Quick Update
Not a great deal to say, only that work continues well and we should be on target for our promised updates quite soon.
What I'm working on
1. I have been writing a lot recently and the fruits of this labour will be used to give greater depth and context to the coming updates. I decided that giving esoteric quotes and historical details was probably somewhat off-putting to a lot of people without a greater sense of the world as it is lived in. To present the world in a fuller light has been my goal.
2. I, with my brother, have been developing and filming a wide variety of combat techniques. We have so far filmed around 80-85 individual combat sequences. The current focus is "grappling-type" counters in which the defender aims to control the weapon of the attacker and then either simply finish them off or disarm them.
We have so far developed techniques for an unarmed fighter to use in countering a longsword (two handed, between 45 and 52 inches long), an arming sword (one handed, 35-40 inches long) and a spear (6-8 feet long). We have also created defences for the use of a fighter armed with a knife and with an arming sword. Future weapon types include axes and blunt weapons and the use of shields.
We are creating these more complex techniques (which will require a fair amount of skill to use) as a test for our combat system as planned. We will soon be moving on to the simpler "block, parry, strike" style of techniques which will be far easier to develop.
In devising these techniques we have drawn on many years of training in Ju-jitsu (a 16th Century Japanese martial art designed for use by samurai against armed, unarmed, armoured and unarmoured opponents) and on our more recent exposure to Medieval martial arts which are currently experiencing somewhat of a revival. It is this cross-cultural examination that has revealed the, often incredible, similarities between martial arts from opposite sides of the earth. It is this similarity that has somewhat vindicated our use of a Japanese system as our basis.
Well, I hope that this update has shed some light on an otherwise dim period of development!
