel it would lose the visual cohesion they currently have. The right page on the main spread, for example, has thirteen instances of bepixeled diamonds, and all of them are integral to the layout. Each page header has one. Guardian and Tinkerer have unique weapons, and of course there's Pilot. The subheaders are slanted at the same angle, the Attributes are arranged how they are to fit their shapes... Oh, and the checkboxes are super easy to fill in!

It's going to take a while to find a new design that I'm happy with that removes the problematic elements. I had plans for digital-ready, form-fillable sheets. I had requests for translations. Ideas for new pages to add. I'm going to start with trying to rearrange and swap some elements out for hexagons (my favorite shape! I skipped on them because they're generally a bit harder to work with) and see how many of the non-pixel-art diamonds I can keep while maintaining a cohesive appearance. The biggest plus side of the timing on this is maybe this: I do have some wonderful layout ideas given to me by @firox39, so it gives me an opportunity to experiment and implement them!

I'm going to take a little more time to mourn the sheets as they are. As far as I'm aware right now, I can leave them be while I work on the new ones. But after I've taken the time I need, the new drafts will start, and we'll start again from the beginning.

I want to thank everyone who has shown their support for this project, each and every comment and download has meant everything to me <3 It's thanks to you that I have the motivation to push through this and work on a new design at all.

Until next time!

-Ember