On-Day Four: Satisfied with Indieweb, Publ, and doing work on Dommy Monsters once again!
10:53am - I'm at the library again. It's my fourth "On-day" and so far this has been working out. I've gotten work done each on-day on things I've been wanting to do and procrastinating on or otherwise not doing. Also, on my off-days I am more comfortable having fun, able to say "I worked yesterday, this is a day to have fun and relax." This also lets me focus more on how I'm having fun and what I'm doing. There's things I want to do with my life in a 'work' sense for these on-days, but there are also many things I want to do recreationally that I haven't. So far I'm still mostly playing ARK: Survival Evolved, and I'm having a ton of fun with it, but I think I'll also be able to play short games, and watch anime again, and so on.
Last time, I was looking into what Indieweb is from their website. I hadn't finished by the time I got hungry and had to go home early, and I fell asleep soon after I ate, without making much progress. So, I'm going to start by looking at the pages I still have open. I also brought snacks with me today.
11:06am - I think I'm satisfied with my understanding of indieweb now. It's good! I don't know how much I'll do with it though, since while I do have a website I barely do anything with it. I am considering setting up another blog, but I'm not sure how much work I want to put into it yet.
11:16am - Publ looks fine, though it also looks like more work. It might be worthwhile if I'm taking things seriously, but so far I'm not. So, now I know about that.
11:20am - I'm working on figuring out what to do next, now.
Last night as I was going to sleep, I wrote this reminder.
"I keep returning to a particular idea about making sort-of archetypal, open source games, with firm standards but made with the idea of modding. Specifically made to have the art assets replaced, but with standards built around that idea. That means the assets should be easy to make interact with eachother properly.
The idea is to focus on making game systems that are refined and polished, and letting the users or other devs add their own art to make it look how they want.
I want to dive into that idea and explore it, if I have time."
That's one thing I could do, is dive into that.
Another option would be doing some work on Dommy Monsters, since this is the fourth on-day and I haven't done any gamedev yet.
Let's go over my goals again.
- I want to develop and publish video games and simulations.
There's a lot more to it than that, not just any game will do, but let's not say too much.
At present I'm making Dommy Monsters Are Fighting Eachother To Own You, which is a surreal and kinky adult-oriented life-simulation game.
Given how seldom I've worked on it, I don't know if I can actually achieve making it, but I don't think the amount of work I've done in the past is the limit of my capability. This day-on, day-off schedule experiment has been making good success on other things, and I hope it will also help my gamedev work.
Like many game developers, I have more ideas than I have time and other resources to create. I mentioned the idea of the archtypal games, and I'd like to talk about that and other game design and development ideas. It's important not to get too carried away though, since even talking or writing, like I am right now, takes time and resources.
- I want to study and contribute to the development of artificial intelligence, specifically for the goal of creating artificial people.
I did some of this recently, and I've learned a thing or two about how machine learning works. It's not really far off from how I imagined it, but I guess I know some jargon now? I'd like to go over more of what I was looking at the other day, but I think not today.
- I want to enable and achieve a peaceful social revolution to make the world a fair and just place, or at least start it on a path towards being that.
The world isn't fair, and it could be a lot more fair. Some folks say that if it really could, we would have already done it, which is weirdly defeatist. Plus, who's to say we're not currently in the process of doing it, and my acts are part of that? The world has changed completely too many times in the last two centuries to really know what's going to happen next, or to assume that people and society will act the same going forward as they did before the industrial revolution. Things are getting better in measurable ways all over, even though a lot of our systems are falling apart.
I believe there are things I can do to help the whole world, and not just my friends and family or my local community. At the very least, in helping them I might be able to help others. I have been struggling to find others who think like me, and I haven't been able to find people who will discuss my more controversial ideas and can also provide useful feedback. Most folks are either unable to comprehend the ideas due to it being so far out of their fields of interest or knowledge, or it offends them on some moral, ethical, or traditional level, that doesn't match my own way of looking at things. When the latter happens, they can't explain why they think I'm wrong, they just insist I am. Some of these things are subjective, so we can both be right and wrong at the same time, but I do find it frustrating when people can't explain why they believe what they believe, and still insist it's the best. I think I can explain what I believe, and if I find something I can't, I get introspective on it. Others I've spoken with don't seem to be that way.
I'm still hoping to find a group where I can talk and collaborate with others, but so far no luck. I'm worried I'll have to make one myself. That'd be a lot of work, and even I am not immune to "Imposter Syndrome". I don't know if people would follow me if I tried to lead, even if all I was trying to do was get people to join a community and talk about things.
I think my next step towards that life-goal is to search specifically for forums, discords, and other web-communities based around those ideas. I think when I searched before, I got the wrong results due to looking too generally.
For now, I don't think I'm going to do that.
- I want to contribute to my local community more.
I don't know what I actually want to do in my local community, at this point. I mentioned before things like service clubs. Really, there's a small 'zoo' of sorts for farm animals here. We usually just call it the Animal Farm. It's not a petting zoo, you're not supposed to pet the animals or even feed them anymore. It's operated by the Kiwanis club. Well, one of them anyways. So that's why I was interested in that.
Otherwise I think a lot of my "Help my local community" goal overlaps with the social revolution goal. I want to help make the world more fair. I'm not sure where to start, so figuring that out would be a good next step.
11:47am - A problem has occured. I'm at the library, but it's actually pretty popular today. Someone in here has a scent or fragrance. It may be purfume, though it also smells a little bit like fancy cigars? It's not particularly strong but it's specifically hitting something that is making me very uncomfortable. I think I'm going to have to pack up and work somewhere else. Maybe Tim Horton's?
I'm going to do that now, so I'll keep this open in a tab.
12:12pm - My start time was weird, but it looks like I've been going over an hour now. I'm at Tim Horton's, now. Got a bit of food and a big tea, too. Feeling oddly tired, but not enough to stop me.
I think I'm going to do gamedev stuff now. I hem and haw, but I've already done things and made progress on everything else.
There's three gamedev type tasks I could do right now. I need to do more work on my Dommy Monsters game design doc. I want to investigate what's been happening with Vircadia. I want to talk about that idea for archetypal open-source games.
I think the first is the best plan, since I keep mentioning it in sideways ways, and it's the thing I most want to do, have most been trying to force myself to do and not succeeding, and have been struggling with the most in general.
That said, I'm not entirely up for it yet! I'm going to do a bit of professional development on YouTube, while eating this sandwich, and see if that helps whatever is up with my body right now.
12:36pm - I ended up not looking at things on YouTube, but looked at a website I had open in a tab instead, and followed its things. The website is https://lazerwalker.com/ and I've had it in a list of things to look at since Roguelike Celebration. They're part of the team that made the fancy mud-like online convention space and I was at that con and thought they were neat, so I opened their page in a tab, and eventually it was waiting in that tab so long I saved the url so I wouldn't have so many tabs open, and I still wanted to look into it. Actually there were two of them I hadn't gone through yet, maybe I'll also do the other one. Professional development!
12:41pm - The other one is this site https://www.nathansavant.com/ and the first thing he says on there is this:
"I am a Narrative Systems Designer specializing in memorable quests, living worlds, and rich characters.
I design and code narrative systems which fill virtual spaces with entertaining NPCs and exciting gameplay interactions. I help build moment-to-moment gameplay with storytelling in mind so that your player walks away with a deeper understanding of your game's world."
That is really cool. It's important work but it's also often considered somehow lesser in the social heirarchy of game developers. Describing it that way really drives home how cool it really is.
1:04pm - I'm definately having trouble focusing now. I think I thought I was checking on professionals I follow, or something like that, but I was actually just dicking around on Discord and Mastodon for a bit. ^.^;;
1:14pm - It took a bit, but I've managed to circle back to wanting to work on the Dommy Monsters Design Doc! ^.^
I do still have these blog entries open so I'll save the urls here for later. I've been checking my previous on-day posts to see what I did and wanted to do, so they'll be useful reminders.
https://www.nathansavant.com/post/rewarding-nonviolence
https://www.nathansavant.com/post/psychological-progression
I also added a few YouTube videos to my watch later list, because I do actually watch professional development type videos even when I'm not 'working'. A lot of them I can watch while playing a game on my other monitor.
So, now on with the design doc.
1:17pm - This was linked from one of the websites I'm using for Game Design Document advice. Don't want it in an open tab, so I'm putting it here for later: https://gamedesignskills.com/game-design/video-game-mechanics/
1:19pm - The last time I worked on this, I was trying to come up with Core Values for the project. I wasn't able to come up with them. Partly, it's hard to put them into words. They're sorta contradictory when I put them down, due to words having multiple meanings that can cancel eachother out. IT's really hard!
Instead, I'm going to carry on with the next step. That one was more optional than the others, which are also optional. So, it was super optional, and I'm taking the skip it option.
So, after the design pillars, I have to figure out the game loops.
1:34pm - The design doc guides linked this article about game loops. https://medium.com/@davengdesign/core-loops-c98b1197e93d
While I understand the idea of game loops, that article gave some interesting and useful perspective.
The loop I had planned for my game was pretty simple. It's effectively a turn-based life sim. Each turn, you look at your current state, your options, and choose what to do from your available options. Then you see the result of your choice, putting you into a new situation to consider and react to.
The thing is, I was mostly thinking of it from a simulationist perspective. That might make it really dry, and they even cover that in the Fatal mistakes to avoid section.
In a sense, my idea for the game loop hasn't changed, because it's still something like Observe your Situation -> Choose your next Action -> Experience the Results of your Choice -> Repeat
The thing is, they point out that the player should be rewarded and feel progress from each turn of the main loop. While that might have been there, I wasn't really focused on making it be. So, I want to specifically say that each loop's results phase should have a clear progression reward of some sort. Something intending to make the player feel something, not just a results report that might provoke a response.
Since the game's core pillars are "Love of Transformation", "Exploring Inside and Out", and "Everybody Wants You", each turn of the main loop should push on these. Since observing your situation is a phase in the loop, I want to make it really clear what's going on.
With "Love of Transformation", I want to make the player engage with their changes on each turn of the loop. So, if something new hasn't changed, it should at least say or do something with one of the previous changes. Maybe on top of tracking the current form of the player, I should keep a sort of history to reference. Then the game could point out how different one thing is from another, and how the player's experience has changed. Since it's mostly a text-based game, the player won't have a mobile avatar to really feel the changes in their character's movement or perception, it all has to be described. They say "Show, don't tell" but there is a way to do that in writing where you're not telling but describing. It changes it from dictating facts to showing the experience through writing.
With the other pillars, I think I should include them in each turn of the game loop as well.
"Exploring Inside and Out" is all about exploring both the game's virtual world and possibility space, as well as the player's own mind, personality, and limits. Even if your explorations just find a lack of limits. XD
So, each turn of the game loop should also reflect that. Make it clear somehow what has been learned or discovered, or at least give the player some way to know that tangible progress has been made on exploration of the world, and possibly themselves? I don't know if I can measure that tho.
"Everybody Wants You" is the third pillar. Part of the idea is that the Monsters WANT the player. They're fighting over you! So, it should be clear in each game loop that you are wanted and desired. The monsters, their domains and minions should all demonstrate the desire and want in whatever way matches their style, and they should do it each turn of the loop. It should also be clear that while the Monster whose domain you're in wants you, there's still other Monsters trying to get you for themselves.
The loop remains "Consider" -> "Act" -> "Observe" -> "Repeat" but the parts of each phase are elaborated on.
2:09pm - I've added the Game Loops document to the folder and started filling it out. I have the Consider phase written down, and was starting to describe the Act phase, but I have just passed the three hours, I have to use the washroom, and my father said he'd have a surprise for me and my roomie around 3pm, which is in less than an hour, so it's time for me to go.
I'm glad I've made more progress! I've done so many things. I'm going to keep doing things as this continues. I wonder how long I can keep this day on, day off schedule going? Have I finally found a system that will work? 15 days a month is a lot more than 1 to 5 if I'm lucky.
Now, I'm heading out. Thank you for reading.
Last time, I was looking into what Indieweb is from their website. I hadn't finished by the time I got hungry and had to go home early, and I fell asleep soon after I ate, without making much progress. So, I'm going to start by looking at the pages I still have open. I also brought snacks with me today.
11:06am - I think I'm satisfied with my understanding of indieweb now. It's good! I don't know how much I'll do with it though, since while I do have a website I barely do anything with it. I am considering setting up another blog, but I'm not sure how much work I want to put into it yet.
11:16am - Publ looks fine, though it also looks like more work. It might be worthwhile if I'm taking things seriously, but so far I'm not. So, now I know about that.
11:20am - I'm working on figuring out what to do next, now.
Last night as I was going to sleep, I wrote this reminder.
"I keep returning to a particular idea about making sort-of archetypal, open source games, with firm standards but made with the idea of modding. Specifically made to have the art assets replaced, but with standards built around that idea. That means the assets should be easy to make interact with eachother properly.
The idea is to focus on making game systems that are refined and polished, and letting the users or other devs add their own art to make it look how they want.
I want to dive into that idea and explore it, if I have time."
That's one thing I could do, is dive into that.
Another option would be doing some work on Dommy Monsters, since this is the fourth on-day and I haven't done any gamedev yet.
Let's go over my goals again.
- I want to develop and publish video games and simulations.
There's a lot more to it than that, not just any game will do, but let's not say too much.
At present I'm making Dommy Monsters Are Fighting Eachother To Own You, which is a surreal and kinky adult-oriented life-simulation game.
Given how seldom I've worked on it, I don't know if I can actually achieve making it, but I don't think the amount of work I've done in the past is the limit of my capability. This day-on, day-off schedule experiment has been making good success on other things, and I hope it will also help my gamedev work.
Like many game developers, I have more ideas than I have time and other resources to create. I mentioned the idea of the archtypal games, and I'd like to talk about that and other game design and development ideas. It's important not to get too carried away though, since even talking or writing, like I am right now, takes time and resources.
- I want to study and contribute to the development of artificial intelligence, specifically for the goal of creating artificial people.
I did some of this recently, and I've learned a thing or two about how machine learning works. It's not really far off from how I imagined it, but I guess I know some jargon now? I'd like to go over more of what I was looking at the other day, but I think not today.
- I want to enable and achieve a peaceful social revolution to make the world a fair and just place, or at least start it on a path towards being that.
The world isn't fair, and it could be a lot more fair. Some folks say that if it really could, we would have already done it, which is weirdly defeatist. Plus, who's to say we're not currently in the process of doing it, and my acts are part of that? The world has changed completely too many times in the last two centuries to really know what's going to happen next, or to assume that people and society will act the same going forward as they did before the industrial revolution. Things are getting better in measurable ways all over, even though a lot of our systems are falling apart.
I believe there are things I can do to help the whole world, and not just my friends and family or my local community. At the very least, in helping them I might be able to help others. I have been struggling to find others who think like me, and I haven't been able to find people who will discuss my more controversial ideas and can also provide useful feedback. Most folks are either unable to comprehend the ideas due to it being so far out of their fields of interest or knowledge, or it offends them on some moral, ethical, or traditional level, that doesn't match my own way of looking at things. When the latter happens, they can't explain why they think I'm wrong, they just insist I am. Some of these things are subjective, so we can both be right and wrong at the same time, but I do find it frustrating when people can't explain why they believe what they believe, and still insist it's the best. I think I can explain what I believe, and if I find something I can't, I get introspective on it. Others I've spoken with don't seem to be that way.
I'm still hoping to find a group where I can talk and collaborate with others, but so far no luck. I'm worried I'll have to make one myself. That'd be a lot of work, and even I am not immune to "Imposter Syndrome". I don't know if people would follow me if I tried to lead, even if all I was trying to do was get people to join a community and talk about things.
I think my next step towards that life-goal is to search specifically for forums, discords, and other web-communities based around those ideas. I think when I searched before, I got the wrong results due to looking too generally.
For now, I don't think I'm going to do that.
- I want to contribute to my local community more.
I don't know what I actually want to do in my local community, at this point. I mentioned before things like service clubs. Really, there's a small 'zoo' of sorts for farm animals here. We usually just call it the Animal Farm. It's not a petting zoo, you're not supposed to pet the animals or even feed them anymore. It's operated by the Kiwanis club. Well, one of them anyways. So that's why I was interested in that.
Otherwise I think a lot of my "Help my local community" goal overlaps with the social revolution goal. I want to help make the world more fair. I'm not sure where to start, so figuring that out would be a good next step.
11:47am - A problem has occured. I'm at the library, but it's actually pretty popular today. Someone in here has a scent or fragrance. It may be purfume, though it also smells a little bit like fancy cigars? It's not particularly strong but it's specifically hitting something that is making me very uncomfortable. I think I'm going to have to pack up and work somewhere else. Maybe Tim Horton's?
I'm going to do that now, so I'll keep this open in a tab.
12:12pm - My start time was weird, but it looks like I've been going over an hour now. I'm at Tim Horton's, now. Got a bit of food and a big tea, too. Feeling oddly tired, but not enough to stop me.
I think I'm going to do gamedev stuff now. I hem and haw, but I've already done things and made progress on everything else.
There's three gamedev type tasks I could do right now. I need to do more work on my Dommy Monsters game design doc. I want to investigate what's been happening with Vircadia. I want to talk about that idea for archetypal open-source games.
I think the first is the best plan, since I keep mentioning it in sideways ways, and it's the thing I most want to do, have most been trying to force myself to do and not succeeding, and have been struggling with the most in general.
That said, I'm not entirely up for it yet! I'm going to do a bit of professional development on YouTube, while eating this sandwich, and see if that helps whatever is up with my body right now.
12:36pm - I ended up not looking at things on YouTube, but looked at a website I had open in a tab instead, and followed its things. The website is https://lazerwalker.com/ and I've had it in a list of things to look at since Roguelike Celebration. They're part of the team that made the fancy mud-like online convention space and I was at that con and thought they were neat, so I opened their page in a tab, and eventually it was waiting in that tab so long I saved the url so I wouldn't have so many tabs open, and I still wanted to look into it. Actually there were two of them I hadn't gone through yet, maybe I'll also do the other one. Professional development!
12:41pm - The other one is this site https://www.nathansavant.com/ and the first thing he says on there is this:
"I am a Narrative Systems Designer specializing in memorable quests, living worlds, and rich characters.
I design and code narrative systems which fill virtual spaces with entertaining NPCs and exciting gameplay interactions. I help build moment-to-moment gameplay with storytelling in mind so that your player walks away with a deeper understanding of your game's world."
That is really cool. It's important work but it's also often considered somehow lesser in the social heirarchy of game developers. Describing it that way really drives home how cool it really is.
1:04pm - I'm definately having trouble focusing now. I think I thought I was checking on professionals I follow, or something like that, but I was actually just dicking around on Discord and Mastodon for a bit. ^.^;;
1:14pm - It took a bit, but I've managed to circle back to wanting to work on the Dommy Monsters Design Doc! ^.^
I do still have these blog entries open so I'll save the urls here for later. I've been checking my previous on-day posts to see what I did and wanted to do, so they'll be useful reminders.
https://www.nathansavant.com/post/rewarding-nonviolence
https://www.nathansavant.com/post/psychological-progression
I also added a few YouTube videos to my watch later list, because I do actually watch professional development type videos even when I'm not 'working'. A lot of them I can watch while playing a game on my other monitor.
So, now on with the design doc.
1:17pm - This was linked from one of the websites I'm using for Game Design Document advice. Don't want it in an open tab, so I'm putting it here for later: https://gamedesignskills.com/game-design/video-game-mechanics/
1:19pm - The last time I worked on this, I was trying to come up with Core Values for the project. I wasn't able to come up with them. Partly, it's hard to put them into words. They're sorta contradictory when I put them down, due to words having multiple meanings that can cancel eachother out. IT's really hard!
Instead, I'm going to carry on with the next step. That one was more optional than the others, which are also optional. So, it was super optional, and I'm taking the skip it option.
So, after the design pillars, I have to figure out the game loops.
1:34pm - The design doc guides linked this article about game loops. https://medium.com/@davengdesign/core-loops-c98b1197e93d
While I understand the idea of game loops, that article gave some interesting and useful perspective.
The loop I had planned for my game was pretty simple. It's effectively a turn-based life sim. Each turn, you look at your current state, your options, and choose what to do from your available options. Then you see the result of your choice, putting you into a new situation to consider and react to.
The thing is, I was mostly thinking of it from a simulationist perspective. That might make it really dry, and they even cover that in the Fatal mistakes to avoid section.
In a sense, my idea for the game loop hasn't changed, because it's still something like Observe your Situation -> Choose your next Action -> Experience the Results of your Choice -> Repeat
The thing is, they point out that the player should be rewarded and feel progress from each turn of the main loop. While that might have been there, I wasn't really focused on making it be. So, I want to specifically say that each loop's results phase should have a clear progression reward of some sort. Something intending to make the player feel something, not just a results report that might provoke a response.
Since the game's core pillars are "Love of Transformation", "Exploring Inside and Out", and "Everybody Wants You", each turn of the main loop should push on these. Since observing your situation is a phase in the loop, I want to make it really clear what's going on.
With "Love of Transformation", I want to make the player engage with their changes on each turn of the loop. So, if something new hasn't changed, it should at least say or do something with one of the previous changes. Maybe on top of tracking the current form of the player, I should keep a sort of history to reference. Then the game could point out how different one thing is from another, and how the player's experience has changed. Since it's mostly a text-based game, the player won't have a mobile avatar to really feel the changes in their character's movement or perception, it all has to be described. They say "Show, don't tell" but there is a way to do that in writing where you're not telling but describing. It changes it from dictating facts to showing the experience through writing.
With the other pillars, I think I should include them in each turn of the game loop as well.
"Exploring Inside and Out" is all about exploring both the game's virtual world and possibility space, as well as the player's own mind, personality, and limits. Even if your explorations just find a lack of limits. XD
So, each turn of the game loop should also reflect that. Make it clear somehow what has been learned or discovered, or at least give the player some way to know that tangible progress has been made on exploration of the world, and possibly themselves? I don't know if I can measure that tho.
"Everybody Wants You" is the third pillar. Part of the idea is that the Monsters WANT the player. They're fighting over you! So, it should be clear in each game loop that you are wanted and desired. The monsters, their domains and minions should all demonstrate the desire and want in whatever way matches their style, and they should do it each turn of the loop. It should also be clear that while the Monster whose domain you're in wants you, there's still other Monsters trying to get you for themselves.
The loop remains "Consider" -> "Act" -> "Observe" -> "Repeat" but the parts of each phase are elaborated on.
2:09pm - I've added the Game Loops document to the folder and started filling it out. I have the Consider phase written down, and was starting to describe the Act phase, but I have just passed the three hours, I have to use the washroom, and my father said he'd have a surprise for me and my roomie around 3pm, which is in less than an hour, so it's time for me to go.
I'm glad I've made more progress! I've done so many things. I'm going to keep doing things as this continues. I wonder how long I can keep this day on, day off schedule going? Have I finally found a system that will work? 15 days a month is a lot more than 1 to 5 if I'm lucky.
Now, I'm heading out. Thank you for reading.