#dev diary

[torchship-rpg]

Dev Diary 19 - State of the Union Part 1

It’s been a while, cosmonauts, but we’re back at it. This last week has been an incredibly productive one for Torchship, solving a ton of longstanding issues holding up the Alpha, and digging back into the art.

But you’re here for the mechanics, and boy, we have some pretty cool ones for you this Diary. Today we’re going to be talking about the meta-campaign and the core of what drives a multi-episode run of Torchship; playing not just to encounter little morality plays out in the stars, but to find out how the resolution of those issues changes things back home.

To be clear; this is campaign mechanics, and long campaign mechanics at that. You can play short campaigns and one-shots too, but we want to write a game that’ll hold up to truly epic campaigns, or sequential campaigns if you ever wanted to do Torchship: The Next Generation.

Your campaign can take you a great many places, but all of them revolve around one question:

The Star Union & Representative Agents

As we’ve mentioned before, the players are not just playing the crew of their spacecraft as they go trekking around the stars. That crew is the product of a society, and when the players are out making decisions in the stars, we assume that similar choices with similar reasoning are being made by the people back home.

For that reason, players get to have a lot of influence over the direction of the Star Union both through their actions in the actual episodes, and through decisions and votes they hold over what the Star Union does. This isn’t actually their characters deciding what’s happening unilaterally; it’s the assumption that your crew are, in a sense, the median voter. When the players decide to invest the Union’s resources into a certain upgrade path or project, this represents the Union’s population settling on that course of action for all the same reasons the characters would make that decision in their place.

For this reason, while you can be many things in Torchship, you can’t really be a rebel. If you try, you will be part of an enormous rebellious movement that will very quickly become the new authority and now you’re right back to your day job as a government employee, looking wistfully at your old leather jacket as you file a T-18 Use Of Telemat Report.

I can already hear your protests that you want to be a bold iconoclast that strikes out in defiance of the norms of society. I regret to inform you that you want this because it is a norm of your society to be a bold iconoclast striking out in defiance of things.

It’s The Economy, Stupid

The Star Union is mechanically represented with its own character sheet and its own stats; changing that sheet over time is your job. It’s relatively simple, with stats primarily acting as ways of gating your access to the cool upgrades that improve your capabilities, make your rocket better, and get you shiny new toys, but it matters a lot.

At the end of every Episode, you go into a mode of the game called Resupply. This quite literally represents the time passing as your rocket flies from one star to another, usually taking about one week before arriving at the next planet/on the television sets of households across the nation.

Resupply is a portion of the game which can be resolved immediately after the start of one episode or before the start of another, but one of the best ways to do it is during the time between your play sessions; it’s designed to be something easily hashed out over chat programs and the like. We’ll go into more detail about what you do there and how in the future, but the important part is knowing that this is when the Union’s economy starts mattering.

The Union has two sets of Economic stats. The first contains just a single stat, Productivity. This is how many Credits the Star Union generates at the end of each Episode because it has a bunch of factories and farms and stuff. Productivity is difficult and costly to increase; you can do so by starting Projects, with the amount of time and Credits required varying depending on what kind of Project it is. 

Getting infrastructure in place to exploit a rich belt of Very High Rotation asteroids for the valuable quark nuggets inside is a relatively quick and cheap project; it just requires you the players to find and secure such a resource. By contrast, building up Production through modernization and expansion of existing industrial capability is slow, hard work that will take multiple episodes to complete.

The second set of stats is the Infrastructure stats, covering all the stuff that production is used to maintain. These are Social, Technological, Military, and Redundant Infrastructure. Respectively, this is the Union’s standard of living, how shiny and new its stuff is, how big Star Force has gotten, and how many warehouses you have. You increase all of the stats by paying into funds for them, investing your Credits when you have a surplus until you’ve paid them off.

For the most part, these are used to gate access to upgrades; if you want that shiny new laser, you need to get Technology and Military Infrastructure to a certain point first. Redundant Infrastructure is the odd-man out; it doesn’t really give you access to many new Upgrades, but it has a vital function we’ll get to in a second.

Every point of Infrastructure costs 1 Credit per Episode to run, and at the start of the Campaign, the Star Union is overextended; it’s trying to take on all the costs and responsibilities of being the leading power of Local Space while simultaneously managing an enormous humanitarian crisis partially of its own making, and integrating a large number of refugees from the aforementioned enormous humanitarian crisis. Infrastructure will be higher than Production, and that means the balance has to be paid by none other than the Star Union’s exploration, diplomacy, and prospecting service.

That’s you.

This difference is called your Union Dues, and it's very important that you pay them. If you fail to pay, you’ll have to roll on the WHOOPS I FORGOT TO PAY THE POWER BILL table. Regrettably, this is not its final name, but it is what’s in the document right now.

You might think that this isn’t too big a threat; you’ll just always make sure to save up enough Credits to pay your Union Dues even if you have a bad Episode. That’s where we smile maliciously and tell you that you can’t. Societies don’t typically like sitting on huge amounts of surplus production and not using it on things that people want and need, so for that reason, the amount of Credits you can store between Episodes is limited by your Redundant Infrastructure. You know, Infrastructure you also have to pay for.

If your Dues aren’t out of control, you aren’t running too many Projects that you don’t want to fail, and you’re not burning your expensive consumables, then yes, you can usually meet your Union Dues no problem using the banked Credits from Redundancy. But a streak of bad episodes or out of control spending can send your campaign into a death spiral. The good news is that eventually, the Star Union will contract until it reaches equilibrium, either voluntarily or through terrible rolls.

The bad news is that the Star Union will contract until it reaches equilibrium, and you live in the Star Union! And so do a great many people who are going to have opinions about that.

Speaking of…

Getting Political

The Star Union is more than just a series of economic stats. All the people those stats represent have hopes and dreams, and more importantly, they have voting power on local councils. Being a direct democracy, the Star Union has a tendency to undergo pretty seismic political shifts very quickly when circumstances change, and any good campaign is going to have a lot of Circumstances.

To represent this, we use a series of Movements. You may remember us talking about these way back, or rather an earlier version of them; we’ve since expanded how they work and set up a system which allows them to exist alongside others.

So… let’s meet a Movement.

The Centralists are the Leading Movement at the start of your Campaign; they’ll be largely unopposed for the moment, but the Civil Anarchists and the Neo-Trotskyites are waiting in the wings and can join them in a coalition fairly easily.

What that means in practical terms is that they have the highest Power Rank at 5. As both a Major Power and the Leading Power, the Centralists give you two passive effects. Their Major Power bonus relates to Stability, which we’ll talk about in a moment, while their Leading Movement Effect is the benefit you get for being at 10-12 Unity on the Unity track. You’ll remember that from Dev Diary 15; that universal rule is actually just the default you get from these guys being in charge!

They also have a Taboo, which represents a value of this Movement, the violation of which discredits their influence; it’s stuff that makes them look hypocritical or disgusts their followers. For the Centralists, that’s failing to keep Promises made to groups in negotiation; their reputation is built around being the trustworthy and reliable ones that follow through on their deals.

Here’s some examples of other Movements’ Major Power Effect, Leading Movement Effect, and Taboo:

Progress Triggers

Movements advance in Power Rank by gaining Progress; that’s what is tracked on that neat little circular dial. At the end of each Episode, you go through the Triggers for all the active Movements and add Progress based on which ones got done. As a Movement rises in Power Rank, the Triggers are reduced in strength proportionally; at Rank 5, the only Trigger which actually gives the Centralists Progress is bringing new Members into the Union. Don’t worry, though; they have another means of keeping power.

You’ll notice that the 4 Progress trigger, Focus on Fundamentals, triggers when you miss Union Dues. A lot of Movements have triggers like this; this is where we put the stuff that the Movement specifically believes they’d do better. So when the Centralists are out of power, they get a boost from the economic mismanagement of whoever is, but once they have influence in government, failing to balance the budget isn’t going to work in their favour.

By extension, lower-value triggers tend to be things that drive or revitalise a weak Movement, while high-value triggers are triumphs or threats that validate them, either mobilizing a weak movement with a victory, or cementing the authority of a strong one.

For another example, here are the Neo-Trot Triggers. You can see how their lower triggers, the first ones to fade, are the relatively small fundamental issues that form the emotional foundation of the Movement; the Neo-Trots won’t be irrelevant so long as we keep finding planets ruled by jerks and evil computers, and their quest for increased military spending grows more pressing every time a Star Patrol rocket limps back full of holes.

The #4 trigger here ceases to help the Neo-Trots once they take power; it’s expected of them. Both the Centralists and Civil Anarchists get this trigger at 5 instead, which creates an interesting contradiction; once they’re in power, winning battles empowers their rivals because, through victory, they are making themselves obsolete. If they keep winning their fights, why do we need to shovel more resources into Star Force?

That’s why their highest triggers are stuff that give them more material power directly instead. Producing and distributing weapons increases the size of those sectors in the Union’s economy and bureaucracy, increasing their influence, while a war breaking out mobilizes the economy and places all their experts in positions of authority. This also, of course, gives them an incentive to keep arming people and fighting wars once they’re in power…

Stability

Each time an Opposition Movement (that’s any Movement which isn’t the Leading Movement) goes up by a Power Rank, it prompts a Stability Check. You also have to roll Stability Checks if you fail to pay your Union Dues. This is pretty simple; Stability is a number from 0-6 representing people’s faith in the current leadership of the Star Union. You roll 1d6 for each Stability Check; if the result is above your current Stability, the Leading Movement loses 1d6 Progress, potentially sliding back to lower Power Levels. If that happens enough, they’ll be displaced as the Leading Power.

Note that passing Stability Checks has an effect; each test you pass lowers Stability by 1. Fortunately, restoring Stability is pretty easy; every Credit put into the Social Infrastructure fund raises Stability by 1, and incidentally also gives the Leading Movement 3 Progress. 

So basically, the Leading Movement can have whatever ideologically it wants, but once it's actually in power, it only stays in power by raising people’s standards of living, though it does benefit from a slow decay of everyone else’s Progress. If the Centralists spend the entire budget on giant golden statues of Yuri Gagarin, then they won’t be in power for very long, and if they really screw it up… well, that’s what Crises are for.

Endgames

Each Movement has a number of Endgames; the five major movements all have a sort of soft ‘win’ condition that cements their power in some way and makes a lasting change on your game. For example, Federation-Builders basically cements the Centralists’ power for the foreseeable future by having them make good on their promises, and in the process gain a new and fiercely loyal following.

Well, I say soft win condition; they aren’t always.

A ‘lose’ condition deactivates or disempowers a Movement, representing the movement breaking apart, being thoroughly discredited, or otherwise losing their ability to carry on. For the Centralists, the only thing that’ll knock them out of the game is the Cybernetic Democrats actually getting their wild experiment off the ground and fully implemented, which is a huge and expensive Project.

How severe these lose conditions are will vary. Some movements will be outright destroyed, either instantly or by fading out, but others are more resilient.

Finally, we have the Crisis. Crises are triggered if Stability hits 0, and they’re bad. The most survivable ones prompt multi-episode arcs in a mad scramble to save the Union; the worst functionally end the campaign. The Centralists being in charge when the state they build fails means that it all comes apart in their scramble to save it; the cordial competition for the future of the Union becomes a shooting war. This might be where you end your campaign, or it might be where you throw in with another Movement and try to win it for them!

Many Crises will be internal…

… but not all of them.

Expanded Movements

The five core movements we mentioned before are all primary Movements, with a full set of triggers, effects, and endgames. Each of them represents a potentially valid direction for the Union that you, as players, can choose to back or suppress. 

However, the nature of this system makes it very easy for us to add new Movements to the game. Most of these Movements are Minor Movements, with reduced triggers and rules which are usually single-issue and whose Endgames are simplified and easier to hit. Minor Movements don’t cause Stability hits when they gain Power Ranks and can’t take the Leading Faction slot, they can slot easily into a ruling coalition without breaking things, or fade once their purpose is achieved.

For an example, if you integrate the Nariene into the Star Union (either by defeating its current government or making an alliance that bypasses that; we’ll be talking about them in the next Dev Diary), you get the very pressing Minor Movement “Nariene Green Movement”, which is clamouring, quite reasonably, to have their planet saved from the runaway greenhouse effect they’re under. They’ll gain power quite quickly with triggers firing based on the Union’s economy growing, and once they hit Major they’ll mandate the funding of their Project. Once their homeworld is saved, their endgame is triggered and the Movement fades, leaving you with a nice permanent bonus as everyone in the Star Union gets a bit better at reducing, reusing, and recycling.

Not all late-joining Movements are Minors, though; some of them can very much become the Leading Power and change your game accordingly.

Finally… not all the Movements are intended to be viable paths forward. Movements can emerge in dire circumstances, reflecting adverse pressures, but they can also come out of your actions as Star Patrol, if you feed the worst impulses of the Union and give material power to bad actors.

Which is why you don’t start your campaign with five moments. You start with six.

[last-sprout]

Last Sprout Dev Diary - Nov 22, 2024

Hello sprout folks! I'm Valerie, or @oneominousvalbatross, and I've been working on Last Sprout since July, and I'm wildly excited to share some of the things I've been working on with y'all.

Ignore that Twiggs' hat falls off that's natural.

I'm aiming for a Dev Diary once a week on Fridays, and I'm just gonna be giving a brief look into making a game! I'm learning how to do a lot of this stuff live, so I'm sure there'll be a ton of massive rewrites and changes. I have probably a dozen huge systems that are already built that I'm not going to be getting into in this post, since I'm already half a year or so into development, but I'm sure I will find space to include them later!

XP

I spent most of my time figuring out exactly how we wanted to represent XP in the world. We were pretty certain that we wanted XP to exist physically as a substance you picked up, so I started with a system from a previous build.

In that version, we just created a bunch of XP objects and scattered them into the world, then had some code that scooted them around. Of course, that means that we're tracking an individual unity GameObject for every single instance of a point of XP which is, uh, slow.

This is what we call 'suboptimal.'

So obviously we needed to not instantiate an entire transform every time we needed to spawn XP. Even if we re-used objects that would just be prohibitively expensive for an object that really just needs a position.

I'm not going to go over each step in the process, but after experimenting with GPU instancing to just draw a bunch of XP objects at once, eventually I landed on extending Unity's particle system, since it has a lot of the settings I wanted access to.

To make the XP move how I wanted, I wrote a pretty simple process that iterates through all the little blobs and checks how close they are to a designated collector, then uses an exponential decay function (with thanks to Freya Holmér) to make them move towards Twiggs.

I think every game should have an action that can be best summarized by making the noise 'SHWOOOOOP.'

Parrying

Parrying was a good deal simpler, but it still has its issues. Essentially, all a parry needs to be is a hitbox and an animation, with some callbacks to enemies to let them react to the parry. Whenever an attack hitbox intersects with either a Parrybox or a Hurtbox, it checks its tags to see if it's interacting with the appropriate entities, to makes sure enemies aren't hitting or parrying each other constantly. If it passes the test, it calls GetParried() on the intersecting object.

GetParried(), idiot.

For the basic behavior, parrying just interrupts the attack in progress and knocks the enemy back by a set amount, but there's room in the system to add all sorts of neat effects, which I'm sure we'll be taking advantage of in the future. It's been a challenge to juggle the various kinds of hitboxes, but it'll definitely be worth it going forward!

Of course, between all these bits there were a ton of bugfixes and little experiments, but that's a topic for a later dev diary!

[lapinlunaire-games]

okay we're cooking....we're javascripting...we're using bright colours to draft because otherwise the pot is full of div soup....

[pixiebombblog]

Dev Diary #1 (Oct 27, 2024) - It All Starts Here!

Hi! I'm Pixie, and I am currently in active development on a new large-scale, fully voice-acted & immersive Skyrim follower mod named Seraph!

I've decided to start up a regular Developer Diary (You Are Here) to share progress & roadmap the release as she gets further along! Also if you haven't already, join the Discord (link after the jump) to stay updated & involved or just to say hi 🩷

Here's some early development highlights so far:

✨️ For Seraph's custom follower framework, I've built a new & improved core framework that is much more effective, elegant, & efficient than the framework most follower mod authors start with, & one of the benefits of this is that it's much harder for external problematic mods like AFT to break her brain!

✨️ Seraph's character and story has been deeply developed already, & her personal quests will be expansive! Her main personal questline is currently planned to play out in four acts/chapters, with an optional fifth chapter for...

✨️ Romance 💖 Seraph will be romanceable (& marriageable) for certain types of player characters! Without saying anything spoiler-y, Seraph's romance is not frivolous, exploitative, or lazy (as is often the case with romance options in many mods out there), it is an important narrative aspect of her character, and adds to a story that plays out over the course of your adventures together. Romance is not the main focus of the mod, & is completely optional, though just as much time & care is being put into it as any other part of the mod.

✨️ Seraph has a complex Approval system that feels much like the companion approval in Baldur's Gate 3, which has already been built & implemented. Your choices will matter, what you say and do will affect your relationship & things can turn out very differently based on dialogue chosen, playstyle choices, and more.

✨️ Seraph is feature-rich, and full of customizable toggles, options, and mechanics that range from functional and helpful to ones that just make her feel alive and fully fleshed out as a character. She can spar with you, have discussions on books and lore topics, bail you out of prison (with potential Approval ramifications!), won't call you the Dragonborn if you don't want her to, and a lot more. She also has all of the customary bells & whistles like follow distance controls, lore-friendly summon ability, relax/sandbox behavior options, etc. Many of these features are already built & implemented, or in various stages of that process.

✨️ I've also been working closely with my fantastic 3D artist @legendaryfirewizard (the artist who created Redcap's custom helmet model & several of Xelzaz's custom models) on a visual centerpiece that I don't want to spoil just yet, but that is central to Seraph's story & makes her very unique from any other follower mod.

There's so much more I'm excited to share, but without spoiling too many of the character & backstory details juuuust yet, I hope this first Dev Diary can give a small idea of what I'm hoping to achieve with this follower.

I've learned so much over the past few years of creating mods, and I've grown so much as a creator and a person in that time. Seraph is my love letter to creating, to character writing, to fantasy and RPG's, and to The Elder Scrolls which starting with Morrowind inspired me to imagine characters and stories within the world of Tamriel and beyond.

If you've read this far, I hope you'll give Seraph a download when the eventual release happens. In the meantime, feel free to join the Discord - to keep up to date with the project as it progresses!

- Pixie 💖

(Mod author, Voice Actress)

[impairedpixels]

Maya almost fell

Maya almost fell while trying out prosthetics but Max lucky caught her sending her prosthetics flying. You can find out more about this story and support my work on Patreon or SubscribeStar.

[voids-colourful-creations]

Dev Diary #2: Mar. 16 - Mar. 22

Here’s this weeks update on RiDsM development!

Quiet week sadly, busy with irl stuff. Mostly small edits where I had time. In the meantime, here's some misc. concept art stuff I've done.

This is THE! Eight sprite sketch! All the art in RIDSM I make is sketched on paper first, then taken a picture of to move digitally! On another update, I might go into detail about how I make sprites if people are interested. But every Eight sprite in the game is based off this very sketch =D

Both of these are some of the sketches I've done for cgs! Most CG sketches I do are very minimal, only the bare minimum info, like the one on the right.

This was the very first sketch of the game I made! The original concept is pretty different than the final version, but the core has always been this. The two of them sitting together, their words separating them.

See you next week! If anyone has anything in particular they want to hear about for next weeks update, lemme know!

[twinklebyisnthere]

"what is this blog" - context

This is the shit-posty Twinkleby dev diary, run by a game dev who’s spent 15+ years being NDA’d by previous employers and who just wants to chat about a game project they love. Making video games can actually be fun – who knew? Anyway; let’s shitpost our way to the game release, and gossip about all the behind the scenes shenanigans the team runs into along the way.

And what is Twinkleby?

Twinkleby is a cozy decoration game where you map out an archipelago of floating islands and build dioramas for a society of spacefaring neighbours. It’s an escapist, cozy, stress-free game made by devs who desperately crave something escapist, cozy and stress-free in this day and age. Check us out on steam for more info (presented in a way more professional manner than this blog haha)

[dragonandknightcomic]

Dragon&Knight Chapter 2 - Dev Diary #1 is on Patreon!

Chapter 2 is getting scripted and I've shared some concepts in the meantime. Read the full post here:

🔥LINK🔥

[emma-heart-art]

This is Chimera Country, something I've been working on for the past year. This was originally my final project to get my BFA in animation, but now that I have graduated I'm wondering if I can make this into something more.

More info about it under the cut, but TLDR; Chimera Country is a pitch for a video game about making friends with chimeras and using a "mount system" to deepen exploration and combat.

STORY:

In Chimera Country, you play as a feral child named "the wildling." She has spent her whole life away from humanity and has thusly learned to bond with nature in ways that most people cant. One day, the wildling comes across an abandoned farm who's owner has, for unknown reasons, turned into a flying talking book. With nothing better to do, the wildling teams up with this book and begins to rebuild the farm. With the book's knowledge of building, and the wildling's ability to bond with wildlife, they set off to find answers. Why did the farmer turn into a book? Why do some chimeras have cybernetic implants? Why are there chimeras here in the first place? All these questions have answers, though they may be hard for our protagonists to swallow.

GAMEPLAY:

I have previously described this as a "top-down metroidvania," but a better comparison would be basically a top-down zelda game with resource gathering components and deeper combat. I'm a sucker for games with an in-depth combat system, so I would love to have crazy stuff like frame perfect dodges, parries, counter attacks, and maybe even a few upgrades to your weaponry. This will not be a procedurally generated world, as I already have mapped out the general geography of this "country." I'm taking inspiration from Subnautica's map in the way its designed for exploration and resource gathering, having different biomes with different fauna and flora thought out in detail. I would also like to add puzzle/ parkour areas that can only be accessed using the mount system. And speaking of the mount system...

MOUNT SYSTEM:

This is the lifeblood of Chimera Country. Everything from the combat to the map layout will be designed around this system. As of right now, there are only five mounts that are in development. They are as follows:

LISA

An elderly Shetland pony who hasn't let her age get to her. She is the only creature in this game that is not a chimera, as she worked on the farm as a work horse during her prime.

Lisa is the first mount obtained in game, being given to the player right after the intro. Her main abilities are running at high speeds and jumping over obstacles. Very basic stuff.

She's also named after and inspired by my mom!

CAMILLE

A mix of a peacock and an emu. She is troubled with horrible anxiety, the type of creature jump at every small sound around her.

Her gimmick is that she can run around at road-runner levels of speed, but she is unable to be controlled by the player in that state. She can crash through fragile objects and give the player access to previously hidden away areas.

My fav of the mounts tbh

JOHN

Not actually a turtle, but a living, moving coral reef that has simply taken the shape of a turtle. They can be found in a above-water coral reef biome that fits they're aesthetic.

They're main ability is that they can bite through almost any material. Weather you need to gather stone for a build or if you need to break into a cave, John has got you covered!

They're a little slow though, so please be patient with them.

JAMES

A mix of a moose and a mountain goat.

His legs have begun to fail him in his old age, but luckily he has been equipped with cybernetic legs that let him jump higher than any other of his species.

His main use is to traverse the mountains located in the northern most region of the map, but if you backtrack you may find some other areas he can help out in!

Named and designed after my dad!

APPLE

Apple's segment had to be cut out for time, but she is still vital to the Chimera Country experience. She is a mix of a barn owl and a bat, and is a rare variant of the "owl-bat" enemies that are common in the game world.

Despite being last on this list, she is actually the second mount the player will obtain. Her main ability is her flight, witch can be used as a form of fast travel.

As said before, these are the only mounts in development right now. I doubt there will be more added to the game, thought. You will not be able to tame every chimera you see. I want to preface this now because I would rather have a highly polished experience with only a few mounts than have another "collect them all" type of game. Chimera Country will have some collection elements to it, but that will be limited to the bestiary.

I also want to mention that this is very much so a work in progress. All the abilities I have mentioned above are strictly for exploration. I'm planning on adding the mounts into the combat system, I just simply need to do some experimentation to see what works and what doesn't.

WHATS NEXT:

I've said before that this was my final project for art school, so as of right now everything is simply animation. The pixel art sequences were made in a program called Asperite and were sewn together in adobe aftereffects. There is no build of the game as of right now. However, I do know enough about the unity engine to confidently say I can make everything seen here a reality. Other than that, all of my development plans are up in the air. I just graduated, so right now my biggest concern is to just get a survival job so I can stand on my own two feet. Once I'm stable though, I can see myself working on this as a side project, kinda like how Stardew valley was made. Regardless of what happens next, I'm proud of the work I've done thus far and I hope I can continue working on this idea. It would be a dream come true if this became a real game people could play, but for right now it is still just a dream.

[humboldtidecomics]

Bath side chat - Moth concept art. Reference for how they are dressed at this point in the scene; Vincent is in just his shirt and Siegfried is in just his trousers, this is because they paused half way through getting undressed for the bath, when Vincent saw Siegfried's scars. But they are wearing uniforms, not pajamas.

Update:

[vikkicomics]

22/200 pages left to ink. 57/200 to colour. After 3 years of work, we are on track for the planned release date. Here is a sneak-peek for those invested.

Otto and Heinz were childhood friends, Heinz's death triggered Otto's shellshock, which was treated with electric shock therapy, but not entirely cured. This is a flashback to when Heinz peer pressured Otto into smoking, Edwin will later discourage this habit. Otto stops smoking when he gets over Heinz's death.

If you can, please support my Patreon for sustained progress, I don't make any money from this and may not be able to finish the work without support.

[torchship-rpg]

Dev Diary 18 - Zinovians

Right, let’s talk another major species! The Zinovians are the other really ‘big’ species in Torchship on the level of the Aquillians, the folks you’ll be dealing with often. They’re not as widespread or numerous as the Aquillians, but they’re a powerful and highly present political force in multiple astrostates, and the shared history they have with humanity have set us on a collision course.

The most important thing to know about the Zinovians is that they got exiled from their own homeworld by the Aquillian Empire about four hundred years prior to the events of the game and scattered across the stars. This has created several very distinct groups of Zinovians to encounter or play as, with sizable cultural, political, and even genetic differences between them. The majority settled in a single state which humanity allied with during their war against the Aquillians; the Zinovians are the reason we caught up to Local Space’s tech level so quickly. 

We promptly paid them back by making peace with the Empire instead of helping them take their homeworld back. They’re still not over it.

Oh, also; all the alien species names in Torchship are exonyms. The Zinovians weren’t originally called that by humans; it’s a (derogatory) descriptive name that emerged after the war to describe the structure of their government by unflatteringly comparing it to the guy whose bureaucratic decisions laid the groundwork for Stalin’s rise to power, and it stuck where the competing approximations of their endonyms failed. As is a general theme with the Zinovians, this is a mutual kind of awful; their name for us is, literally, “The Little Traitors”.

Biology

The Zinovians are another of the local humanoid species, though they’re a little more alien looking than the Aquillians, who could pass for human with a hat on. They’re one of the most diverse species in Local Space; like Humans, they have no taboo on genetic engineering and have used it to adapt themselves to a variety of physical and social environments. But there’s still some commonalities across groups.

Zinovians are cat-people, though this is less ‘cute kittycat girl’ and more ‘oh god, there’s a panther on the loose!’. Think the Puma Sisters from Dominion Tank Police. They have tall tufted ears, retractable claws on their hands and feet for both climbing and hunting, and a lot of subgroups have vestigial tails. They’re descended from apex ambush predators with a similar hunting strategy to leopards, complete with hauling kills up trees, which gradually developed complex social structures in response to changing environmental pressures. 

As the only major sapient species of obligate carnivores in Local Space, their transition to sapience was largely driven by the complex competitive politics of reproductive suppression to avoid overhunting, which gradually shifted toward tool use for reshaping the environment to increase hunting yields. Their version of the agricultural revolution was the invention of the fishing net and nomadic groups settling along coastlines.

That gives us our first trait, the aptly named Ambush Predator Evolutionary Outlier trait. This gives some pretty meaty bonuses to short bursts of physical activity, but means you take Fatigue more quickly in return.

Zinovians have distinct structures of long hair and short fur; their fur and skin share pigmentation, which can make it hard to tell which is which at a glance. The amount, lengths, and colouration of fur has a dizzying degree of variance (with colours mostly clustered in the red/yellow/green range) thanks to their ancestors having some pretty cool camo fur patterns; those largely became solid colours in the transition to sapience, but you get deliberate or accidental genetic throwbacks. 

The claws give you the Built-In Weapons Trait; these are serious business, about as dangerous as walking around with iron daggers on hand at all times. This is connected to the somewhat-muted Zinovian pain response; with sociability being a relatively recent evolutionary development, pain’s signalling function of ‘stop and get help’ is less neurologically developed, meaning that Stiff Upper Lip here represents quite literally feeling less pain.

Finally, Zinovian sexual dimorphism and gender politics are a fascinatingly complex subject. Their crash evolutionary development of sociability has left rather significant holdovers from when their ancestors were highly hierarchical matrilineal fission-fusion societies resembling something between spotted hyena clans and lion prides. The psychological developments are no more present than in humans, of course (though, like in humans, pop science evolutionary psychology does crop up socially), but some of the physiological aspects have stuck around.

So, first off, baseline Zinovian sexual dimorphism is a bit exaggerated compared to humans, with females being larger. This is a bit more than the relatively small differences between human sexes; their evolutionary adaptation trait suggests you can take Efficient Metabolism over Ambush Predator if you want to play the far end of baseliner male dimorphism, more optimised for wandering off to find groups with gaps in the hierarchy than challenging it. This dimorphism has been genetically reduced in some Zinovian groups and exaggerated in others.

The other big thing is that Zinovians have two sets of sex expression, termed ‘major’ and ‘minor’ sexes, which is a holdover from alternative reproductive strategies that developed around the strict hierarchies of their presapient ancestors. Essentially, about 3-5% of Zinovians naturally develop what we might term inverted secondary sexual characteristics, with no way to tell before they hit puberty. Like, naturally occurring transgender hormone balances, sorta kinda. And then you layer socially constructed gender on top of that, and it gets complicated, with different cultures having vastly different answers to the social status of sex expressions, transgender people, etc…

Yeah, it’s an excuse to roll up your sleeves and get on some next-level gender stuff with these cat people. Don’t let it be said we don’t know our audience.

In the Zinovian Sphere

Okay, first off, they don’t call it that. We call it that, because it makes them sound like an evil hegemony. They call themselves the Universal Republic, and call us the Human Star Empire. See? This is a whole thing.

The Zinovian Universal Sphere Republic is the largest political body the Zinovians have and are in many ways the ‘second power’ of Local Space, being the largest unified group after the Star Union in the aftermath of the Aquillian Empire shattering like a pane of glass. Unified is being kind of generous, though; the Zinovian Sphere is more like a loose federation of eight semi-independent ministries which once had specific duties in the unified government, but who have gradually developed into messy mini-states within the larger whole. 

The logos of the Ministries. Resources, Loyalty, Labour, Peace, Space, Life, Sanitation, and Security. Once specialized, all now form mini-governments in their own right, complete with their own militaries.

They symbolize a borehole mine, a watchful eye, a churning vat, an interstellar transmission, a rocket launch, cell division, water purification, and a watchtower.

The Universal Republic began with the ragged survivors of their homeworld’s uprising against the Aquillians being directed to a group of marginally-habitable high-gravity worlds in a star cluster near the Aquillian border with one of their distant rivals, to be used as a buffer state and early warning system. Their founding ideology of hopeful liberation was one of the many victims of starvation, decompression, dehydration, and radiation poisoning that characterised this exodus and the crash terraforming projects that followed.

As a direct result, the Universal Republic adheres to an apocalyptic socialism the Union calls Social Triage; resources must be held in common to be distributed to maximise return. In accordance with ability, disregarding need.  It’s the cold logic of a mass casualty event, applied to entire societies and lingering long after the emergency is over. It’s a relic of the days when a community leader had to stand up in the shelter and tell a thousand people they will only have calories for eight hundred, when neighbouring communities would exchange rosters of their population so unbiased choices could be made as to who gets to live. 

They’re past the days of anyone actually starving, but that, uh, is going to leave a bit of a psychological mark. It’s the reason why their government can be eight Ministries in a trenchcoat and yet survive; for all their squabbling, the Ministries are dedicated with absolute zeal to not rocking the boat too much, in case it means somebody somewhere doesn’t get fed, and are equally dedicated to the dream of one day getting Lost Homeworld back and making the fucking elves pay for it.

Republican Zinovians are divided into three Identities for gameplay purposes. The first two represent the civilian population of the Republic, and share a bunch of interesting Traits. You get Heavyworlder, because the 12 worlds the Zinovians were forced to settle on were largely hovering around 1g. You get Radiation Hardened (Lesser type, with Radiation Absorbing Structures) and/or Built-In Armour, which represents the subdermal steel plates which are affected by most of the population; these plates are largely cultural now, but at one time these were there to keep major bones from absorbing too much radiation on worlds with marginal magnetic fields. You’re encouraged to take Psychrophile/Thermophile, or any other trait which reflects the harsh nature of whichever world you ended up on.

You also lose some traits. In the Republic, genetic engineering efforts have at times been directed to reducing sexual dimorphism as part of various (largely unsuccessful) efforts to combat matriarchal social structures. Republican citizens also get their claws removed as a public health and safety measure at a young age; this is largely seen as a kind of sad-but-necessary reality of modernity, and a lot of defectors to the Star Union go get them regrown or have mechanical replacements installed.

The first of the identities is the Citizens; these are the regular people of the Republic, the politically disenfranchised common folk with no overt loyalties to any one Ministry. As with all the major powers in Local Space, the Republic is dealing with an overabundance of labour; in the Republic this manifests as waiting. You don’t want for anything vital, the local Ministries work together to ensure you have food, shelter, education, and distraction, but what you’re issued is what you get, and what you’re issued is decided by a bureaucrat somewhere. If you want more, you sign up for a waiting list for job openings in the Ministries, and you wait.

Which is why there’s a wild black market among the common citizens, hence a recommendation for the Entrepreneur trait. Polyglot represents how these colonies were haphazard multicultural endeavours which maintain enclaves carrying on the traditions of Lost Homeworld, and War Veteran represents how the only widespread employment available to common citizens was the recruitment drive during the war.

The second group are the Ministry Families. The Ministries operate as densely entangled networks of nepotistic family groups, with entire departments run by extended clans. The definition of ‘family’ is pretty loose; Zinovian norms about adoption are extremely flexible. Ministry families live marginally better lives than the regular Citizens in material terms, but do so under constant scrutiny and the intense expectations of their families, creating an intense political thunderdome of inter- and intra-family competition.

This gets so serious that it's reflected in the main Ministry trait, Augment. If you’re a ministry couple expecting a kid, it’s not uncommon for the clan matriarch to drop by and talk about the job they have lined up for them when they grow up, so wouldn’t it be a good idea to make sure they’re well-suited for the role? This dovetails well with just about any other trait; you’re encouraged to think about what you were destined for and how your family tried to achieve that.

The final recommended trait is Foreign Connections, a Trait which gives you both friends and enemies in another state. Maybe those friends are family who still have your back… or maybe they’re the department you betrayed your family to in order to smuggle yourself out of the Sphere.

A fun detail about the Republic is that they’re intensely maltheistic; organised religion was one of the main tools of the Aquillian occupation, and a lot of them were very devout people. Given the subsequent traumatic Everything, the natural cultural conclusion was that their gods had sold them out to the occupiers, and when Lost Homeworld is taken back they’re going to make a point to lock their deities inside the temples and light a match. In the meantime, they practise with effigies. Their kids make them out of paper mache. It’s great fun for the whole family.

There’s one last Identity within the Republic, and they’re very different from the other two. The Republican Marines are a cultural group inside the state descended from a seafaring culture who had been given a position as warrior nobility under the Aquillian hierarchy; the uprising largely kicked off because they got sick of getting increasingly sidelined for foreign mercenaries and defected to the rebels. The Marines are essentially a separate nation bound by treaty to the Republic to serve as an apolitical military arm; though in theory they’re all soldiers, in practice the majority of them work the logistics that allow a small handful of them to be the scariest power-armoured infantrymen in the history of the galaxy.

Seriously. The main narrative purpose of Zinovian Marines is to act as a thing the GM can put in a scene to say to the players “nope, you need to talk your way out of this one, because you aren’t winning this fight”. They have rotary chainguns with sufficient armour penetration to shoot up your reactor from the top deck of your spacecraft, and their armour has articulating ERA shields that double as deck-clearing fragmentation mines. Your redshirts going up against them is going to look like that sick Astartes animation on youtube. Just don’t.

Marines get to keep their claws, and obviously get recommended the War Veteran trait. It’s also noted that you are extremely visually distinct and it's impossible to hide it; Marines get elaborate facial tattoos and piercings specifically so they cannot shirk their duties to the Republic and try to become a civilian. 

In the CNFT

The Zinovian Marines are one offshoot of the seafaring warrior culture, one that ended up in the Republic. But a lot of them ended up elsewhere, either through surrendering to Aquillian forces during the war and being repurposed, or fleeing reprisals. Like most refugees in Local Space before the Star Union became a thing, those people ended up in the CNFT, alongside some other Zinovians who quickly became culturally integrated.

So what do a bunch of soldiers do when they arrive somewhere with combat experience but no money? They offered their services as mercenaries within the cutthroat anarcho-capitalist nightmare of the Territories, and they were good at it.

The modern SEA-WARRIORS OF ZINOVIA! are what happens when an entire culture’s financial security depends on being able to sell themselves as the best mercenaries in the entire galaxy, playing up their foreign heritage and biological quirks as an intergenerational advertising scheme. According to the marketing, the Sea-Warriors are a barely-civilised society of bloodthirsty warrior women whose rigid codes of honour demand they seek out war and conquest, and they can be yours for the low low price of $29.99! They wear the furs of exotic animals and get cool tattoos and carry four-foot long cultasses around in public and pick fights in bars with the hope of getting cool scars. Where the Republicans downplayed their sexual dimorphism with genetic engineering, the Sea-Warriors exaggerated it (mostly in that the ladies got even taller). They even gene-modded their tails back in and made them fuzzier to look more animalistic.

And it worked. Every politician has a Zinovian bodyguard, every criminal kingpin has Zinovian enforcers, and when you turn on the TV you’ll see Zinovian athletes playing full-contact sports, chasing perps in cop shows, and selling gene-therapy treatments at the commercial break. The CNFT’s image of physical prowess is a six-foot-five cat woman with tattooed abs and a massive machete leading a platoon in the conflict zone of the week.

The thing is… it’s not entirely an act. It started as one, sure, and the ones pushing the envelope will wink and nod and admit to exaggerating, but a culture can’t perform a persona this long without becoming true believers. Yes, they put the furs and swords away and fight in power armour under a swarm of autonomous drones like everyone else when it comes down to it, their mercenary corporations have slick PR operations and genetic modification programs and R&D departments, there’s Zinovians in suits negotiating with the government over protection contracts, but at the end of the day this still is a culture growing up with a self-image that the coolest thing they can possibly be is a barbarian warlord with a laser pistol in one hand and a sword in the other.

The first recommended Trait from all this is Augment, because you don’t keep your edge in a market like this without a bit of help. Imposing reflects the brand, obviously, and you still have your Built-In Weapons (getting declawed is seen as a fate worse than death). You have the fun Cultural Tool trait to represent the exaggerated cutlasses that your honour demands you carry in public, and War Veteran is an obvious pick for a culture where the Territorial Army and then subsequent mercenary work is the only real career path for most. 

Finally, you’re encouraged to take Redundant Vitals, because a lot of Sea Warriors opt into a series of genetic and surgical procedures to duplicate a few of their vital organs, just in case. It makes getting life insurance so much cheaper that it’s always worth it. 

The Greater Diaspora

The final set of identities is a bit of a catch-all for everyone else, and is more a high-level summary than the detailed Trait lists for other identities by its nature. There’s a ton of Zinovians living spread out in Local Space; descendents of refugees, migrant workers, and ancient settler projects. Like with the Aquillians (or the human wildcat colonies), it's an excuse to take the basic archetype and make it your own. One part of this characterisation is the fact that the Universal Republic wants very badly to use this diaspora as an arm of state power, and its various Ministries attempt to do so, with various levels of influence and success. There’s also a fair number integrated into the Star Union, many of them advisors who came over during the war and decided they liked it better.

Finally, there’s a note that the Zinovian Sphere is, well, not just a Universal Republic in name; they actually do have a number of alien species among their ranks as well, who will be culturally integrated at various levels using the above Identities. There’s a fair number of humans who have jumped ship to the Universal Republic in the same way, mostly people who think the Star Union is too pacifist or forgiving for its own good, or advisors horrified by the voters back home leaving their allies in the lurch. Said humans are largely integrating into Ministry families at this point.

[last-sprout]

Last Sprout Dev Diary - Jan 10, 2025

Hello, and welcome to the new year! After the break, I'm here for another dev diary - this one being a bit more about something conceptual. If you want to read the last dev diary from December, you can do so here.

If this is the first one you're reading, I'm @oneominousvalbatross, and I'm the tech side of the sprout team! This week I mostly worked on status effects, but I want to take some time to talk about a broader, more conceptual topic, and save the full breakdown for next week.

My poor boy, who has every disease.

Something I don't think I've really specified before in these dev diaries is my background in game dev, or, rather, my lack of background. I started seriously learning how to code a bit over a year ago, and entered my first game jam in February of 2024.

(The game was barely functional, but it did exist so like, there's something.)

My academic background is in philosophy (simultaneously the best and worst thing tbh), and apart from being pretty good with computers in a broad sense I didn't really have much to go on for this project. I'm bringing this up because I'm going to be talking about something that I had to figure out for myself, but that might be like, compsci 105 or something if you went through school for it. That said though, if you have always kind of wanted to make games, you can absolutely make games! I didn't think I was a math person, or a coding person, until I started doing it.

Game Development is Hard

I'm going to assume that software development in general is hard, but I haven't really done that, so I'm talking about game dev. I spent around two weeks not touching the game, and when I came back, the first thing I noticed was just how hard it was to get my head back around something with this many systems! This was also something I ran headlong into when working on that game jam, I reached a point in like, a week where I couldn't touch any system without potentially breaking every other system.

The solution I use, and the reason why I could come back to this without completely losing my mind, is to reduce the number of access points into a system to the absolute bare minimum. For example, we can look at the animation system. It's really complicated! It needs to be able to swap the sprites out on a variety of different renderers, it needs to be able to adjust animation speeds, control shader parameters, and it needs to be able to queue up multiple animations in sequence, plus it needs to send out events on animation end so that I can use them to time up other game actions.

If I was to condense all of this into a few sentences: A system can be as complicated as it needs to be, but try to envision it in its own little box, with precisely one entrance/exit. If you need to spawn a projectile, you should really just be able to go, like, SpawnProjectile(projectile), with as little external work as possible. This means if you need to completely rewrite how spawning projectiles works, you can do that, and all the other classes that spawn projectiles can still just do their thing.

A helpful diagram

The way I would've done this originally would have been to have, like, a SpriteAnimator class with a 'speed' field. I'd set it to one by default, and then whenever I need that speed to be different, I'd have whatever object needs to change the speed go in and set the speed to whatever. If you've done a lot of programming, you probably immediately realized the tons of problems this could cause - problems into which I ran headlong.

What do you do when you want one animation to play at a certain speed, then go back to the previous speed when it's done? If you do, do you assume that the speed was set to 1 before, and just reset it, or do you have one of the two objects involved store the previous speed to go back to it? If you do, what happens if, halfway through an animation, another object butts in to adjust the speed again? Say you're playing an animation at half speed, and then a speed buff gets applied that's supposed to last for a minute. Your speed buff goes in, sets the faster speed, the animation suddenly starts playing faster, then when the animation is finished, the object that was waiting to reset the speed goes back in and sets the speed to 1, leaving the animation playing at the default speed when it's supposed to be faster.

These kinds of problems will always be a risk, but in my specific case I split the speed at which an animation plays out into three places. First of all, an animation has a frame rate, which is meant to never change. We do most of our animating at 12 fps (on twos, I think is what you call it in the traditional animation world? idk, not a 2d animator), and each animation object keeps track of its frame delta (1 / frame rate) so that the controller can progress through the frames at the right speed.

However, we don't submit the animation to the controller in its unaltered form. Instead, we have a data structure called a PlayableAnimation. This contains the animation itself, but it also has the speed at which the animation should be played, as well as some other useful info that might change between two instances of the same animation. A controller maintains a stack of playable animations and can look at the individual speed of each one as it progresses through.

On top of that, there's a final speed modifier that can be submitted along with the playable animation, without changing its values. This way, if I want to play an animation at double speed for whatever reason, I don't necessarily have to set the value for the entire controller, I can just say this animation should be faster, and nothing else. Some animations have different frame rates, or are re-used with different speeds for different purposes, and I can do all that configuration without having to put all that weight on one field.

All of this sounds wildly complicated, and it kind of is, but importantly, if you're playing an animation from any other system, all you do is type in "Controller.PlayAnimation(animation)". You can also go like, "Controller.PlayAnimation(animation, speed: 1.5)" if you want it to play faster, but all of that stuff is handled completely without additional input. This is what lets me come back to the game and keep working on it when it's been months since I've touched a part of it.

Why This is Relevant Right Now

Status effects seem simple, but they kind of need to touch every other system at least a little bit, which is why I spent all that time talking about making systems. A status effect needs to be able to do things like apply damage, but it also needs to be able to play animations or sounds, and it doesn't always want to play those things on the source of the effect.

Some demos for the animations different status effects will use.

Plus, this is a roguelite, so we need to be able to add and modify status effect stuff within the upgrade system, which might mean modifying the magnitude of the effect, changing colors on animations, or tying other things into the effect when it goes off! As long as each of those systems has the cleanest possible entry/exit points, this is doable, but it's been a long battle making sure the game can keep moving forward and not get mired in constant bugfixing and complexity management.

I have a lot of cool game design thoughts on the effects themselves, but I think I'll leave that for a later week. As per usual, thanks for reading, feel free to send any questions or thoughts here or to @oneominousvalbatross, and I'll see you next week!

[lapinlunaire-games]

hello tumblr if this place ceases to be i am to be found at:

itch.io (lapinlunaire-games)

neocities (lapinlunaire-games)

the @neointeractives discord

[mccarthyacademy]

2024 has been a big year for developement. This is a passion project spear-headed by three people, but we've done a lot with our tiny team!

New UI thanks to https://www.tumblr.com/kathaeris

All characters have full, colored sprite libraries with one pose.

Prologue is fully playtested with all visuals and voices implemented.

Ch1 is in the middle of a mechanic overhaul for one of the playstyles, but the other 2 are implemented. Including a fully functional boss battle and alternate endings based on player choice.

Voicelines for Prologue and Ch1 have been recorded and turned in. (Voice editing has been put on pause to prevent missing voiceline glitches later down the road)

Draft for Ch2 is finished and sent to the editor, with programming daily life already under way.

Pathways for seven characters are in.

Our goal is to have the first 3 chapters in a playable state before releasing as a beta for further testing.

[saintatomique]

Alain Delon as Wilton lookalike

I can't imagine anyone who could play Wilton better - with all his irony, stylishness,coldness but also hidden humanity.

He is handsome but also rough internally, ambitious and unemotional but still childish, philsophical and even vulnerable behind all the trenchcoats.

He is Wilton's inspiration personified.