1. Went to a friend’s wedding.
2. Went to an afterparty.
3. Played Star Wars RPG with family.

Good weekend.

Attending a friend’s wedding today. They have odd thematic taste so I’m basically dressing up like a leprechaun.

Hmm. Maybe SRPG needs some scary bits.

Continuing my thoughts on weather/elements from yesterday:

Fire: Kind of already have this covered with the thermal/temperature elements previously discussed. As an avid D&D player, however, one of my favorite observations is how many problems fire can solve. I’ll have to be very careful about giving the player any access to flammable materials or components.

Earth: Honestly, I don’t have a solidified idea here. Earthquakes are of course a significant natural disaster, but I’m not sure how to work that into the game. Looking at it from a different angle, there are some nature-based mechanics that could be interesting: plant growth, erosion, etc.

I may be going too far with some of these mechanics. At a certain point this is just going to turn into the text adventure version of Dwarf Fortress.

I’m going to be out of town over the weekend for a friend’s wedding, so the next few posts will be on the short side (not like I’ve been writing any novels lately).

I had two dreams about tsunamis (twonamis?) last night. Probably means something significant about my life, but it got me thinking about environmental effects in SRPG. Specifically, how changing weather or extreme events might fit into the context of the challenge types I recently laid out…and how the player might use those elements to overcome obstacles.

Water levels are the most obvious example; the Myst games in particular have always been fond of giving the player a way to raise or lower volumes of water to gain access to places or objects.

Air is another fun one. The Talos Principle used fans in various puzzles to launch the player, prevent access to certain paths, or propel/lift objects.

Another D&D map today, this one for a rebel safe house in Brighthelm.

Did some inking, makes it a lot more legible.

I put together this map for a city in the D&D campaign I’m running. I’d like to reproduce it digitally (in Campaign Cartographer or something similar) to print handouts for my players.

On an unrelated note, I really need a scanner.

Changes:

• Stubbed out some more locations/creatures/items in all sections.
• Did some design breakdowns for interactive elements and dev tools.
• Did some design work for a Card Builder side project.

Bugs & Problems:

• Nothing new

I’m thinking through better ways to create and edit Entities in SRPG. I’m using an IDE, but it’s not very helpful in the very dynamic context of the SRPG engine (this could be fairly viewed as a downside to the design).

What I’d like to put together is an in-browser tool for creating entities. It would be aware of things like Verbs and other entities, allowing me to reference them directly (and implicitly validating that portion of the entity code in the process).

Alternatively, I can set up templates in my IDE to quickly insert entities of various types with certain fields pre-populated. It’s more simplistic, but also requires far less time investment (a good thing, considering I barely have time to work on the game itself).

I’ve been having a bit of trouble figuring out the mechanics for SRPG. Specifically, making them interesting, deep, and open to emergent interactions. So I’m trying to break down interactivity in the game to make the mechanical behaviors more composable.

Ways you interact in SRPG:

• Translation: Moving an object from one place to another.
• Communication: Talking to someone.
• Destruction: Breaking something or attacking someone.
• Configuration: Changing the state of something without changing the thing itself.
• Transmutation: Changing something into something else.
• Combination: Using something with something else to configure, transmute, translate, or destroy it. This is usually a combination of Translation and another interaction type.

This is helpful already. Let’s say you need to get a raccoon to leave a location, but it won’t because there’s a delicious cake on the ground. The goal requires translation (moving the raccoon to a different location), but you can’t accomplish it directly. This is where the other modes of interaction come into play. You could:

• Communicate: Explain to the raccoon that an all-cake diet is bad for its health. If your reputation with the local wildlife is sufficient, the racoon will listen to your advice.
• Destroy: Smash the cake into oblivion. Even a raccoon doesn’t want to eat dirt.
• Transmute: Use your magic wand to turn the cake into a healthy salad. The raccoon will go look for something tastier.
• Translate: Just pick up the cake and take it with you. The raccoon will follow.
• Combine: Put a stick of dynamite in the cake. The ensuing explosion will certainly destroy the cake and might kill the raccoon. Either way, no more raccoon in that location.

I like this approach so far. In general, I want to separate means from ends. The player is presented with an end goal, and combines (composes) the interactive mechanics in their toolkit to accomplish the goal. This makes for a nice separation in the code as well. Instead of coding a quest condition like “player dropped cake in dim clearing” (which implies a particular solution), the check would look like: “raccoon is no longer in west trail”. If I add game mechanics later on, such as a ray gun that transforms any target into sawdust, the quest/goal doesn’t need to be updated, because it’s checking for outcomes rather than actions.

Decided I will go with my own layout. It’s inefficient (severely) but I’ll learn more by doing it. I’m going to model the layout after the subset of CSS properties I deem useful, which will include at minimum:

• Font family, size, weight, alignment, and style.
• Padding, position (fixed/relative/etc), margin.
• Background color.
• Border (top, right, bottom, left, width, color, size).