![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
2:33pm - Well here I go again.
I talked a lot about my Posthuman Future setting and my Adorabillians last time. I talked with my friends Alex and Kanada about them, and did some thinking on my own, and I think I have a pretty good picture of the origin and expansion of the Adorabillians into the setting.
They'll start out with humans who changed into them by choice, who then built the foundation of the Adorabillian ecology. New Adorabillians were born who had always been that way, and others joined the Adorabillians by choice later on. A big part of the draw is the happy go lucky pastoral paradise of the Adorabillian habs and culture compared to the ecclectic chaos morass that you see in the anything goes habs.
I'll still need to work on what that culture and those habs are like, but I have some good ideas. <3
Now, I'm not sure if I want to write and establish more about the Adorabillians, or work on my programming projects.
I'm still not really sure what I want to do regarding those projects; if I want to keep working on making a multiplayer game for my friends, or fall back on one of my other projects instead to try and make a living.
Mmm actually I'll take a few minutes to check the job boards now that I'm thinking of it.
2:44pm - Nothin' notable.
Alright so here's a thought. I love my friends and I want to make a game to play with them, but that's not the sort of game I'm into, really. I mean, I like to play Borderlands or Warframe or Path of Exile or whatever, but those aren't the kind of games I want to MAKE. I might have had a good idea for something to play with my friends, but that's not where my passion lies. So maybe I should fall back to a previous project...
That said, I don't think I was far enough in my previous projects to stay stuck in Unity. Godot seems pretty great and doesn't have the requirements that Unity does, like royalties or buying a license for larger games. It's FLOSS after all.
So I'm going to stay on with Godot for now, but that still begs the question what am I going to do? Before, with Unity, I was noodling around with AI projects, just trying to figure out how to make a cool AI character system. Maybe I should go back to that?
I'm not sure what I was doing before. I mean, I wasn't sure when I was doing it, so how could I be sure now? So there's that.
I think the general idea was to make a colony sim where the player was an active participant, and the NPCs were interesting people to interact with. So I was trying to make an AI that would be interesting to interact with, while also being robust and able to plan their own schedule both short and long term.
Some of the most impressive NPC systems I've seen were scheduled, but they were always predesigned by the developers, so I wanted to make it more robust. Still, I'm on my own, so I'm not sure what to do that would be worthwhile and reasonable.
I want to make my own "Dwarf Fortress". Not a clone but something similar enough that is similar and more my style. Dwarf Fortress is already very 'my style' even though I only play it rarely anymore. There are similar games as well, some I haven't tried but want to, like Rimworld. Then there are older sims I like, like Pirates! and Startopia. I could also model my game after those. I've always said I wanted to see Sid Meier's Space Pirates! and why not Relee Squirrel's Space Pirates! huh?
Well I know the answer to that is all my problems with hard scifi and space games... XD
I love the space game genre but it's so unrealistic. The free traders buying and selling resources in bulk; it's more likely going to be like the modern Trucking and Shipping industries than the old merchant empires, or the age of pirates in the Caribbean.
Not to mention, most space habs and planets, once established, are going to be pretty self-sufficient.
Still, I suppose on the fringes of civilized space things might be different, where new habs and planetoids and things are being settled. Maybe in a newly settled solar system? But then, they probably would only have one colony ship settling the whole thing, so they'd have a centralized government supply system in place right? Ahh I don't know...
That's part of why I like fantasy, you can make up your own rules for shit. I've thought about doing the 'Space Game' as a fantasy series, like Spelljammer or something. But it never gels right in my head.
Then again there's always Space Rangers 2... Man that game was weird, but similar to what I want to do as well.
But now I'm waffling on the colony sim and stretching into the pirate sim/space sim ideas.
To be fair, in my heart I want to do them all. I even would love to do them as a single supergame.
I've thought about MUDs and MMOs too. An MMO is really not sensible for me, since I'd need to host servers and build an account system and all that jazz. Even a MUD would need that stuff and it doesn't suit me. So it's easy to discount that project... or it should be. LOL
So what about the Colony Sim and the Pirate Sim and the Space Sim?
I'm just not sure. I could even get away with not implementing a super detailed NPC system for those games, but isn't that what I want to do in the first place? Isn't that the whole point for me? I don't really know anymore. I have real friends now so I don't feel as much of a need to make artificial friends or pets. Still, I have thought about making a kind of pet sim, too.
There's actually a lot of competition in the Space Game market, with games like Evochron and the X series covering a lot of the territory I'd like to see more of. But, only the most recent X games have featured cockpits and walking in stations, which are also essential to me. Though, to be fair, I'd be satisfied with a Freelancer style station visit, where you're just pictured standing in a station in a 3D model, rather than free wandering. Just something to show I'm not personally a spaceship, but a person who can enter stations and interact with other people.
So it's probably not a good idea to invade the Space Game genre directly, too much competition. Still, there's nothing like Infinite Space either, except Infinite Space, so something like that with a small capital ship or flotilla would be nice as well.
Ehh...
I still like the idea of colony simulations. Games like Dwarf Fortress, Prison Architect, Startopia and Banished are right up my alley, especially for long play sessions. So I should really try to make one of those, right?
But that brings me back to the advanced NPC problem, and the living in the simulation issue I was considering.
It might be interesting to combine this with what I was talking about earlier, and make an Adorabillian Hab Simulator, where you manage the Adorabillian ecology and keep your cutesy critters happy. XD
Nah, the Adorabillians are too close to my heart I think. I'll keep them to my stories for now.
What else...
3:38pm - I wonder if I should be trying to make one game for the rest of my life, or making multiple small games with a complete feature set? It's a tough call. :/
3:54pm - I've been trying to figure out what to do for about an hour and a half now, and I still don't know. I'm going to play a game for a while and think some more after.
12:34am - Well, I didn't play a game for very long before switching over to thinking. Then I switched to thinking in bed. Then I switched to being asleep for the rest of the afternoon. Alas.
I'll end this work post here and try again later.
I talked a lot about my Posthuman Future setting and my Adorabillians last time. I talked with my friends Alex and Kanada about them, and did some thinking on my own, and I think I have a pretty good picture of the origin and expansion of the Adorabillians into the setting.
They'll start out with humans who changed into them by choice, who then built the foundation of the Adorabillian ecology. New Adorabillians were born who had always been that way, and others joined the Adorabillians by choice later on. A big part of the draw is the happy go lucky pastoral paradise of the Adorabillian habs and culture compared to the ecclectic chaos morass that you see in the anything goes habs.
I'll still need to work on what that culture and those habs are like, but I have some good ideas. <3
Now, I'm not sure if I want to write and establish more about the Adorabillians, or work on my programming projects.
I'm still not really sure what I want to do regarding those projects; if I want to keep working on making a multiplayer game for my friends, or fall back on one of my other projects instead to try and make a living.
Mmm actually I'll take a few minutes to check the job boards now that I'm thinking of it.
2:44pm - Nothin' notable.
Alright so here's a thought. I love my friends and I want to make a game to play with them, but that's not the sort of game I'm into, really. I mean, I like to play Borderlands or Warframe or Path of Exile or whatever, but those aren't the kind of games I want to MAKE. I might have had a good idea for something to play with my friends, but that's not where my passion lies. So maybe I should fall back to a previous project...
That said, I don't think I was far enough in my previous projects to stay stuck in Unity. Godot seems pretty great and doesn't have the requirements that Unity does, like royalties or buying a license for larger games. It's FLOSS after all.
So I'm going to stay on with Godot for now, but that still begs the question what am I going to do? Before, with Unity, I was noodling around with AI projects, just trying to figure out how to make a cool AI character system. Maybe I should go back to that?
I'm not sure what I was doing before. I mean, I wasn't sure when I was doing it, so how could I be sure now? So there's that.
I think the general idea was to make a colony sim where the player was an active participant, and the NPCs were interesting people to interact with. So I was trying to make an AI that would be interesting to interact with, while also being robust and able to plan their own schedule both short and long term.
Some of the most impressive NPC systems I've seen were scheduled, but they were always predesigned by the developers, so I wanted to make it more robust. Still, I'm on my own, so I'm not sure what to do that would be worthwhile and reasonable.
I want to make my own "Dwarf Fortress". Not a clone but something similar enough that is similar and more my style. Dwarf Fortress is already very 'my style' even though I only play it rarely anymore. There are similar games as well, some I haven't tried but want to, like Rimworld. Then there are older sims I like, like Pirates! and Startopia. I could also model my game after those. I've always said I wanted to see Sid Meier's Space Pirates! and why not Relee Squirrel's Space Pirates! huh?
Well I know the answer to that is all my problems with hard scifi and space games... XD
I love the space game genre but it's so unrealistic. The free traders buying and selling resources in bulk; it's more likely going to be like the modern Trucking and Shipping industries than the old merchant empires, or the age of pirates in the Caribbean.
Not to mention, most space habs and planets, once established, are going to be pretty self-sufficient.
Still, I suppose on the fringes of civilized space things might be different, where new habs and planetoids and things are being settled. Maybe in a newly settled solar system? But then, they probably would only have one colony ship settling the whole thing, so they'd have a centralized government supply system in place right? Ahh I don't know...
That's part of why I like fantasy, you can make up your own rules for shit. I've thought about doing the 'Space Game' as a fantasy series, like Spelljammer or something. But it never gels right in my head.
Then again there's always Space Rangers 2... Man that game was weird, but similar to what I want to do as well.
But now I'm waffling on the colony sim and stretching into the pirate sim/space sim ideas.
To be fair, in my heart I want to do them all. I even would love to do them as a single supergame.
I've thought about MUDs and MMOs too. An MMO is really not sensible for me, since I'd need to host servers and build an account system and all that jazz. Even a MUD would need that stuff and it doesn't suit me. So it's easy to discount that project... or it should be. LOL
So what about the Colony Sim and the Pirate Sim and the Space Sim?
I'm just not sure. I could even get away with not implementing a super detailed NPC system for those games, but isn't that what I want to do in the first place? Isn't that the whole point for me? I don't really know anymore. I have real friends now so I don't feel as much of a need to make artificial friends or pets. Still, I have thought about making a kind of pet sim, too.
There's actually a lot of competition in the Space Game market, with games like Evochron and the X series covering a lot of the territory I'd like to see more of. But, only the most recent X games have featured cockpits and walking in stations, which are also essential to me. Though, to be fair, I'd be satisfied with a Freelancer style station visit, where you're just pictured standing in a station in a 3D model, rather than free wandering. Just something to show I'm not personally a spaceship, but a person who can enter stations and interact with other people.
So it's probably not a good idea to invade the Space Game genre directly, too much competition. Still, there's nothing like Infinite Space either, except Infinite Space, so something like that with a small capital ship or flotilla would be nice as well.
Ehh...
I still like the idea of colony simulations. Games like Dwarf Fortress, Prison Architect, Startopia and Banished are right up my alley, especially for long play sessions. So I should really try to make one of those, right?
But that brings me back to the advanced NPC problem, and the living in the simulation issue I was considering.
It might be interesting to combine this with what I was talking about earlier, and make an Adorabillian Hab Simulator, where you manage the Adorabillian ecology and keep your cutesy critters happy. XD
Nah, the Adorabillians are too close to my heart I think. I'll keep them to my stories for now.
What else...
3:38pm - I wonder if I should be trying to make one game for the rest of my life, or making multiple small games with a complete feature set? It's a tough call. :/
3:54pm - I've been trying to figure out what to do for about an hour and a half now, and I still don't know. I'm going to play a game for a while and think some more after.
12:34am - Well, I didn't play a game for very long before switching over to thinking. Then I switched to thinking in bed. Then I switched to being asleep for the rest of the afternoon. Alas.
I'll end this work post here and try again later.
