This is some kind of quarterly update. My investors are unhappy with throughput, also communication, also temperament, also clarity, also potential... The exercise I will instead engage in is one of misdirected anger, label-kludging and disinformation. It's my only real skill.
Specifically, this is a sitrep concerning productive dysfunctions, mostly those deriving from my unchecked creative preferences; the honest truth is that I only like the wide-angle parts. It's a log of all the bullshit I'm working on! "Working on." The word of the day is larkitechture, or 'uninformed rearchitecting of unfinishable ambition for the purposes of self-satisfaction', a kind of hostile extension of the First Creative Strategy a child develops: I can do it better! fused with an untrained ego and predisposition to self-seclusion. I spend all of my time spinning my wheels on hallucinated consequences to hallucinated choices and paralyzing myself into undersharing. This might be a good thing (I don't share my headstrong bad ideas), but it really probably isn't (I don't share anything with anyone). I will struggle to do it and play coy with details because I am neurotic.
It's probably at least a little annoying to my friends that I overpromise results and underdeliver (zerodeliver?) in perpetuity (just practicing for my eventual joint as a AAA PR manager dw), but I neither expect that it occupies all that much of anyone's bandwidth, nor that entrenching in those kinds of self-imposed obligation holes is a useful pattern for actually making stuff - and the end goal is, still, actually making stuff. I'm not looking to expound here on all the particular misalignments of my creative disposition, but I think it's probably worth at least a little scrutiny, and what's wrong with being forward? Sorry for the momentary self-indulgence (perpetual self-indulgence, what website are you on? come on) The reason for this--the question I want to answer as un-defensively as possible, "why don't you have anything done?" has about two easy answers. The first one is hiding in the above paragraph - I'm a larkitecht, buddy! It's the whole job. The second, related answer is a lack of discipline. Less interesting. Still, I do spend a lot of time adding fuel to the fire, so this is a sliver of the mound.
My *conscious* understanding of this post is me fulfilling another self-imposed obligation: I don't like blabbing about stuff I want to work on then going silent forever. Feels bad, especially because I haven't stopped working on any of them, I just don't know how to bring 'em up in the states they're in. In part, I also think that my defensive narcissistic subpersonality that hides all of my ideas from public exposure is insane, and this is me working against it directly. I have an ego problem and I like to make up shit I know I can't do, then ram my head into it until I give up. All design is undecidable, I am God, and I will make the undecidable-decider eventually. Much love.
"Cyclosomatic consecration is the same as operative consecration - it causes that operative set to consume no power or resources and potentially propagate to neighboring sets."
M4, or "Mad-Manic Magi-Mechanics", thank you very much to the studio that caught and misused my awesome original name and forced me to take on a double-edged infringement, is a massively-oversized techmod for Minecraft 1.21. If you could call anything my 'primary focus' it is this, but only because it's the closest to achievable given my current disposition. Closest, in that context, is still about ten times the distance between the Sun and Pluto--but hey, distinction matters.
Whatever my old motives for it were (waaah something something Other Techmods are Boring waaah Magic Mods suck waaah Botania), they're long-lost now. The current incarnation of M4 is something like a mixture of everything. It's got magic, research, in-world orchestrated crafting, GUI nightmare spam, logistics, weird mobs, bad text guides, name collisions, worthless time-wasting, awful recipes - the works! I think it might just be an excuse for me to make up fake metal names.
The doctrine for 'feature completion' would probably take every team on the planet a solid five years to box out - I'm pretty sure the final 'content package' necessitates a full-scale 4X implemented within the scope of a single machine GUI. Just so we're on the same page. Putting aside the unreasonables, M4 is ultimately a kind of ill-tempered attempt to graft a bunch of different story-styles onto a game that isn't compatible with any of them--'ultimately' because it's more like the wagon I put any of my *automation game* ideas onto, and one of my worst fixations is on how game stories all suck and it'd be cool if we used interactivity to...uh...help us tell them. Not the right place or time to soapbox about game narrative underutilization. I'll circle back.
CPAK1, the 'finishable' part as-evaluated (and the next five CPAKs are still within the realm of 'like maybe almost kind-of doable') constitutes a four-part progression that can kinda help articulate the features:
- ...is a basic techmod with some idiosyncrasies around in-world crafting, compression, resource handling and machine recursion.
- ...implicates two slightly-more-unique features - the *free market* as a method of fixing shortages in supply and throughput, and *research* as a constant drain that gates your access to more sophisticated machines, Factorio style.
- ...drags a magic mod unwillingly into the fold, introducing mana networking, crystals with in-world charge conditions, aspecting, rituals, golem orchestration (thaumcraft, bro, I swear it isn't what it looks like) and also an entire subfaction of intruder mobs that you're meant to derive the rituals from.
- ...is a synthesis thing, implicating a bunch of ruined machine-structures into the research process and adding sources of infinite exotic resources for reprocessing and profitable sale. Also more multiblocks and awful recursive power generation. Compelled magitech?
Implementation, as I now realize, is most often stalled by two things:
- I am not good at the Identify Desired Outcome -> Derive Processes from Codebase -> Try -> Correct Design -> Try... workflow. Minecraft is not a poorly-implemented game, but boy do I get bored of rewriting boilerplate, even if I understand the necessity of it.
- It's paralytic to try and design crafting trees via speculation alone. It is almost certainly better to hammer out loose, ugly and unrefined trees while building features and refine them once you have a chance to try them.
I also might suck as a programmer (not really i swear) because I do not like making workflow-optimizers or tools at all, which is vital. The dire omen of scope creep hangs low and heavy over all the land and I do nothing to combat it...
The part of design-to-dev I actually enjoy is also kind-of the easiest part to implement: hyperabstract systems. M4 is full of silent, churning background processes that are only partly exposed to you - fodder for evil efficiency gains and also disastrous side-effects. The most hilariously-impossibly-stupid is probably the *market*, which is a partly-facilitated exchange between a massive list of world/save-time generated semirandom interdimensional corporations from which all prices are derived - and you can't just *sell*, you also need to package, deliver, facilitate shipment and handle delivery faults. Reception is the same - extraorbital and orbital delivery schemes are volatile, your goods are often fragile, and recapture is very expensive. These sound scary, but from my experience it's more the representational part of a feature is typically the hard stuff - GUIs for market interfacing, arrival animations, etc. Everything else is just data exchange and computation, mostly fakery, numeric easing and good modeling. EZPZ.
Solutions may be easy and fun, but the motivation to get in there and just *write all that damn code* is a different problem. I definitely have not stopped elaborating on it though. I have the boilerplate in place to get all the *stuff* concerning CPAK1 in, but I need to commit to the establishing of a couple ugly features that may need to be extracted or refined:
- Worldgen in general - I do not know how carvers work. Ambition will likely run aground here. Expecting limitations in terms of what can be controlled and how the worldgen stages (carve/decorate/...?)
- Orchestration, entity-awareness and stable inworld processes. Plenty of precedent, but a technical and unsupported avenue that you gotta lay out carefully so you don't suffer later. Everything is a block-entity! Everything is listening all the time! Never free any memory!
- Entities and the potential they have for more elaborate control. Golems in particular, since the above portion concerns rituals, and those will need a ridiculous investment in the form of UI and world hooks for programmable state-executing entities that can pick up, move, drop and destroy stuff.
- Custom models, shaders, and some other fun visual bullshit I haven't bothered to try at. Some noted examples include governance proc projections (billboarded effects that pop over machines), the Mortz filter (blocklimited photonegative) and the research tethers (finish riffing the ender dragon crystal beam lul). Models would include trying at some of the Crystal Heretics, a little more high-poly than a traditional MC mob. Animations? GeckoLib? No idea. Most mobs are cutting room floor material.
- Workflow tools for UI/UX, more established processes for dealing with the MC architectural quirks in terms of M4's customizations and needs, especially text rendering and background process facilitation - 'standard establishment'
- The communicator (essentially a fake email client) and anything related to interfacing with all the market junk. I'm partly a UI designer by trade, for some reason, so I loathe this work and will avoid it at all costs.
It's not testable. I want to package something playable as soon as I finish the 'production chain' but I keep working on silent background processes instead of improving my frail and underfed dev art skills or establishing UI pipelines. Needed features for 'demo' would be resource baseline (thallite, dyspersium, nitrol, photokophrite, pinches, alloys) -> basic powergen -> three big machines (manufactorum, manipulator, inoculator) -> logistics -> IIC backbone (charger, operator, irrigator, distributor, furnace) -> ritual power (LRCU/MSE) -> story bait (Comms Relay & delivery platform). Main stoppages are pinchcraft, which I don't have a good design for (just do it!), and the three big machines, each of which is more complicated than it ought to be.
To establish a pattern here - since these aren't devlogs (I made a whole part of the website for 'em and I don't even use it lol) - my objective is still the completion of CPAK1 by the end of this year. I don't think it is entirely unreasonable. I also expect to massively reduce the scope as I encounter more technical obstacles.
If you wanna *really* know what's going on in CPAK1 + speculation for the future, here's a profoundly evil image.
"So - we must teach the layperson to live like a linguist, a paranoid philosopher and a psychotic poet. It'll only work on like five people. Worth it!"
Brittle? In this economy? Not a good look.
At this point, I don't even remember exactly when this idea first formed--probably gaining on eight years, maybe nine. About the only thing that has stuck around is Tenant's Drop, the big hole that runs down the middle of the map. The 'second pass', where I grabbed ten sheets of notebook paper and drew the entire game out in a single uncritical burst of evil energy, was sometime in 2020? A lot more of the game's current DNA is derived in some way from the blueprint laid out there. The premise - that I liked Going Down Games and wanted to make the ur-Going Down Game that just *keeps* going down - is actually pretty much 1:1. At some point, it took on a Katamari-esque tendency to just absorb and expand whenever I thought of *anything*, and I have since become bitter and incapable of reducing the scope. It would unequivocally cost near-billions to finish. My current objective is to implant cult cells into various population centers and attempt to establish a neo-religious following oriented towards completion of Brittle before 2100.
The humorous part about Brittle's hypothetical architecture is that the individual parts aren't necessarily so inaccessible-impossible-improbable. It's a 2D action platformer (daring today, aren't we) with a ridiculous control scheme, but that's still just different ways of kicking off animations and spawning entities. The most expensive parts of Brittle *by far* are just entity and area representations; I've had the full technical scope mapped and half-cooked for a looooong time. It's what makes the thing fun to think about--sure, such a platformer would never exist, but what sort of forces would the designers need to account for in a resource-infinite realm where such a project was possible? The main problem is still branch control and explosive outcome expansion.
Modern Brittle is mostly stalled by a conflict between "near-complete control paradigms" and a "fear of unspeculated future needs that would render the current implementation brittle", ha-ha. The player, the Mechanic, is capable of a pretty stupid amount of things. Eight loadouts, four weapons each, attunements that can replace you with an elementally-skewed version of yourself, a lot of mobility options, contextual mobility options, loose chains, cancel thresholds. My lack of canonical design knowledge, being as I am a hobbyist with no formal training, means that I'm prone to picking a fallible design for these sorts of things. Intuitively it feels possible to handle it as a series of competing finite state machines that deprioritize to links, but I'm unsure of the ordering.
The logical split would be that the Mechanic has three: one corresponds to their 'body-state', or the shape they're in right now, and it informs down to two more - their 'movement-state' or where they're at and how they're moving, and lastly their 'acting-state', or what they're doing in addition to moving, if anything is possible. The mechanic can only ever be doing one thing for each of these in a given moment, so each is like an FSM/pushdown, and their criteria for cancellation are all different, but their stacking is because the topmost is the most-dominating and will cull downward (this is the fault, since it cuts both ways - the bottom state can also restrict upward...?) A lot of time has been wasted poking at the best way to let the Mechanic's states harmonize and control one-another as needed, because you can be doing a lot of things at the same time despite many of these things restricting many other things. This paragraph constitutes the current version, but it likes to get fuzzy with category-overreach and locking failures.
Broader systems are still tricky, but less-so. The largest concern beyond individual entity behavior is either squad orchestration or flag management. The latter is a far-far-far-future design headache that is almost unworthy of discussion. The former concerns Brittle's most common style of encounter, small groups of organized combatants numbering 2 to ~20? Normal entities are just behavior trees with some baked-in hooks for room specifics and pathing jank. Squad subordinates and commanders are where the money's at--they have a ton of exposed stopgaps in place to override all behaviors in favor of a score-based hierarchy of command. Commanders, sometimes multiple, are entities that both navigate and perform percept calculations on surrounding state so that they can select and distribute orders.
Orders are heuristic objectives that all subordinates recieve as 'soft overrides' to preexisting pathfinding and item selection - spoofing targets for A* is one thing, but this is more in line with the representation of, like, tactical maneuvers as a relation between a target, the environment/navmesh and ally aid avenues. Commanders evaluate, pick maximally-relevant orders, subordinates use it to loosely-position and then fall into new decision subtrees until expiry or new orders. All of this stipulates reactivity to an individual agent's immediate context - if they're in danger or can somehow mistrust an order, they can break it, and orders have *tolerances* for how much breakage they can weather before they 'fail' and the whole squad either restores to normal action, routs or otherwise destabilizes.
This is all kind-of technical shit, but it isn't novel technical shit, nor particularly complex or uncommon for somewhat sophisticated 2D AI. The real 'issue' is that it is an absurd premise to try and shoehorn everything, this included into an action platformer. If ever there was a point to this project, that's probably what it is - a bad idea playground for beating up a long-established set of genre conventions by just stuffing as many of them into the same room.
Brittle's completability aside, I do still have interest in publishing vignettes, sorta-reconfigured interpretations of areas that can be released individually, with slightly-variant control schemes but a similar core loop. Nothing to form up there until the systems are working, though.
"Your character, JUNIOR, is special - they're multidead. Not just now, but also previously and soon. This allows them to intercept variant interpretations of a person’s fate, characterized through the prophetic saltcrystal echoes of the Canyon."
Foundations is something I've spoken little on, maybe never at all. Once RPGMaker (a delusion that I have the required self-criticism to work under such limitations), now not-so-much. It's a game about a dead kid named Junior, child of a famous cultist in some late-future postexistential flavor of the pacific northwest, subsequently resurrected by a broken broad-scope artificial intelligence in order to exact an old dismantling project on all anthropic systems of organization. I have a lot of Big Opinions about party RPGs despite generally hating them, so this whole thing is kind of a joke.
The thing about making a joke - err - a game in a genre you don't like, though, is that it's a terrible place to start a project from. All of your motives are fucked from the get-go, and any flavor of negative-or-disproving indulgence (I'm doing this because I think everyone likes this wrong and I must show them the right way) is as close to an outright bad system for motivating a design as there ever was. My qualms with party-oriented RPGs are not some kind of authentic criteria for how to make them better, they're just vague expressions of taste, often also neurosis or blindspot. There's always an amount of worthiness to measuring your appeal fences, what subcategories of fans or foes you care to capture, but that doesn't legitimize the process of 'antidesign' either - fix-fixation/aggressive correction is overreliant on two abilities you probably don't have:
- I can accurately assess the shortcomings of a thing I do not like (and therefore likely do not understand the subtleties of)
- I can accurately control my biases so as to not sand off positives in a system I dislike - in another word, I'm not cutting trunks and losing good branches I was blind to.
The objective is to make a cool game, and there are things I like about party RPGs. There are also bad ideas I can cram in as a motivator, mad science style - can you make this work?
Foundations is a trimodal game in a manner typical to this genre - overworld, inworld, combat. There's just a little more sass in each of them (save inworld, where I'm at my least inspired).
- OVERWORLD constitutes an inertiatic car building puzzle most similar to Mon Bazou or My Summer Car, oddly enough
- INWORLD constitues something closer to a Sokoban puzzler or a ZT automata engineering game
- COMBAT wrinkles solvability by composing your party of competing interests with different victory conditions (and most of your party members act without your input), deferring some of the evaluations of health, completability and control to nebulous interrelations of parameter and enemy tell.
Not trying to be clever here - Foundations is, more than anything, a game motivated by narrative. The systems are overcomplicated expressions of the narrative that will be eroded by technical pressures and pipeline demands.
I've talked before about how turn-based combat is at its most interesting (to me, at least) when the death pressure is maximal and the solvability is misdirected or depends on complications that may compel you to gamble instead of computing. It's why the first Darkest Dungeon is a perfect game, but only when you're *about* to lose it all. Everything before and after that is as close to definitively-YMMV as possible - how much of your time are you willing to literally burn away in pursuit of one genuine pain-point, one emotional climax - nadir, maybe? There's a bigger problem at play in how the only thing games can ever gamble with is your time, and once they've done it enough, all emotions sort-of race towards frustration--Alien Isolation, weirdly enough, comes to mind, as it is so perfectly articulate of the ideal monster stealth experience, so exact in visual and systemic execution, and it still starts to feel like shit once you've died a handful of times in a row. I'm also only mentioning it because it's a game I have played recently. Almost every game suffers this in some way.
There's also a lot to be said about how this would not be a problem if busywork was not the primary mode that most games occupy when not in those pivotal high-stress states. When the combat isn't threatening, DD is a pretty boring affair (though it actually does realize the 'Death by a Thousand Cuts' energy of actual adventuring, which can be a source of stress if you're inexperienced). Alien Isolation, like most stealth horror games, is almost entirely composed of worthless puzzles and retraversal when you aren't being chased. This is not problematic--even if you could compose games entirely of gorgeous, exhilarating and engaging mechanics, it may actually just flatten the peaks you're trying to hit anyways--but it means that genres like these can really struggle to engage or surprise players if those peaks aren't strong, or if the system can just never pressure them enough to make it happen. Counterpoint to this would be the many twitch shooters, indie shooters and stimulation shooters (a terrible, terrible idea for a term) that have taken hold in the indiesphere, since they tend to hold at levels of near-continuous engagement and maintain spectacular momentary climax potential. The curiosity is thus: could you make a game that is as continuously engaging as a twitch shooter a.la Ultrakill or Hyper Demon without flattening the climactic pressures of a starvation RPG like DD or a horror adventure like AI?
This is only kind-of the motive for Foundations, especially because you cannot exploit the dexterity-maximal nature of these games in the framework of a slower, more methodical RPG experience. One potential component of approaching this [percieved fault] for the genre, maybe the most important to me, is that every mode of gameplay has at least a draw that could operate independent of other systems and still produce an interesting game. For the speculated Foundations: the overworld is a movement-unbound navigation trap tied to your engineering whims and in-world often weighs awkwardly on your acquisitions to engage you in long and convoluted automation schemes. Combat, the elephant in every room, is the least resolved part of this - the prior two are 'games' in scope and may be excessive, but they aren't really complex, nor do they demand a lot in the way of representational work. The objective is setups that can ebb and flow, gain and lose complexity and seamlessly harmonize between all modes of play - the increase in complexity is a cost paid to better integrate certain ideas through the sum of the experience. Then, we can still make combat the punchy and expensive and impactful part, but all that time you spend driving around, talking to people and interacting with blocks isn't pure worthless torture - it may have some potential to create climaxes independently, too. One final anecdote here would be the 'Inscryption effect', when a game that casts wide on variety accidentally makes one part waaaaaay better than the rest, diminishing the impact of later climaxes that likely took as much work to produce. Anyways.
To be brief, the combat-premise is that your two main characters, Junior and the BASILISK protocol that resurrected them, are half-oppositional half-cooperative. You can both *kill* the enemy to end an encounter, but each of them also has an alternative that is not always in sync. The 'how' and 'why' of this desync are things I'm not going to elaborate on yet - wait for a devlog. The rest of the party-members are entirely uncontrolled by you, but you can choose instead to compose the party exclusively of powered BASILISK parts to reduce chaos - your choice.
Is there much more to explore here? I've been kicked back into refinement many times, not ever fond enough of a method to the madness. Also, as much as I don't want to be defensive of my ideas (who would steal these?), I also don't want to just explain everything about them - surprise and novelty are sorta the most fundamental components of game design, fiction, whatever. Sorry Junior - maybe next year. I would like to build a few prototypes within the next few months, though. I've got a start on under-the-hood and vehicle handling, only the barest of movement controllers for the inworld gameplay and a bunch of half-assembled UI garbage for combat, but hey! Maybe a weekend jam will bring it all together.
"What has history forgotten? The Inwheel’s core-worlds were all but obliterated by the Cyclic Ascent in an era mostly consumed by voracious infoparasitics. The Council’s shape, too, is naught but a deified series of murals and translations - our contact with the protokhanic divinity wanes by a step with each passing age."
Doloman Epoch is where the madness sets in. Same deal as Foundations, new digs. Doloman is actually similar in that it's an attempt at finding a good relationship with types of games I don't typically stick with, but this time it is a pure evil Girl Talk-esque megamix-from-the-dark-below: social deduction, meet deckbuilder roguelite, meet resource-tight eurogame. Collect cards and control information on an expedition to the edge of reality, attempting to fulfill your own potentially-disruptive motives without dying as you pilot a strange magitechnical starship fleeing universal collapse.
The slipcover pitch is like this: You and up to five others are manning a ship during the twilight hours of the Doloman Epoch (in the astrogeochronological sense), a skeleton crew to the extreme. These are apocalyptic times, where physical law is feeble and time is constantly in flux--most mortalfolk believe the universe is dying. In the race to escape cosmic damnation, a rumor is spreading of a true way out: the Lordswalk, the space-over-space, the edge of the universe. Your Captain came to you all with an old etcher-mite's coordinate stone, a working skipper and a scheme: get there or die trying. Your motives likely differ, sometimes dangerously, but nobody can fly a ship alone, now, can they?
I have, for whatever reason, worked out a lot of the networking backend of this game without substantiating much of the actual content. It's not super interesting, though the infrastructure is built to handle very odd partial-state saving and breakaway sessions - an engineering discussion better held if or when it works.
Doloman is most clearly derived from the flow of big, odd, story-based boardgames like Kingdom Death or Aeon Trespass, something like this: communal election of objectives -> prepare -> handle events -> Main Gameplay Chunk (fight, usually) -> cleanup -> social workshop, handle events... repeat until everyone's dead or the game ends. The quirk is that leveraging the enforcement scheme of an actual *game* allows me to make more hostile, competitive or complicated objectives - table trust is well and good, but to get the level of manipulation I want, we gotta hide some stuff behind the cold calculating power of the machine.
The deckbuilder part is the spine that runs through all of it. Your cards work for everything - maintaining the ship, bartering with allies, resolving events and fighting people directly. That means that 'resolution' is modal, but they share some commonalities.
The one we care the most about, 'boarded combat', is a tile-based skirmish game where cards can function as a number of things - resources, instantiations, attunements and feeders are the four broadest categories - mana, creatures, enchantments and instants/sorceries, in a more familiar tongue. It's a stack game. You play, some things are fast enough to stack onto those plays, as are many written-onto-card and keyword effects, and once everyone has passed or done their responses, they're resolved and punted top down.
The manner in which a group of six people can fall in and out of tile-based deck-based-also combat is through aggro ranges and time distortion. The Chronon Convolutor is a device everyone has. It is designed to collapse decisioning into discrete units for superior operative capacity - whenever an ally enters the range of an active CCR, theirs mutually activates and emplaces them in the sequence. Play cards, blow up enemies, recover their stuff and keep moving. Maybe, if the timing is right, a little bit of sabotage and subterfuge would be appropriate? 'Friendly fire' is always enabled...
Outside of combat, the game mostly concerns keeping your ship in good shape, maintaining crew stability and handling unpredictable circumstances as you travel. This is mostly measured through the use and exchange of abstract currency ('pips') during the Ship phase, aiding your crewmates with cards where possible, organizing your decks and bartering (if available). The phases that bookend boarding/combat/exploration are open-ended.
If a player dies, they can re-enter the game after some time and at a dire cost, further confusing everyone else's progress. Sessions can even be sheared if the group totally splits, cutting into independent games as expeditions depart in opposite directions. The game ends if everybody's dead and the vessel goes unmanned. Rewards include new characters, convoluted in-conditions for future games, variant completion motives, hidden segments of the card pool and so-on.
Crew stability, event handling and the weird interactions between social stress and system limitation are where the game gets lost - or, mostly, where the idea is unstable and prone to antipattern. Social deduction games toe a line with frustration, one I exist far on the other side of, and DE is not a reduction of that. It's a gargantuan worsening of all the stresses of sabotage/subterfuge games like Among Us, adding a continuity to the deception and a constant uptick in stakes as a session continues--if you've ever played a board game where screwing other players is an avenue to success, you should know well how hard it is to reset your relationship with some people after torching that bridge, so a game that is meant specifically to exaggerate those trust issues over a long, multi-session campaign may just be a bad idea at base.
Still, I think coopera-competitive games are a more interesting space than pure deception games. DE is not meant as an exercise in pure manipulation, but rather opportunism. You self-select the level of traitorousness you'd like to participate in, for one, and your motives are never entirely separated from all other players--none of the motives involve destroying the expedition outright; they all need the ship to keep running.
This idea is ridiculous (...a pattern...?)--less raw content than something as dumb as Brittle, but no easier to approximate for the sake of demoing. A demo is 'possible' in the scrappiest possible sense - I've built out the ship, lobby-to-game via P2P, game modality transitioners, CCR-to-combat, simple stack resolution and card rep - but it's the kind of game which doesn't really 'work' without the content, and that's not what a prototype is going to be good at demonstrating.
I'll also readily admit that DE has not captured my attention in a while. I'd like to do a writeup on the actual cards and how they work across the four major phases, since it's a little less MtG-like than the card archetypes broadly imply (try and read that banner image, lol!) but I also want to avoid getting pulled into multiple major efforts simultaneously, and this is obviously too big to just dabble in. Same shit, different game.
"...the body is a conduit for the worshipful reciprocation of divine affection
the body is a reliquary for the storage and transfer of morbid energies
the body is a tool for use in the repair of planar maladjustments
the body is a violable possession of the other order..."
Down the Worldwell, or the only thing-thing-realized-thing I've ever partly-shared, is still living in the churn. I want to write a book, yeah, but so does everyone that thinks their fantasy setting is interesting. We'll save the evaluation of that for the editors (that includes you - play at it by harassing the stuff I've actually released if you'd like). The more interesting part is the system, and I'm flirting with the abyss yet again.
Let's do a ridiculous fast-fire overview!
DtWW's system is based on D12 dicepool resolution. The only motive I have for this selection of rock is feel. The D12 is the best die.
DtWW's statline numbers only four, which is likely insufficient for good buildmaking. They are Body, Mind, Nature and Conductivity. Each of them can further specialize - erring on four each, maybe more, with Conductivity as a notable exception. The number you carry in these stats, further bolstered by your specialization, controls the number of dice you roll if you elect to use them.
A roll is a success only if it hits a desired number of successes. The threshold a die must hit to be considered a success is called the execution requirement. The number of successes you need to complete the task is called the complexity requirement. An unmodified one is a catastrophic failure. If the number of catastrophic failures outnumbers the complexity requirement, the roll is a catastrophe - unless you also pass normally, then it is a shaky success.
You may push to reroll any catastrophic failures, but for each attempt, the execution of the entire roll increases by one and the threshold for a die to be considered a catastrophic failure doubles. This makes it impossible not to catastrophically fail if you push more than three times in a single roll.
The only way to control these difficulty ratings is with the help of abilities, equipment and magic. These are notionally different but represent in similar ways. Abilities are acquired by expending Experience in pursuing a given tactical profession, equipment is bought and sometimes trained into, magic must be derived from experience or learned from others - often at great personal expense.
Skills are developed ad hoc and at GM discretion. They are the furthest refinement a characteristic can reach, granting final, extreme bonuses to the pools you roll with if you can prove excellence at a given task. They can be continuously improved at a steep experience cost.
Conductivity is the weird exception. You don't control your specializations in it directly, and it is a volatile characteristic that measures your unintentional attunement to the fantastic and terrible Other. Using magic will cause this characteristic to fluctuate, and allowing it to swing out of balance will probably kill you in spectacular fashion. The manipulation of natural energies is a wounding process; the Gedt factor of local space is an approximate system for measuring stability - if it falls or raises too far out of stable state, everyone will die.
Casting procedures can be archaic, straightforward and everything in between. Anticipate this carefully and know exactly what sort of state you need to be in before you attempt such conjury--kickback for failure is often severe.
Your life is not tethered directly to health - rather, you more often die in one or a handful of severe injuries. Your lifeline is in barriercraft and elaborate armaments. These are called layers, and are graded by how much of you they cover and then how good they are at weathering: their resilience ('execution') and their stability ('complexity'). Any time an attack passes a roll according to those values, it breaks through the layer, damaging it and whatever is beneath it to a lesser degree - otherwise, it is absorbed. Destroyed layers can have negative impacts of their own.
An attack that strikes beyond the layer of flesh is injurious. This will inflict a wound appropriate for the location, type of harm, and remaining power. Most of the time, wounds will permanently injure your character, incur bloodloss (suffer n/turn until you faint and likely die) or fulfill a racial/bodily death condition and kill you instantly. Repair is not easy, magical or otherwise, and is rarely safe to do in-field. This system is cumbersome and likely to change, but I intend to preserve some flavor of individuated, permanent injury. The idea is that any blow which strikes your person directly is likely grievous, so you must do whatever you can to prevent it.
Combat is handled popcorn style - the team with the upper hand gains initiative and controls it until an individual suffers a reversal of fortune or another entity has some kind of process interruptor, at which point they gain control for a time. Rounds and single-action activation rules still apply. Movement is handled loosely and the game does not need to take place on tiled space - use abstractions of distance and obstacle relativity to describe positioning. If you prefer slower, tactical experiences, use hexes that are 2/4/8 meters in width and use 5E-style movement rules: bipeds of average stature and good health can move about ten meters per round or commit to sprinting to double it at the cost of their activation.
When you elect to attack something, you can be as specific as you'd like regarding target. Similarly, all entities and their layers will describe particular resiliences or pain-points for exploitation, focusing combat on prior preparation and the information advantage. To avoid over-granularity, we use general targeting numbers unless exceptional circumstances apply; most layers have generic ratings for the entire body save the head and joints. Targeting is mostly flavor and fodder for injury association.
The bulk of character customization comes from the acquisition of abilities, spells and equipment. The most formal way of doing so is through the tactical specialty charts that I am not even remotely close to finishing. Ha-ha.
The book, the big book, is not close to completion by any reasonable measure. Filling out the system spec has helped ferry other parts along, but a lot of writing is yet unfinished concerning setting details (I like to throw stuff out.) I intend to do what any rational person ought to and start out by writing mostly-system-agnostic modules long before I try and crank out a 200+ page setting/system guide, but it won't stop me from working on the Unfinishable One - when have I ever done that?
Damn, that's it? I need to start more projects.