ELSEWHERE

Unsurprisingly I am Very tired so I'm going to bed a little bit early

Added Oz's prescriptions to my budget (and removed some patreons) and there is not a whole lot left over anymore. I also need to find enough money in my accounts somewhere to be able to order a refill of the appetite stimulant. I held on to a little cash as just-in-case money, I'll have to walk it to the ATM when it's not too hot

Haven't been getting enough sleep for the past bit, and that plus all the stress has my memory and brain-in-general not working so great. Oz however seems to be doing really well, she takes the transdermal medications like a champ and her eating is good. Her poops are still bad, which is concerning but really strongly points toward it being the food she's eating that's causing it, IMO, and I also suspect the vet will recommend a prescription food for her kidney disease.

Still haven't heard back about the ultrasound, but I did get a call yesterday about her upcoming appointment -- there's been a change in schedule so she has to see a different vet if we want to keep her appointment time, and that time is the only one we can make work, so. Very annoying, we were putting a lot of effort into trying to see specifically that vet

I was also annoyed that they hadn't seemed to have approved the medication refills I'd already sent in, but when I checked earlier they were approved and 'being filled', so the site just didn't bother to keep me updated I guess.

 
On Tuesday, Dave and I played our first week of the big new Palworld update! We'd both mucked around with it a bit solo so it wasn't totally new stuff for us, but it was fun and for the most part I'm enjoying the changes. On Wednesday, Jake and I played Valheim which was new to me -- it's a survival/crafting game where you're a nordic viking who has been banished to purgatory or something? And have to prove yourself worthy of moving on to Valhalla? Something like that, the plot is not exactly grabbing me but the gameplay is fun. We're going to play again next Thursday, so I'm not making a regular thing of games-with-friends two nights in a row, but this week that was unavoidable because yesterday Erika, Dave, and I played Ale & Tales Tavern! That one is a restaurant-simulator where you are running a pseudo-medieval tavern. It is pretty janky and the progression and gameplay loop are extremely weird (you don't unlock weapons until your tavern is level 14, there's no like, enforced opening or closing times though there is a day/night cycle, there seem to be a bunch of ingredients that you have to just go out and fight wildlife to get and getting enough to be worth putting that food on your menu is difficult and tedious; also the game doesn't alter itself in any way when there's more than one person playing, which is. Odd). It has unbelievably annoying dialogue and voice acting, I suspect the script was either translated by or punched up by AI and the actors are all fiverr pulls. All that said it was really fun playing with them and I also played it solo all night

 
My goal today is to work on a Minimal Viable Prototype/Vertical Slice for SnowRPG. The intro quest was more or less designed for this, so I'm going to try to implement that as far as I'm able. This'll give me an idea of what I need to learn more about and what will need modifying to work in the new engine/environment/genre. Assuming I can get my brain working, anyway

Alright, these need to be implemented to get the Intro Quest working

 
(I cannot be fucked to make a list in bbcode right now so we're doing a screenshot)

An issue is that the Intro Quest should introduce Opportunity Cards but the thing they were doing in the StoryNexus version (talking to NPCs) doesn't make sense to transfer unaltered into a format where NPCs can just be walking around and you can talk to them. I will need to think of some other way to introduce Opportunities into the quest, because it's a. very important for those to be part of the MVP if they're going to continue to be part of the game (and I'd really like them to be!) and b. important for the Intro Quest to introduce them as a mechanic

Character Uncreation: The StoryNexus Intro Quest has the ability to just end the game right when it starts, both because I'm hilarious and because it introduces players to the idea that it's possible to make decisions that will "kill" your character off, permanently, and what those choices look like so they're not making those decisions blind. This raises an important question: is it possible to make a decision that will permanently "kill" your character in SnowMUD¹ and what does that look like in this format.

Jobs I am still floundering on how I want to implement them, but for this MVP I can do a bare-bones 'Go to location, acquire job, perform "job" action, get paid' system. Regardless of what the mechanics look like in the end, those parts of it do need to exist.

Most of this is very straightforward and should be easy enough to just do in evennia without much tinkering. A lot of what's going to make SnowRPG distinct is going to be the visuals, I think, which are a problem for future me.

¹SlushRPG

For jobs I'm leaning toward players parking their character in $JobLocation and earning money for as long as they stay there, up to a max amount per in-game day. While there they can draw Opportunity Cards that are specific to their job, so there is a thing to do but largely this is a chance to step away from the game for a bit, or switch to a different character, or whatever not-actively-gaming activity.

I'm also leaning toward an in-game day being 6 real-hours long, so an hour would be 15 minutes. Idle (or log out) for 2 hours to earn an 8-hour shift's worth of pay

May as well explain Opportunity Card details: There's a "deck" of cards representing events that can happen to the player character, that can be drawn into the player's "hand" if they meet the requirements for that event. For example, a card can have the requirement 'be at work-location', and if the player is at that location and they have room in their hand, when they click the 'draw' button then that card can appear. If a player has a location-specific card in their hand and then leaves the location, that card stays in the hand but becomes unplayable until they return to the location (or similar for cards with other requirements that the player can stop meeting). You can discard cards, but only the entire hand at a time. The number of cards you can draw is limited by an action pool that refills over time.

Maybe negative events can't be discarded, so they stick in your hand until played or something else knocks them out of your hand (eg a 'Get blackout drunk' event could reset your hand, removing the 'Get hit by a car' event that you don't want to play but can't discard)

I do still want to try to find a different mechanical metaphor than cards/decks/hands but haven't been able to think of one

That does give me a place to put Opportunity Cards for the Minimum Viable Prototype, but I do still need to find a way to get them into the Intro Quest to introduce their mechanics to players as early as possible

This is clunky, but Bus Boy and Exiting the Terminal could both be Opportunity Cards, forcing the player to interact with the mechanic before they can leave, but this might inadvertently teach the player a wrong assumption about navigation being part of the cards stuff

One Of Those Nights

I have had 16 Military Wives stuck in my head for days, to the extent that it was also stuck in my head in my dream last night

Oz threw up this morning, it was the pattern again of malaise the preceding day. Due to how long it's taken the medication to be approved, filled, and shipped, she's been off the famotidine for a bit, so plausible it was helping prevent this

She's also going to end up off the appetite stimulant for a bit, but I did make it to the ATM today and just ordered some for her.

She is not ending up off the thyroid medication because Lee kindly got a refill of that through her previous prescription with the VCA and Chewy and that arrived in like two days.