#dev diary

[torchship-rpg]

Dev Diary 14 - Star Union Members!

Hello cosmonauts! Today we’re going to go back to the lore and identity Dev Diaries and cover the remaining members of the Star Union. So far, we have done Terrans & Lunars, and Martians & Spacers. These groups collectively make up the Solar Union, which is far and away the largest and most influential member of the Star Union (as the names imply). 

However, there are three other members; let’s touch on them.

Camp Aldrin

The first member we’re going to talk about is actually still within the Sol system! Camp Aldrin was once a major mining base on Earth’s Moon and a small second city, but the costs of maintaining two sets of infrastructure saw it rapidly outpaced by Armstrong City and eventually become something of a ghost town, home mostly to military bases and robotic mining. It is like Armstrong City in most ways, a network of underground tunnels, just smaller.

That changed during the war, because as Solar Patrol started winning battles, it started taking prisoners, and nobody was exactly sure what to do with them or where to put them. The initial plan was to keep them on Earth, which would be cheapest and safest, but Aquillians are not exactly accustomed to 1 g, so that was deemed needlessly cruel in short order. So, Camp Aldrin was repurposed instead; hardly anyone was living there, the systems were robust, it was close enough to Earth to make feeding everyone easy, and escape risk was very, very low on the moon.

Of course, the Sol Union hadn’t really run very many prisoner of war camps in the last half-century, so it dusted off the models it had used during its expansion on Earth, which was basically to have the prisoners self-organise a little community under their supervision, which is a very good way of ensuring that after the fighting is over, the enemy soldiers you release have familiarity with your mode of political organising. This worked extremely well among the Aquillian prisoners (and various auxiliaries and unlucky others who ended up there), who had up until this point lived pretty miserable lives as press-ganged crews of rockets and space stations. Camp Aldrin was the kind of place where the guards didn’t bother carrying weapons.

Then the war ended, and a lot of the prisoners didn’t want to go back. Some left for the new Aquillian republics, some hardliners tried going back to the various Remnants, but after that was over, there were 200,000 people still living in this creaky old moon base who wanted to stay.

So after some negotiation, the guards handed over the keys, and Camp Aldrin was the second full member of the Star Union.

The details of this identity are going to depend a lot on the Aquillian identity, which we’ll go into in more detail in the next Identity-focused dev diary. What’s interesting for our purposes is that Camp Aldrin’s Aquillians are distinct from the other groups because of their ongoing enthusiasm for biological and genetic modification, which is very taboo among other Aquillians. This is basically an excuse to play just about any kind of space elf you want; whatever characteristics you think a space elf should have, there’s a subculture on Camp Aldrin like that.

The other common Traits of Camp Aldrin’s citizens are War Veteran (for obvious reasons), and Dark History, in case you want any juicy dark secrets or old enemies from before you ended up here.

Camp Aldrin’s flag is based on the old uniforms they gave prisoners, which had a terrible colour scheme and a big symbol on it so everyone could recognize escapees on sight. If the ears didn’t give it away.  (Which it might not on Earth. God, can you imagine how embarrassing it would be to be part of some cool fantasy elf gene-mod subculture and then you meet real space elves and it becomes hashtag problematic? How do you explain to people you just liked Lord of the Rings before First Contact?)

Proxima

Gee humanity, why does the Star Union let you have two members?

Well before FTL was invented by humans, we sent tiny near-light probes to the nearest systems using our mastery of Fuckoff Big Space Engines. When the images came back decades later, people were overjoyed by the readings from Proxima b; despite being a tidally-locked iceball orbiting a flare star, it had both liquid water and abiotic oxygen generation in the upper atmosphere. Sure, it was cold, you’d need to live in canyons on the terminator band to avoid the howling winds, you need to bring your own soil to grow stuff, and there’s no terrestrial source of metals, but other than that it's basically just like home!

Needless to say, the moment FTL drives were invented, humans threw themselves on some FTL rockets and made the months-long crawl (they were shitty FTL drives) to the nearest star to set up a colony. Compared to Mars, it was basically paradise! Sure, it took months to get supplies from home, and there was no FTL communications yet so that was the only time you got any news, but the basics were covered.

Then one day, after an unusually long delay, one of the supply rockets came in and told them, hey, first contact just happened. Anyway, we’re at war with a giant alien space empire, everyone back home voted to set up an emergency War Council with way too much power over basically everything, and they’ve unilaterally decided that the colony project isn’t affordable in a war economy, so pack it up, you’re heading home.

Needless to say, people reacted in an entirely rational manner. Which is to say, they concluded that the Solar Union had just had some kind of insane military coup, probably by the same bloodthirsty maniacs that oversaw the Elysium Emergency (which was a formative event for most of the colonists), and was trying to shut the place down because it was outside their control. So, naturally, they promptly declared independence, then immediately fell down a rabbit hole of spiralling radicalization and internal conflict as they tried to figure out how to survive in their half-built colony when Solar Patrol would surely be arriving with the jumpjets at any moment.

This is where we get our two Proxmia identities. The first are the surface-dwellers on the planet themselves, who are the far better-known group. Properly Centaurians, but universally known as Proxies. The Proxies had no doubt that humanity would triumph in their war against these mysterious aliens, if it was even real; they were largely Terrans who had grown up at the centre of the Solar Union’s power and could not conceive of something beating them. Obviously, this meant they’d be next! 

This group seized heavily on the preliminary plans to do a Martian-style genetic engineering process and decided that going full-steam ahead and making themselves a distinct species would make them too much trouble to re-integrate back into the Union. And, of course, this could be used to create The Ultimate Specimens of Post-Humanity, an impulse that never ever goes wrong ever.

So, obviously, it went wrong. Sure, a lot of Proxies were faster, stronger, maybe even smarter than the human norm back home. But mostly what happened was they made their kids really sick. Even when it worked out, a lot of them were left with chronic pain, neurological disorders, or permanent dependence on various medicines or procedures to have any kind of decent quality of life, things not in abundance on the tiny colony. To make things worse, the place was rapidly falling apart, and the adults were accelerating this process fighting one another over whether to swallow their pride and call home, or somehow try to tough it out. Eventually, the older generation were overthrown by the super-kids they made, who promptly called their grandparents and asked for medical assistance.

Proxies are a chance to play with all the really fun gene-engineering stuff and make a post-human character. There’s a few recommended Traits; almost all Proxies have a tapetum lucidum for better night vision in the eternal twilight of the terminator band, and the Augment trait’s mix of bonus abilities and medical or metabolic drawbacks is perfect for representing it. The Cold Resistance trait is also a good one; a lot of Proxies have an insulating layer of fat or some other adaptation which makes it easier to survive the bitter cold.

The other group in the system which split off were the Proxima Spacers, a group of Spacers who tagged along with the colony to set up mining in the rich asteroid belts in the system. As Proxima b has no local metals, they were the ones who’d need to provide them, in exchange for food and biological compounds from the surface colony. Being Spacers well-accustomed to the precarity at the edge of the system, and just how fragile the Solar Union was, they were convinced humanity was going to lose the war, and they’d be next when the aliens swept in to clean up. Human extinction was surely imminent. 

So they started to hide, disassembling their major stations and rebuilding them into the sides of low-spin asteroids, spreading out into many small communities and increasingly relying on cold-gas jets to make increasingly infrequent journeys between stations and to the planetary colony. They put up shielding, used lasers in place of radio to communicate, and did everything they could to disappear. They became the Archivists; doomsday survivalists in space.

When the Solar Union returned to the system, it at first looked like the vast majority of spacers had fled down to the colony or died, but over years they slowly became aware of the Archivists through intermittent contact. They mostly want to be left alone to their task, though sometimes members join Star Patrol, either defecting from the tightly controlled and spartan lifestyles of the spacers or, worryingly, spying and gathering information to squirrel away. For the most part, the Archivists seem to just be focusing on long-term survival, and may even have spread to other systems using their reserve of old FTL drives for redundancy.

An Archivist is a really good way to play a loner. The exact mix of Traits is a bit up in the air right now as we rebuild character creation, but you get all the common Spacer ones with a few extracts to represent the culture of secrecy and isolation you grew up in. Archivist communes are often organised quite a bit like mystery cults to compartmentalise information, so lack of trust is something very central which you may need to overcome.

Proxima's flag is a stylization of the sky as seen from the colony, with the three stars in the system and the endless sunset.

Corvus Peasants’ Republic

Finally, we have the first member to consist of aliens and not be located a convenient walk away from Earth. The unimaginatively-named Corvus is the natural exonym given when a wartime Solar Patrol rocket crashed on an alien world and were greeted by a bunch of crow-people; they presumably didn’t recruit them for creativity. 

The Koath are a species of hunched, bipedal non-humanoid aliens with an interesting evolutionary history. As best anyone can tell, their distant ancestors were once the domesticated pets of a humanoid species which managed to Great Filter itself about a million years ago, possibly over the fact that they’d bred at least one strain of their companion animal to be able to speak and possess the intelligence of a ten-year-old child. The Koath emerged as survivors of the apocalypse, which included a pretty severe biosphere collapse and resource depletion, and have become the dominant form of life on their world.

At first glance, Koath societies look more or less mediaeval, mostly in that really late period where people were doing really cool things with waterwheels, granted, but there’s not a lot of industry or steelworking owing to the easy sources of carbon fuels and decent iron all being long-depleted. For those reasons, the Koath have been at roughly this state of infrastructural development for roughly a hundred thousand years, at the edge of their population carrying capacity and unable to intensify production any further, resulting in interlocking networks of feudal kingdoms prizing stability in an attempt to build up their resources and overcome the gaps.

This does mean that the Koath have a lot of interesting surpluses, though. Having had organised agriculture for ten times longer than humanity, the Koath have selectively bred some absolutely incredible crops; not just for eating, but for just about everything. Need a dye? They can cross-breed you arbitrary Pantones. Need paper? They can make you a lot of it. It’s so impressive that while the planet had consistently been considered not worth conquering, it has long been considered worth visiting, which means the Koath have learned a lot of things they don’t have the technological infrastructure to have discovered on their own… which dovetails with a quirk of their biology.

Koath are really good at languages. Really good. It’s what their ancestors were bred for. They start talking within months of being hatched, and they make up new languages constantly because it’s easy and fun. They have unique languages for regions, religions, guilds, and within families. They can learn to read in weeks. They’re all literate, they make paper with the waste-products of food production, and they’ve had moveable type for longer than human civilisation has existed. And they are, to a fault, curious.

A Koath peasant working the earth with a bronze plough might not know much about quantum mechanics, but they’ve at least heard of it. They have a rich body of secret political writing written in coded languages about how much it sucks living as serfs so a lord somewhere can have the county’s only lightbulb. So when a human spaceship filled with 3d printers, the diagrams for 3d printed guns, and a bunch of very confused communists who immediately bristled at the idea of ‘local lords’ crashed in their neighbourhood, the local peasants did a whole little revolution about it, and were then promptly besieged by every single one of their neighbours.

So that’s the Corvus Peasants’ Republic. Not a whole planet even; a tiny peninsula of possibly overenthusiastic little bird communists trying to build up technological infrastructure while literally having trebuchets pointed at them. They’re very excited to be a part of the Star Union, because every iron-rich asteroid found out there is a new steel foundry back home, so maybe their people can enjoy all the cool technology they’ve had blueprints for since Ur was the happening place on Earth.

As a Koath, you get the Polyglot Trait, obviously, and the Non-Humanoid Bodyplan trait which gives you some cool little tool bonuses when you use your claws, vestigial feathers, and adorable little legs that give a surprising burst of speed, at the cost of needing special tools and being bad at throwing things. You are also a really good recipient for the Out of Time trait, as you may have gone from living as, you know, a peasant, to operating a spacecraft in a few short years. The Prodigy trait also does double-duty here for the curiosity and literacy of the species.

A year ago this little guy was a farmer.

#torchship #ttrpg #dev diary #torchship ttrpg #rpg

[cts-games]

Breakheart: Dev Diary 1

Game Structure Overview

To help keep me focused on working on the game and trying to meet my self imposed deadline of having some kind of PDF preview document by August, I'm going to try to maintain having a weekly devlog discussing the game and its various mechanics. Or bi-weekly, if one per week ends up being too much. I guess this is also the formal announcement of the name of this game, Breakheart.

This week, I'll be discussing the overall structure of a campaign.

A Cluster functions similarly to how a Team/Squad sheet functions in Forged in the Dark games. It has its own dedicated sheet, resource management, upgrades, etc. All players in that cluster gain the benefits of the various advancements they collect for their Cluster. Recommended clustersize is roughly 2-3 play groups. Since playgroups are recommended to be 3-5 players, the typical Cluster size will be about 10 players. Meanwhile if the campaign is made up of just a bunch of solo players, it might make sense to have smaller Clusters of 3-5 people. Just keep in mind that the more players in a Cluster, the more conflict there may be when selecting advancements and upgrades for the group.

Breakheart is designed to theoretically be able to function with any group size. From being able to run it as a solo game, all the way up to running it with several hundred players. I think actually expecting the second option is a bit of a lofty goal, and don't expect it to be a common way to run the game. Hell, just having a hundred people having ever played the game would be a delight and far greater than I dare to hope for a indie ttrpg release. But, I still want to structure it that way, just to have it as an option, as the game will be designed with Open Table Play in mind. This will be accomplished through what I am calling Clusters.

Clusters

Clusters are only meant to divide resources, NOT players. While players are bound to a specific Cluster, this does NOT limit who they can play with in a campaign, only where their upgrades go. It's just designed to make the logistics easier to manage and helps keep a hypothetical campaign of 100 players from just buying every single upgrade after a single mission, or one player spending 100 players worth of communal resources at once.

Open Table Play

The game itself follows a fairly standard West Marches / Open Table style format. Though uh... I certainly aim to be a little less colonial than West Marches was. Players work together to figure out when they have time to play a single session together, and then they do so, bringing back resources and reporting any important findings to the whole campaign in whichever predetermined way all the players of the campaign have decided, be it group text chat, discord, a dedicated tumblr sidelong they submit play reports to, actual play videos, whatever.

All sessions run concurrently, using an episodic format. Each session acts as a different plot line in the 'Episode', and each character can only take part in one adventure per Episode. Once the Episode has concluded, an Intermission starts. This is where downtime actions take place. Characters can recover between adventures and spend their loot on various advancements or upgrades for their Cluster.

It is fine for a player to have multiple characters, but they should probably keep them in separate clusters as much as possible. In this way, more active players can join more games, while less active players can pick up games here and there where they can. Alternatively, it could be fun to have an optional rule where each player has their own Cluster for all their characters, and players just make as many characters as they want to go on adventures with, but this will not be the default mode of play.

GM-Agnostic(ish)

The system itself will be GM-Agnostic, with sessions being playable solo or co-op, though the Solo/Co-op Rules can absolutely just be ignored and replaced with an actual GM. GMless should work fine for smaller campaigns, but ones made up of multiple Clusters may need a Organizor/Facilitator to help keep the persistent world between different play groups more organized.

At the end of the day, a group is always free to just run a Breakheart campaign using only a single Cluster, with a dedicated GM, and play the game as a more traditional TTRPG.

#Breakheart #Dev Diary #ttrpg #ttrpg dev

[alisheaburgess]

My Coding Certification Half-Sprint: Day 1/7...It Begins!

I have been seduced by learning once again!

I have one month access to an entire collection of video courses (a huge library). They come with CERTIFICATES!!!! This is both a dream and a nightmare for me. So many options is too many options! 😂😅

I want to learn it all...and I keep trying to do it! HELP!

I started out just casually looking for game design courses. Then I found UX, then UI...then a BUNCH of other things...

And now I have found coding. Something I didn't know I wanted, nay...needed!

I am going to try and record my goals for courses and understanding what I want and need next here... I am getting way too overwhelmed with all the options available. (help, I'm a baby in a candy shop!)

My goals for today:

Finish the "Career Essentials in Soft Dev" and take the test...it makes sense

At least 1 HTML course (2+ hours long each)

Finish the Accessibility course for UX (another 2hrs)

Stare down the CSS course so it gets intimidated and doesn't know that its beefy 5hrs is scary...(at least 5 mins, reapply as needed)

Finish the Figma video that I keep starting and get distracted in...poor video

Recheck job listings to make sure that the things I'm learning together make sense... "Can I sell the employee/freelancer that I'm building?" 😅😂🤣

I think that's plenty for today... If I do more I do more... I'm just finishing up the UX training and only starting the Dev stuff. 👀 wish me luck and uh...focus lol

#coding #software developers #ux design #product design #learning to code #dev diary #diary entry #journal #codeblr #count down #day 1 #learning tech #tech journey #tech jobs #neurospicy #neurodivergencies #neurodiverse stuff #webdevelopment #curse that pretty picture!

[bibixpgames]

Here's the next dev log! Explaining my writing, audio, art and more on "CTRL FREAK" instead, a game that will be releasing soon! :DDD

This dev log is also focused a bit on comparing our progress in later games, just for some fun and interesting progress!

I'll likely have a dev log that shorter but accessible to everyone on Itch.io soon, but that that might take a bit, and this Patreon/Ko-fi dev log is the full thing, so check it out if you want to see more on "CTRL FREAK's" development, especially with its release coming soon!

Keep an eye out for the monthly art as well!

#game development #dev log #dev diary #visual novel #indie games #renpy visual novel #vn #vndev #gamedev #indiegamedev #indiedev #development #patreon #ko fi #developer #writers on tumblr #artist on tumblr #indie #indie vn #vn development #sci fi #sci fi game #visual novel development #ko fi page #indie developer #indie dev #on tumblr

[risu5waffles]

dev diary # butch wiv gun

Am i butch? i don't know. Adjacent, i suppose.

Still working out if this is going to be a level-level or what. i've got a lot of ideas i'd really like to make work, but time, you know, it's always time. Figured if it does become a thing, it'd be best to put together a paintgun that won't give you carpel tunnel syndrome if you use it the whole level. This is kind of where i want it, but i'm not super sure. There's a single tap shot, and a hold to spray function. Like the regular, but the spray is a lot quicker. The downside so far is you can't really tap quickly, the way it's set up. Which, i mean, the whole point is players shouldn't have to tap, so maybe that's alright.

The overheat mechanic was to keep players from just spraying constantly and killing the turrets as soon as they appear. Still need to work on the timing for it and the cooldown. Also indicating to the player. There's actually a smoke effect as well, but the way the cameras are, you really can't see it. i'd like to avoid something appearing in the UI, 'cause i feel like it'd be going on and off constantly and get distracting. i do want to have an accessibility option where players could turn off the mechanic entirely too.

For a first shot at a custom powerup, i don't think i did a terrible job. It could definitely use polish, but yeah, i kinda like it.

#littlebigplanet #little big planet #lbp #lbp3 #dev diary #Youtube

[shoehedd]

Throwback to October 2022 when I built a working prototype for a survival horror platformer and burnt out immediately thanks to my full time job being awful!

I also managed to get a dialogue system working in this, keycard doors, enemies who shoot at you and kind of a working flamethrower (made out of a hairspray can that was SO buggy)

To be feature complete I'd need to set up a shop system and do cutscenes. That might not be for a bit. If I get back into the game I'm defo gonna have to take it slowly!

#gamedev #indiedev #indiegame #indiegamedev #survival horror #horror game #dev diary #video #oc #tw: gore #shoehead

[lapinlunairegames]

Friendly reminder not to be like me. Do not dally around cool jam entry ideas until ten days before the deadline and then come up with two brand-new ones that would be SO COOL.

If anyone needs me, I'll be hunched over my keyboard sucking down green tea through a silly straw.

#jinx thinks #dev diary

[lapinlunaire-games]

To write, or to code: that is the question: Whether tis nobler in the mind to suffer The searches for an elusive word, Or to hunt for bugs in the Twine editor, And by surrendering find the missing end bracket? To debug, to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heartache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, tis a consummation Of devout rubber ducks. To write, to sleep; to sleep, perchance to plot! Ay, there's the rub; For in that sleep of doc what plot may come is angsty and questionable, to give us pause: There's the self-indulgence that makes calamity of so long life; for who would bear the whips and scorns of spellcheck, The squiggly red line's wrong, the check's delay, The insolence of ERROR and the spurns that patient merit of the forgotten <<nobr>>, When you yourself terminate the tag? Who would Javascript bear, to grunt and sweat under dialog API, But that the dread of something after death, The undocument'd code from whose bourn No reddit help thread returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus Twine does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of brute force coding Is sicklied o'er with the spectre of best practice, And enterprises of great pith and Discord With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action (#sugarcube). Hark! The fair Youtube! Nymph, in thy comment sections Be all my procrastination remember'd.

#if you read this entire thing i applaud you #dev diary #sometimes you just have to write an obscure parody of The Hamlet soliloquy #to procrastinate getting anything done on your project(s)

[cdstudios]

Also a small developer diary im gonna start alongside the lil project

#julia art #dev diary

[kiloku]

From the dev replies after yesterday's Stellaris 3.7 Dev Diary:

How will cloaking factor into the calculations for relative strength and diplomatic weight? Will we be able to hide our fleets long term to appear weaker than we are to bait enemies into attacking us?

No hiding your fleetpower and diplo weight :p When we tested that the AI would cloak their fleet and start fearing for their lives looking for an overlord to protect them.

"Admiral. Activate the cloaking fields."

"Yes sir. Activating now."

"OH GODS, WHERE ARE OUR FLEETS?! WE ARE DOOMED!"

#stellaris #glitch #glitches #stellaris dev diary #dev diary

[kalechipslives]

sorekara setting design

Here are some notes on the development of SOREKARA's style and presentation. If you couldn't already tell, SK takes a lot of inspiration from 70's/80's anime, Nobody's Boy Remi being the reference point for much of it. I've always respected Dezaki for his monumental work so I've always wanted to pay tribute to it (especially the early stuff). I don't think I was as successful as I'd like to have been, but alas! There is still more to come! So without further ado!

I was just talking about Dezaki , but now I shall talk about something completely different. To set the tone, I created the cat and the trolley setting first. The Girl's design should be plenty obvious (lol). But the background here I paid special attention to... I find the paints of Night on the Galactic Railroad to be very unique. They have a line less, airbrushed quality to them that blends in surprisingly well with the characters. I did some research and studied 児玉喬夫 Takao Kodama's work, as they were credited with setting design for this film as well as Genji Monogatari. Actually, if you look at Genji Monogatari's backgrounds, they have the exact same airbrushed quality! I had never done a background like this before (I am certainly not an environmental artist) but I think I did a fairly good job of it.

...I immediately switched gears and without thinking, went back to Dezaki works. I can't say I was very faithful at all. The night sky is easy to paint, with it's notable color spray and paint blots, but I diverged quite a bit with the watercolor textures. Shichiro Kobayashi is the artist I looked to the most, and this project made me appreciate him more than ever before. Just looking at his paints gets me emotional... The vibrant colors, the dramatic angles, you can just feel his reverence for life overflowing from the work. There really isn't anyone better. I need to study more if I'm to capture even a fraction of his skill. That being said, I did make sure to animate the backgrounds slightly with the sparkles on the water-- The reflection of light on water is my favorite to draw! Also, flowers are a very important motif (for various reasons, ohohoho). Kobayashi seemed to love drawing flowers, the paint around the edges give is a delicate look. Actually, if you look at the textbox...

Instead of full-color CGs, I opted to use "postcard memories". This was a technique Dezaki used where he would show a detailed, scratchy-lined illustration to highlight important moments instead of fully animating them. It creates a really memorable image that draws out all of your emotions! I tried to emulate them (the more single-toned ones, that is) for the game. It was 1/3 Dezaki worship, 1/3 time-saving technique, and 1/3 excuse to draw lots of scratchy lines. I love scratchy lines. This way, I could make a lot of memorable shots that were visually interesting without overworking myself.

As another note, I looked to Akio Sugino's character art when drawing. The characters don't really look like Sugino characters, but I was emulating his shading technique with (once-again) the scratchy lines. Ah, I was in heaven. Looking at his older work, the linework is hardly ever clean-- but the rough, hand-drawn edge gives everything a tactile quality and the strong anatomy makes everyone so gorgeous. It's like an engraving come to life.

Finally, the anime effects! On the left you can see soothat before his values are adjusted (very dark, isn't he?) and on the right you can see he is in-game, values adjusted with a more appropriate "anime" look. This is because anime cells are put onto a CRT screen, so they end up looking very different. I created an auto action in CSP to adjust the color grating and line quality of every asset before popping them into the game for the chromatic aberration to take effect. The lines are slightly crunched a blurrier compared to the original. It gives it a more "physical" look. The colors are fixed up-- you'll see there is no pure black. If you look at a physical anime cell, you'll see they more often than not do not include pure black. There is usually a tint of green or red in there.

The chromatic aberration filter... I don't know how noticeable it is to the average player, but the game actually has a built-in filter that creates a slight "chroma" effect to emulate the look of frames through a crt/light. This means the red + blue + green values of the entire screen are split up and adjusted to layer slightly off from each other, giving it a little visual interest. It was AN EXTREME doozy to put in, with my poor programmer coding it and re-coding it until the end. It seemed simple at first, but there are parts where the game zooms in which totally broke the filter! It made out eyes bleed! But it was repaired in the end, so blessing upon you, Sandy. You saved my life.

The reason why I looked to Ie Naki Ko/Nobody's Boy Remi specifically is because that's where I feel the most "pure" energy from. It is a show that leans incredibly hard on it's techniques to get by but because of that it really embodies what I love about old anime-- It has a selfless reverence for its subject that drives you to watch and surrender your heart. Dezaki's powerful directing, Sugino's gorgeous drawings and Kobayashi's majestic paintings come together to make a work that shines. The setting is truly at the forefront with the characters getting lost in the grandeur. That's the attitude I had with SOREKARA: "There are things much greater than us, so isn't it wonderful that we are able to see them side-by-side?" There are many animation techniques that are cost-effective while still being utterly beautiful, I would love to copy them someday but I wasn't able to go that far yet. At least not in the demo. There's still time, I suppose... Studying limited animation from old anime is actually extremely useful when creating visual novels. Understanding the placement of cells and their layering/movement has given me even more ideas for stories!

I ended up going on a rant about anime again ^^" But it's so beautiful, you must now understand my heart going into the work. I always think of my characters and their journey, of course, but before that I think of the setting. I want the player to experience beautiful and mysterious things alongside their traveling companions. There is still so much more to make. I hope to incorporate more Dezaki-style techniques in this and future works. Please remember the true message of my works.... Not that love finds a way, or that your connections can transform your world...it's that....anime is very, very cool.

Thank you for reading 🙇🏽‍♂️

#game dev #sorekara end of a journey #visual novel #vn dev #indie dev #dev diary #osamu dezaki

[torchship-rpg]

Dev Diary 13 - New Subsystems

Alright, it’s been a while since our last Dev Diary, because we’re been doing a lot of rewriting (and because medical stuff delayed my ability to write a lot for a while). We’re currently working on writing up a new playable draft of the game incorporating lessons learned from the hasty Metatopia rewrite, building new systems to achieve what the first draft did in a smaller and better footprint.

With that in mind, I thought I’d talk about two new subsystems added to the game to make running things smoother in response to playtests, which helps mechanise some of the more abstract issues and sticking points in test games; sensor rules and factions.

Sensors & Scale

In my experience, an issue that arises in almost any Star Trek inspired roleplaying game is that most players are naturally much more cautious than the protagonists of your average television show, and correspondingly are more likely to sit snug in their spaceship for longer and roll lots of scanning rolls when the exciting story thing would be to go and take a look directly (and thus get in interesting trouble). This was a problem that occurred in some of the old playtest Torchship quests, in the metatopia games, and even in some of my brushes with Star Trek Adventures and other similar RPGs long ago.

To get around this, we’ve written up a system for sensors in Torchship which makes it very explicit what they can and can’t discover called Scale. Every sensor has one or more Scales it operates at, in a scale from 1 (microscopic) to 8 (interstellar telescope). This gives both a range you can see things from, and what information you can discover from that distance.

Under this system, a scanner which can gather information from farther away will, inherently, gather less specific information than one which scans closer. A Scale 4 scanner which works on ranges of tens and hundreds of kilometres is also one which lacks the resolution to easily recognize individual people or tools, so if you wanted to find a specific person you’re going to struggle doing it with that Scale of scanner. Fortunately, your hand scanner is a Scale 2-3 device which is perfect for that sort of work, thought limited in range to metres and kilometres so you’ll need to actually get off your butt and into the adventure.

These are soft limits, not hard stops; you can take penalties to scan beyond your normal range or for finer detail than you can normally identify, and higher-tech scanners are better for this because they roll more dice to absorb those penalties, but these limitations mean that gathering the information you need to fill out Checklists and complete objectives will often require you to go down and point a hand scanner at it, or even gather samples to take back to the microscope lab on the rocket.

Of particular note is the ‘orbital gap’, a deliberate hole in the system between Scale 4 and Scale 5. When you’re in low orbit trying to scan the surface of a world, you will almost always be doing with at least one Range penalty, and probably more because high-tech Scale 4 sensors are uncommon on most large spacecraft. This very purposefully makes it inconvenient to just wait upstairs until you roll good enough to see what you want to see; at the very least you will want to take out your shuttle to get close enough to use it without penalty.

You get to choose which scales your spacecraft’s sensors have when you do character creation, which has lots of interesting implications as you try to fit it into the limited options. Do you leave a gap in your sensor coverage in the midband for wider coverage? Do you mount smaller sensors you have to get very close to use? Do you sacrifice some of your short-range detail for long range resolution?

This also makes it easy for us to build sensors into other tools, sensors you can repurpose. Your point defence turrets might have lower-tech specialised radar emplacements at Scale 4 for picking up and tracking incoming missiles, for example, and when you encounter something invisible to your tachyon sensors it makes perfect sense to repurpose it!

A Star Patrol vehicle with a massive tachyon sensor pickup ideal for scanning other star systems across interstellar space, but which is probably going to have a bit of difficulty focusing on something tiny right in front of it.

Factions

The other portion of new mechanics has to do with the diplomatic and political side of the game. As we sat down with the new draft, we made a bunch of notes as we looked over what, exactly, this game needed from first principles before re-adding things, and we came back around to the conclusion that the game should explicitly and distinctly focus on three spheres of Exploration, Politics, and Combat, each of which should have dedicated subsystems which could carry an entire campaign on their own. 

We had a strong scientific element in the Checklists and we have interesting combat mechanics, but Politics was lacking in that; while we had ways for players to interact with groups, we didn’t have much mechanical distinction for what those groups were or how they related to one another. This is where the new Factions mechanic comes in.

When you visit a society in conflict, you will find multiple Factions there. Each Faction is a simple mechanical framework for a movement or ideology inside the society that wants something, with a defined membership and a reason they want to have power over their society. Key to this is the Faction’s Influence, a single arbitrary number that tells you how much power the Faction has over their society.

The faction with the greatest Influence is the Ruling Faction, and they matter because the Ruling Faction is the only one whose promises to Star Patrol get kept at the end of the Episode. You can negotiate trade deals for a planet’s titanium reserves with the labour unions all you want; if the Labour faction isn’t in charge by the end of the episode, you don’t get anything from it. 

This is coupled with the fact that every Faction has a simple binary opinion of Star Patrol; either they like and trust you or they don’t. Factions are like pilots in that way, though unlike pilots they do have object permanence in the sense that they remember Promises. Promises are mechanically binding agreements to give things to one another, though they only get upheld if the Faction likes you at the end of the Episode (and, again, if they are the Ruling Faction).

If you want to negotiate with a Faction, you have to exchange Promises; Factions don’t do anything for free no matter how well you roll, though you can still negotiate with communication rolls to get better deals. Promises can be immediate aid, like getting supplies for your rocket or their support in a mission, but they can also be resources over long terms at the end of the Episode, in the form of Credits from you and valuable resources, political alliances, or military aid from them.

What makes things interesting is that a Ruling Faction which does not have the majority of the Influence in play with all the Activate Factions is unstable. When things are unstable, Factions have a tendency to make lots of big promises to Star Patrol in exchange for help, often blindly agreeing to trade away things they really need because having the local superpower arbitrate their conflict and hopefully decide in their favour (or even just put the issue to rest, honestly) is worth more to them now than material riches or obligations that are currently meaningless to them. 

An unstable society is a big opportunity for the Star Union, but one you have to navigate with care.

#torchship ttrpg #dev diary #ttrpg #torchship #rpg

[cts-games]

Breakheart: Dev Diary 3

The strengths of Fused System games

Last week dev diary (moving took more out of me than i thought, as did dealing with a very persistent TERF harassing me over on my main tumblr, I talked about Fused Systems and how to achieve synergy between the two systems used in the game. As a reminder, 'Fused System' is a term I entirely made up, to describe the TTRPG design niche of taking two games and jamming them together with duct tape, and 'Synergy' is just a buzzword for my game design neuroses and making sure certain things line up (such as using a consistent resolution system), even if no one else seems to care.

This week, I'll be expanding on the Synergy I'll be adding to the game, and why I chose Anima: Prime and Last Stand specifically as the basis for this project.

As mentioned before, the thing about ICON that made it feel like it falls short, was the lack of connective tissue. It felt too obvious in play that you were just switching between two different games.

Last week dev diary, I pointed to the dissimilar dice of the two games as part of the issue, and indeed, it can be part of it. However, it's far from the full story. A game doesn't NEED to use the same mechanical resolution across both of its modes. Indeed, the split between Combat Resolution and Out-of-Combat Resolution mechanics are one of the praised aspects of Stars Without Number.

However, in SWN you are still working off of a single character sheet. In ICON you are working off of two seperate character sheets, one for combat and one for out of combat. Nothing between the two sheets are shared (outside of XP and Dust)

The actual cause of this lack of synergy runs much deeper. NOTHING between the two sides of the game interact with each other. How would one go about fixing this for ICON? I'm not so sure. The two systems don't seem to actually get along. It's a large part of the reason I don't think it's viable to just take any two games and mash them together.

Resource Management in Anima: Prime and Last Stand

As the heading suggests, Anima: Prime and Last Stand both have a shared focus on one particular part of their gameplay: Resource Management.

In Anima: Prime, players have 3 Resource pools they keep tokens in (usually just the dice you will be rolling, because tokens are spent to gain dice 1:1), called the Action Pool, Strike Pool, and Charge Pool.

Each pool has a specific use for what it allows the player to do with their character. Action Pool dice are spent on Manuevers, the big flashy attacks that look pretty but don't actually move the narrative forward on their own. After a Manuever, dice that rolled a 3-5 are moved to the Strike Pool, and dice that rolled a 6 go to the Charge Pool.

Strike Pool dice are spent to make the kinds of attacks that DO push the narrative forward. The attacks that inflict lasting Wounds, and drive the opponent closer to defeat. They are also spent on Achievement actions that allow you to accomplish Goals during conflict, changing your relative narrative positioning, or even offering alternative win conditions for a conflict.

The Charge Pool is used to fund abilities that enhance the effects of your strikes. Many of the games powers use Charge Dice to offer a variety of effects, from healing to adding elemental damage to attacks to inflicting status conditions. They are hard to obtain but can be used to great effect.

Last Stand, on the other hand, only has a single Token Pool, but does have a highly recommended optional rule for a second pool, which ties into the initiavite system. Initiative in This second pool, the Combat Bribe, gains one token at the start of every combat round, and at the start of any round players can choose to delay their action until after the NPCs all act, to add all the tokens in their Combat Bribe to their Token Pool. This helps improve the token economy while also adding more tactical depth to combat by choosing when you actually gain those tokens.

Finding and Creating System Synergy in Breakheart

All of this comes together to demonstrate why I chose these two systems, and why I'm hunting this synergy. After all, what's the point of hunting for these compatibilities between systems if there isn't a way to utilize it? TRICK QUESTION: I design games for fun, and you don't need an ulterior motive to have fun. Though, luckily, in this case there is an additional benefit.

DESIGN SPACE!

Design space is a nebulous term, made all the less clear by the enshitification of Google leading to any attempts to look up the term to instead redirect you to CNC machines (as in the machines that cut stuff into specific shapes, not half the trans gals I follow on tumblr).

I layman's terms, design space is just a description of how much a developer can do with their own system, with the limitations they have placed. For example, Breakheart only uses 10-sided dice, and doesn’t use them as percentile dice. This limits my design space by preventing me from doing things like "Add an extra d4 to your roll" or having effects with a percentage chance to trigger (unless that chance is a multiple of 10%).

Again, just changing both systems to use the same dice isn't enough to create synergy on its own. It creates consistency, sure, but it restricts your design space and limits your games potential. Instead you need to find places where the design spaces of both games overlaps, and elements from both games can contribute to each other. For Breakheart, the focus of this synergy is in two places: Wounds and Resources.

Wounds

Wounds are fairly basic and easy to grasp. In Anima: Prime, players have 3(ish) Wounds that they can take before being taken out. In Last Stand, players have about 20(ish) points divided across 4 stats that determine how strong they are, but also use these stats as HP. If a stat is reduced to 0 then you lose your bonus when rolling that stat.

Obviously, 20 and 3 are not numbers that are close together, and would be hard to mesh together. Sure, you could finagle it so that wounds applied some amount of damage, or receiving a certain amount of damage will count as a wound, but this is insufficient in my view. Again, it feels two much like playing two entirely separate games. However, 4 and 3 are MUCH closer to each other. Just have wounds tied to eaxh stat. This also helps provide some clarity for an oft misunderstood mechanic in Last Stand, where players think they use only their current HP as a bonus to their rolls, which is incorrect.

Now, when a stat is reduced to 0 that stat becomes Wounded, and Wounds are what negate the bonus on the roll. Outside of combat you don't need to focus on the minutiae of tracking individual HP, and so instead you just deal directly with wounds. This also means enemy statblocks can be compatible with both subsystems without needing to have two different sets of stats for each mode of play.

Resources

The other place the games overlaps is in their resource management. By combining aspects of each system, both games benefit. Players have 3 pools, now renamed to Action, Attack, and Amplify, because I am not immune to the draw of alliteration. Tokens are moved between these pools or spent when activating various abilities. However, these tokens ALSO have their own Innate effects that activate while they are in a specific pool.

Tokens in your Action Pool represent your stamina and you draw from this pool to fill the other ones. Tokens in the Attack Pool represent your ability to harm others and are spent to make attacks in both Conflict and Combat phases. Tokens in the Amplify Pool represent your ability to aid others or enhance yourself, and are spent on additional effects in Conflict phases and on non-damaging effects in Combat phases.

In Conflict phases (the Combat portion of Anima: Prime), tokens generally flow from the Action Pool into the Attack Pool, with the occasional token going into Amplify instead. This supports those scenes strengths, focusing on intense but fast Combat that still has a tactical element through its resource management.

In Combat phases (the combat portion of Last Stand), this flow is switched, with tokens now flowing from the Action Pool into the Amplify Pool (functioning as the Combat Bribe mechanic from Last Stand), and from there either being spent or moved to the Attack Pool. This leads to the more drawn out and thoughtful combats of the grid-based combat. It's also my hope that by making non-damaging actions easier to build resources for, those actions will become more attractive and the game will promote a more collaborative team-based style of play, as opposed to just a focus on maximizing damage output.

Tokens can also have their own effects, just like in Last Stand. This is where the design space of Breakheart REALLY shines through the strongest in my opinion. Each non-basic Token now has 2 tags on it, as well as a passive effect. The first tag determines what phases the token is active in (Conflict or Combat, though theoretically there could be some that affect Character scenes as well), and the second tag determines what pools the token is active in (Action/Attack/Amplify/All).

Tokens can also have different effects in different phases. Poison is a status condition present in both games, and is mostly the same for both, but with some minor changes to account for how the systems interact. A Poison Token would have the following effect:

[Combat - Attack] At the start of your turn, take 1 Poison damage.

[Conflict - Any] At the start of your turn, lose 1 Token from your Action Pool.

This opens up some fun new design spaces that weren't previously possible in either game. You can have enemies with a 'Slow Acting Poison' attack that adds Poison counters to the players Amplify Pool. Now players have a choice. Do they move the tokens into their Attack Pool causing it to activate immediately but letting it fuel their stronger attacks? Do they use their actions for some non-damaging action to spend it before it starts causing trouble? Do they leave it where it is and try to find a way to get rid of it before the next Conflict where it will activate regardless of what Pool it's in?

An extremely basic attack leads to a huge split in possible options for the player. Creating design spaces like this, in my opinion, is where Fused System games can really excel and are something I would love to see more often. The overlap of these systems can offer so much potential, and I am so excited to explore it.

#breakheart #dev diary #ttrpg #ttrpg dev #sorry this one is so late

[starpuffgames]

Sneak preview of the key art for my first RPG maker game. What do you think will happen?

#dev diary #rpg maker #game dev blog #game dev update #game dev #rpg maker 2003 #indie horror game

[bibixpgames]

We have our Itch.io dev log out, just to tell anyone who haven't seen our current progress in numbers form for "The Faithfulness of the Universe"! :D

And who doesn't like seeing progress get closer and closer to 100%? :3

#visual novel #devlog #dev diary #on tumblr #itch.io #vndev #gamedev #indie game #indiedev #vn #indiegamedev #vn development #visual novel development #indie visual novel #indie otome #otome #amare #cozy fantasy #fantasy #magical #renpy visual novel

[mccarthyacademy]

Slowly getting everyone's base sprites colored <3

Tonight I'm putting in the first 30 backgrounds into the prologue and Ch1

#wip #sprites #dev diary #concept art