Promiseland

[Fetian]

Poking at SnowRPG again

[Fetian]

My eye is bothering me (I think it's allergies) and I would not be surprised if I woke up with it inflamed again

[Fetian]

Desk is cleared off! A lot of the stuff has just been moved somewhere else to become a future problem, but the desk is usable and that's what matters right now. Desktop PC has also been re-set up and I'm back to moving all the stuff on it that I want to keep to somewhere else so I can format the drive and get a more modern OS on it. I'd run out of steam on doing that because the original plan was to get a more modern windows on it to use as a gaming PC but, uh, the state of windows right now is, bad. And most games run on linux now anyway, so. Like the main deterrent was actually that I wanted Premiere on there so I could get back to video editing but again, windows. And maybe there's finally a video editor for linux that will work fine for my purposes, who knows. It's just annoying to possibly lose all the editing I've already done on the many hours of footage I was going through

Did run into a small snag because there's stuff on here that I don't want on dropbox, actually, but that I do want to keep, so I needed to find something to put them on. Finally rummaged up an old drive that should work, hopefully, we will see. So now I'm compressing those files into a zip drive to put on that and then I will resume going through everything on the computer and uploading shit to dropbox

 
Meanwhile! Poking at SnowRPG stuff. I had written this option off early on for reasons that are honestly still relevant, but fuck it. I'm not going to get into the weeds about all of this, there is an old kind of online, multi-user text-adventure game called a MUD (among other things, depending on how granular you want to get about the kind of game in question) and I will be going this route with SnowRPG. Plan is to pipe it through a browser GUI to enable illustrations &c, but the bare bones is that it will be a text-adventure game set in Snowtown with locations you can navigate to and NPCs you can talk to and all that. So plan there is to learn Evennia (sort of a template for making MUDs) and python, and then to convert all of my notes for the game out of Choose Your Own Adventure gameplay into Text Adventure gameplay (which I was already considering while I was debating making it in Inform)

I think by and large this maintains elements that I wanted to keep and compromises on things that I'd be compromising on anyway with basically any other method. So we'll see where this goes

[Fetian]

So yeah, after getting the desk set up, I spent the day migrating files from the PC to dropbox, reading Evennia documentation, and trying out online python courses in an attempt to find one that'll work for me. ash and I watched a Worst Cooks while we ate dinner, and then he went to bed and I came back into my room to continue doing research. I'm trying to conceptualise what I want the game to end up looking like, because I'm neither married to the card-based UI from storynexus nor to the pure text-based interface of old-school MUDs. I may mock up some potential layouts tomorrow, see if anything grabs me. Once I set myself some limitations, I can start thinking about how the game will actually work (combat? random events? dialogue trees? ???)

For now I will listen to a podcast and go sleeps

[Fetian]

Like this is what achaea (a MUD) looks like these days:

[Sorcyress]

While I've bought a couple of introductory ballet manuals (I figure what I'm looking for will be something taught early and emphasised) I also started looking for ballet-inspired at-home exercise videos because I also figure that a. there will be a market for that kind of thing and b. what I'm looking for is probably the kind of thing that would be easy to teach to rank beginners. I've downloaded a few and today tried out one of them, unfortunately while I am intrigued by it and it is professing to be marketed to people with no experience in ballet, it does have a lot of 'move into a plie position' kind of terminology. There are people on-screen demonstrating, of course, but it does feel like it just jumps you immediately into things like you know what they're talking about

But I did half an hour of that today and we'll see if it helps or if it makes my joints feel more fucky

Intrigued by this for obvious reasons! It's a good logic, I think. I've never been able to consistently just, like, do the Highland warmups every day which is a shame, because that would probably go a long way towards making my body work optimally.

[Fetian]

Holy shit Sideways upload?????

[Fetian]

Screenshot 2026-01-13 at 11-34-23 (716) Sideways - YouTube.png

[Fetian]

I am considering keeping the card-based mechanics, with the player having a "hand" they can store "cards" in (up to a maximum), and a "draw" action they can take in a given time period.

So there's the world the PC is existing in, and actions they can always take in that world (given that the thing to perform the action on is there), and then extra, special actions they can take based on the "cards" in their hand (representing rarer opportunities a player can act on)

So eg, your character is in Ripton. TIMPS is there, and so long as it's open for business, you can always go in there and buy a pie. But in that area you can also draw cards that will give you access to actions like interacting with an NPC who happens to be on the street at that time, or taking advantage of a sale at a different store, or etc. I think I like this concept but I'm a little worried it is a little too like StoryNexus and therefore Fallen London, I might need to think if I can put a different skeuomorph on it

(not that Failbetter has a monopoly on card-based RPGs, I just would like to avoid drawing comparison if I can)

For combat, I'm thinking of developing a rock-paper-scissors mechanic that uses your stats to determine how strong your rocks, papers, and scissors are. So if you're up against someone who throws whatever the equivalent of 'rock' is going to be, and you throw scissors, you can still win if your scissors are a high enough level, though the rock will have advantage. I do plan on letting players fight each other, but I do want people who aren't interested in PVP to be able to just ignore it so I need to think of ways to flag players as PVP-enabled and -disabled. Obvious options are to give players an item to equip that signals they're open to combat, or to limit PVP combat to specific areas that people who don't want to engage with that element can then just avoid. Not sure how I'll go about it, we'll see

[Fetian]

Sometimes you really do just need to walk away from a project for 13 years