Hello again! I return to fulfill an obligation to my faceless investors.

I wanted this post to be a split domain, but that was over-ambitious. It's more 80-20. I may have promised a playable version of M4, but instead, you get...

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Foundations!

Foundations

- How many games can I fit in this box? -

Ain't that a weird turn of events. I had something of a come-to-spiritual-leader moment midway through this month, the same kind I have every month (week, day, hour) in pursuit of a stunning all-solver that finally pries me out of my mispatterned lifestyle. This one was different, though, I swear!

It's just another workflow restructuring angle. Sorry, kids.

Foundations is special only because it's actually 'finishable' - not really, not in terms of content, but systemically. Unlike any of my other projects, the pipeline demands of Foundations are extremely-generous and biased towards my natural strengths of Writing a Shitload of Text Fast and Lazily Editing Highly-Abstract 2D Images. This means we've got some actual stuff to look at from June, and some new considerations for how the game is actually going to work.

I. Driving

Hey, how does a car actually handle? Acceleration, deceleration, braking force, turning speed, turning radius, suspension force, compression damping, rebound, traction bias and loss, downforce, COM/weighting, aerodynamism and drag...hmm. The physicality of a car simulation is an interesting engagement - lots of forces, not a lot of use for all of them. The question of "how real is too real" has been mulled over by many a developer or aspirant, and you will be bucketed into a subgenre based on how accurate your representation is.

I don't really know how to characterize this with respect to Foundations yet. It's a game where you *can* swap most of your parts out freely, so these forces need to be both represented and mechanically tangible enough to be worth altering. That's eminently superfluous for a top down driving game, but I find it kind-of funny in a rage game sort of way, providing overly-granular controls to convolute an otherwise automatic process.

If you hit an enemy, you either kill them instantly or get to start a fight on your own terms. Not much else going on in the overworld, mostly just driving, recharging and stopping to inspect areas of interest.

II. Walking

No notes. I know you love that sweet, sweet programmer art. There are some systems yet to be implemented that I *will* discuss once they near maturity, and I recognize a confusing prioritization has occurred here. I mostly lacked inspiration when it came to mocking sprites for this mode, so I put it off.

What's the stall? It's fucking menus! The party menu is pretty vital here, as is a cohesive dialogue handler. Both of these systems have broad implications with respect to how we handle and shuttle data between states, so I'm taking my sweet time with them. The party menu is a particular sticking point, being as it's a less-resolved limb of the full combat body, so I expect to waste a lot of time reworking it.

Junior and the BASILISK, the 🚶 and the ▽ respectively, are compulsory slot-1 and slot-2 party picks--and no, I'm still not introducing them yet. You get to fumble your way into new friends for the other two, though no ferrying a hundred options around in your trunk - most of 'em stay where they are. Take care of your buddies, too - they're typically pretty fragile, and who's to say it'll be easy to bring them back from the brink...?

III. Beating People Up

Do you like menus? I love menus! I hope to do nothing but make menus forever!

My capacity for good UI/UX design is often hampered by my patience, so choosing to make a game that is essentially all menus where it counts - that's an interesting choice. I think it's kind-of fun to rediscover old projects in new places--obviously a multipane combat control scheme would necessitate some kind of 'window manager' paradigm to track focus and handle inputs, huh? Hello again, OS 101.

It's not horrible, but an interesting note when it comes to designing games that mimic the navigation-fashion of common window managers and desktop environments: you need to port in at least a good amount of the QOL features that operating systems provide. There's a lot of them. Dwarf Fortress and its ilk also demonstrate the value of building a game for power-users, since attrition is often a consequence of control frustration, not just design problems. Shortcuts are good. Multiple ways of doing the same input are good. This also means that your focus control and multipane navigation needs to be well-structured from the get-go or you're shooting yourself in the foot.

I've mostly been working on menu transitions, which are fun, but there are limits to the capabilities of shaders and simple motion. I'm not going to explain how this shit works to you yet. Feel free to speculate!

IV. Engineering Woes

God, I love Unity. What a forgiving platform it is. You may not know it now, but Documentation is your God, and robust, well-indexed forums are a close second. Also, here's the cursory fuck you to all LLMs for ruining the procedures of information-sourcing; I'd really rather just read a mediocre spec doc than have to argue over basic practice with a corpse-aggregate of all developers past and present as it suffers pangs of hallucinatory solution nostalgia. Fuck off.

There's not a lot to say about interesting technical specs. Foundations is a supremely-simple game thus far: data-shuttling between states is not hard, we don't have much super-state to manage and none of the technical stuff (in-world systems, driving hazards, the jankier combat actions) exists yet. Calm before the storm, yada yada. I keep fucking with the rendering pipeline and producing transient errors.

Hey, do you see that? We just passed someone on the side of the road. Weird. It almost looked like ...

M4

- Just tooling around -

The beast lives yet.

I recall mentioning in May's M4 segment that I figured the problem was related to an inability to quickly move from 'idea' to 'identification' to 'robust solution'. That's a mischaracterization. The issue is that the 'identification' part is being hit prematurely. In other environments, my terrible dev habits are rewarded by "working prototypes" that will kill me later. Modding a mature game is more like actual software development-- you wanna do something, figure out the process first and learn it well. If there is no process, you better make a good one.

In that sense, M4 needs *tools*! I need to fix my datagen, I need to establish very strict patterns for every basic implementation (block to blockentity to GUI, like what are you *doing*), and I need to find ways to automate those processes to a point that they become trivial, whether that's a purely mental process or some kind of actual external helper. Jumping the gun and constantly trying to parse how Mojang constructs, represents, preserves and cleans something like a dimensional portal when I haven't nailed down my basic GUI workflow is a fundamentally stupid practice.

This has pulled M4 deep into the "dev only" realm of progress, not helped by my distractable ass shamelessly moving to the Foundations-house. I still harbor some amount of irrational trust in my ability to wrap on CPAK1 before EOY, but that's accompanied by a couple more adjustments to the core process. Unsurprisingly, the main three machines (I will name them for you: the Manufactorum, the Manipulator and the Inoculator) needed a reduction in complexity. Re-evaluating them as something closer to Factorio's basic assemblers was followed by an important realization: not every gameplay element needs constant Interest Adjustment. I gotta let more things do their boring jobs.

All to say - things are going well! Project work is surprisingly-sticky (ack), despite my faltering interest in the 'points of inspiration' for resuming them. Nothing will be playable by the end of this month, either - how the fuck is it already the 10th?

Down the Worldwell is a *little* dead. More to come next month. If you're nice, I'll include a video of Foundations instead of a bunch of mockup screengrabs.

wuv u, have a good one, take care, direct any inquiries to my secretary, etc..