Promiseland

[Fetian]

Consciously took this week off to try to recover some from the everything, so instead of doing any programming/evennia study I have been learning ventriloquism and puppet-making. Today though I have cracked open my todo list and am going to try to be productive

Tuesday was the usual Palworld with Dave, we are working on breeding me a fancy Omascule and then probably some other boys on my regular team. Reject Omascule are getting fed to each other to bring their star level up. But that was basically all of playtime this week was standing around the breeding pen and moving eggs back and forth

Yesterday was the now-usual Valheim with Jake, we were very productive and have entered the bronze age. I also hung fairy lights up all over my house

Did I mention last weekend that Lee and I watched the first two (Japanese (dubbed)) Digimon movies? It was interesting comparing them to how they ended up in the American Digimon Movie, though those two didn't have a whole lot of changes to them. The Our War Game segment in that was always my favourite, to be honest when I was a kid I used to watch the VHS of the movie but just stop after that segment and not bother with the rest of the movie.

We also started on the second series on Tuesday and it... is. As a kid I was annoyed with it for being different from the first series and like, very intentionally sidelining all of the characters I'd gotten used to and really liked (and keeping the two characters that I did not like, which felt like an extra slap to the face), but as an adult I'm realising that another reason it annoys me so much is that it's not different enough. It's just so obviously 'This is the new Tai! This is the new Biyomon! These are the new Black Gears! Buy the merch!', and while there's a lot of potential there for a storyline about the new guard coming along and the old guard having to give up their station, ideally gracefully letting times change and moving on but maybe they resent these children showing up and taking over -- that's a more adult story that I don't think this series either intended to or is going to tell. But I don't remember it super great

I do remember a lot of the Digimon Emperor's storyline and that I am looking forward to watching with Lee

Alright, unfortunately the timer program I've been using on my computer is broken so I have to try to troubleshoot that or find an alternative before I can be productive, so I'm going to go do that

[Fetian]

Ugggghhhhhh CEO of the VPN I use turns out to be funding fascists

I just renewed, too

Unfortunately it is time to renew again and I do not have the spoons to set up an alternative right now, so they're getting another month of money from me

[Fetian]

Here's a fiction hot-take for you: If a character believes they have committed a murder, not killed someone by accident but 100% believes they've murdered someone and then it turns out that someone didn't actually die for whatever reason -- I don't think the character should necessarily be held legally culpable for the crime that didn't happen but I do think they're still guilty of it

[Fetian]

Today I have been learning evennia/python for twenty minutes and then watching youtube and playing Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines for twenty minutes, rinse and repeat. I beat VTMB for the first time a couple days ago, took me about 40 hours, I think? I don't think I've ever gotten past Chinatown before.

That run was a stealth-focused camarilla-ambivalent nosferatu which got real annoying near the endgame where combat started to become super mandatory -- I only cheated A Lot. I'm playing an unarmed-focused anarch gangrel now to get a breather from that, and then the plan after that is to do something social-focused. This game is fascinating on so many levels, development-wise, and it's very inspiring for SnowRPG stuff, both in a sense of 'I should figure out a way to do that in my game' and 'I need to avoid falling into that trap'. Famously, VTMB ran out of development time and got released kind of unfinished. It is nonetheless like, the pinnacle of immersive sims. I wish it was released now with steam workshop functionality so people could upload their own missions and campaigns to run in the game's engine, but alas it was released in like 2004 instead

I do want to get around to playing the sequel one of these days, but 'spensive. I've heard it's not a good Bloodlines game but it is a good Vampire: The Masquerade game, so I'm very interested in seeing how that falls out. It's also not an RPG, unfortunately, leaning much more action like basically every ""RPG"" released since 2008 (I am looking at you, Bethesda)

[Fetian]

The beginning of the game has a lot of sleath-focused missions that my gangrel is very bad at, but you can fail at the stealth part of those and still complete the mission, LaCroix just gets mad at you for it. But that's on him for sending a hot-headed brawler out on recon, so.

Meanwhile when you fail the combat missions you just die

[Fetian]

LaCroix is just trying to get you killed, anyway

[Fetian]

Check me out, going to bed before 4 AM

[Fetian]

Went to bed with a small migraine and woke up with a big migraine

[Fetian]

Okay, so, you take a job. You go to $JobLocation, and engage in job. What then?

Option 1: Job is no longer available at $JobLocation, because you have it. When you're at $JobLocation, everyone else at $JobLocation can see you doing job. If someone wants a job, they have to find one available at a different $JobLocation.

I do honestly kind of like the idea of jobs being a limited resource. Make sure there's enough on the map so people aren't getting cutthroat about them. It'll spread people around the map because they'll have to travel further out to find available jobs and attend those jobs. Say if you don't perform a shift within a certain time period, you get fired and the job frees up for other people. Jobs inherently have promotion mechanics, which can also free up the slot as people advance out of them. There's a potential social aspect where you can say to your friend 'Hey, I'm working at $JobLocation, want to come hang out?' and there's a specific place they can go to sit down and hang out while you work.

Cons: This precludes unique jobs, like working the Pie Shop, because there's only one Pie Shop. While I'd be okay with six people fighting over five indistinguishable Bouncer occupation slots, everyone trying to advance the Pie Shop questline all fighting over their turn to work at the Pie Shop is not a great user experience.

Option 2: $JobLocation is an instance unique to you. You show up to work, the game spins off an instance, and then someone else can show up to work the same job and the game spins off an instance for them. On its face this precludes all social aspects of working, but there could be a way for non-working players to be shuffled into an instance with a working player -- however I don't see an easy way to make sure a player ends up in a specific instance with a specific other player, except maybe with some kind of invitation system. That all starts sounding really complicated, though.

Option 3: People working at $JobLocation are spun off into instances so they can't see or hear each other, but can still see and hear non-employees who exist in the location -- this gets weird quick when Player A is talking to Employee B who Employee C can't see or hear

Option 4: Let multiple people work the jobs at once. This works fine for, say, a cafe (unless we've got 20 people all working at once), but a Bouncer should probably be the only Bouncer Bouncing a given shift.

I'm also running into some thoughts about world state in general -- for example the Pie Shop questline will ultimately end with the player character deciding whether to let Katters and Zebra continue doing what they're doing, or stop them. Players who stop them will of course experience a world without TIMPS in it anymore, but players who haven't, either because they haven't made that choice or because they haven't gotten to that point in the quest, won't. And that starts to get weird. Like it's mechanically do-able, it just, starts to strain disbelief when another player is talking about things you can't see. I know that's inherently an issue with multiplayer games, but I do think games tend to deal with it by limiting how much effect the players can have on the world

[Fetian]

Woke up feeling not great with an irritated throat, but haven't felt terrible enough to do anything about it. I was supposed to game with Jake tonight but let him know I might not be able to, except that I ultimately decided I could and meanwhile Jake had had a migraine all day and decided he couldn't. So we rainchecked this week

Spent the day doing more of 20 minutes python/evennia//youtube/vtmb. I'm close to beating vtmb again with my brawler, and I haven't cheated at all except for the werewolf sequence. Genuinely fuck that sequence, though, and fuck all the fans too blinded by sentimentality to admit it sucks

I've refined the Minimum Viable Prototype some more, now I just need to figure out how to implement it. Might try to get started on that tomorrow, see how it goes and where my weakest points still are