brig

a screenshot of the steam page of dirtbag mahjong listing its planned release date as november 26th, 2025. vren has been drawn over it showing off the date, with the words "TA-DAAA!!!"

dirtbag mahjong has a release date!!

it's coming out for real and you can wishlist it at s.team/a/3488460/ !!

only four weeks to go until you can throw tiles every which way and hurt other people around like the mahjong table like you've always wanted to!

Just putting out into the aether that despite coming out in December 2024, Caves of Qud is eligible for a number of this year's awards that have November cutoffs, like the Game Awards

maybe nothing

there's almost nothing i enjoy as much as singing with people

the feeling of drama is good, good enough that i might just base progression on wounds survived. 1 xp per wound you took and lived, after each battle. also you have to progressively flesh out character details. units get a name after their first xp... maybe a standard progression of Qs to answer

no penalty for wounds, and the 17% starting death chance is high enough that one team in the last battle lost two guys to one wound each. that said the surviving unit fought on through five total wounds to die to the sixth (a 66.5% of death rolling at six wounds).

i have "when you take a wound, roll 1d6 per wound and die on a 1", but without the eventual cap lancer has (running out of structure), just each wound being more and more likely to kill you. rn it's a little wonky for sure.

i like the wounds mechanic enough that i am sure someone is already using it somewhere. i got it from lancer, almost. you know how when you take structure damage (or reactor stress) you roll a d6 for each one you have lost so far?

working on a little tactics game

maybe i can buff everybody else

it brings me no pleasure to announce that i must nerf elves

"what kind of game especially suits this dice toy" is the next question, then

caught in the awkward position of liking the concept of the game i am working on, and liking the core dice mechanic for it, but also thinking they are poorly suited to one another. i think i want to play with the dice toy more than make that game concept, for the moment, so maybe i'll focus on that

really what i want is to run ttrpgs in person again. it's been way too long. i wish i were equally happy running them online but i'm not. even when everyone has a smartphone the focus on the game is so so much better in person

okay doing facing on a vtt isn't too bad. i wish aoe templates that rotated with a token were easier (if they're not centered on the token, the group rotates around the center of the total group, and not around the token like i would want) but it's not too bad.

hadn't put vlc on my phone on shuffle before so i was totally unprepared for my dream recordings to start playing back to me between songs

or Really suck it up & do away with grids, i guess.

alternately suck it up, switch to hexes, and do "big hexagon you place such that you are in one of the edge hexes"

"your focus is a big square you can place anywhere that puts you on the edge of it" seems alright, assuming 8-directional movement. and the effort savings of the templates being square seem probably significant actually

it's tempting to say something like "diagonal movement is identical to orthogonal movement, because dream-space is warped" but i think the cost in player intuitions about grid positioning is prrrrobably not worth it? maybe it's fine. it doesn't quite solve the above problem though

wow okay new annoying problem with this project is just. how do i do focus area templates with character facing on a square grid. this sucks. maybe i either a) shouldn't do facing or b) should switch to hexes. i do kind of dislike hexes but not for a like. legitimate design reason

okay realistically i knew i wouldn't be reading at all but i did earn the personal favor of the prince-captain of the Bear's Nest with my bardic talents so that feels pretty good ngl

took this as a sign & brought a lem book with me to playing pretend camp

no i did not get much (?any?) sleep why do you ask

& no they're not intelligent, all the complex behavior is reflexive processing of the information brought by the prey species. we sent physicists and saw high-dimensional geometric structures projected in 3 dimensions; we sent psychologists and saw psychoanalysis.

later it turns out this is its entire evolutionary strategy & that provoking desperate self-annihilation in the pursuit of understanding in spacefaring civilizations is how its species eats. and also they're the most successful lifeform in the galaxy & the entirety of the great filter.

it doesn't work, of course, because the ocean has no regard for or evident awareness of the individual human experience; we hurl ourselves into gastric seas in the hope of one day rendering self- and other-knowledge possible, but all it perceives is millions upon millions of free lunches.

the practice escalates as the behavior of the ocean becomes no less inscrutable but ever more armed with human symbols with which to provoke a response. eventually millions annually hurl themselves voluntarily into its gelatinous tides in the hopes of their digested self finally being truly known

what Lem doesn't tell you at the end of Solaris is that after Kelvin returns to Earth to try to convince us not to nuke Solaris we do it anyway, but it doesn't seem to do anything, so we start sending people there to dissolve them in the ocean to make it more human and therefore comprehensible.