| Something I have explained in my journals, but it wasn't in the manual, because I wanted to keep it as part of the 'surprise of gameplay': A Katalyka is a culture that is able to transform anything into anything else with relative ease. If that is not a good version of Heaven, then what would be? (That's why I called it Katalyka... is a play on the idea of catalysis.) * [link] The Galaxy represents Everything, because life is everywhere, in every star system, and when they communicate with each other... the mind of the healthy Stellar Life represents EVERYTHING... trying to fill in the spaces where the planets have not yet accomplished something. Some call it imagination, some call it The Future, some call it Galactic Culture. * Life is so perfect in design that I have been working on the thoughts and gameplay that have gone into Katalyka for over 20 years. Not full time obviously, but a long time ago when I was a teenager I decided I wanted to create a game of some kind, and I wanted it to mean something... I felt an overwhelming desire to not only build a new kind of worldview, but I wanted it to be applicable to real life. I was studying spirituality and the theories of scientific methods of observation, and my spirituality was teaching me to connect everything together and make sense of it. I started working on an RPG called SolFires in about 1989 with a man named Matthew Neu, and then after he left to create his game system, called Renaissance Edge... the project we had begun mutated into my RPG called Metagenesis by 1992, and that turned into the background world for a graphic novel named Subterfugitives in 1995, and then that storyline got rewritten into Seven Flowers For The Weary by 1999... each year I worked on the mindset behind these stories I kept learning more and more, getting pulled deeper and deeper into the concepts behind the stories... ...to the point where I woke up over the last few years to discover that a character generation system and ability pathway tracking idea that a man named Jamon Shroeder and I were working on in 1993 actually ended up being involved with something the planet Saturn was working on for a decade afterward... a social construct for understanding how different interactions in life relate to each other... that I call Holistic Rationality. It took quite a bit to finally get it all down, but it became the backbone of Katalyka, and the systems in Katalyka took about half a year for me to design and illustrate after that. I did end up using a lot of the world building that was in all of those previous games and story ideas... so in a very real way there is over twenty years of game design that has gone into Katalyka. I think once people begin playing it and figure out what it does, it could actually change the way people live and interact. But only if they are open to it. After all this, I mostly hope that people find the game fun to play. |









