Andrew Doull

I’m noodling on something similar, but for military applications

It’s not just writing. The lead developer of Kerbal Space Program 2 had a (highly technical) day job.

I see some book piracy discourse, and, to make a positive argument in favor of buying books, your marginal ability to influence what books get published and support the careers of writers you like is massive compared to most other forms of media.

All games become crabs.

We don’t really have a term for evergreen design paradigms like roguelikefication which can form the core of a game play loop.

Multi-day real time play like Neptune’s Pride/Cataphracts being another (much less safe) example.

Fl/accid

Split a word in half to make it truly cursed. I’ll start.

Maga/zine

Pros: in the next update there’s a colonist name generator using a whole bunch of European pre-industrial agricultural techniques

Cons: I’d quite like there to be some non-European agricultural techniques in there

This is amazing and also makes the game designer in me go

If you tie initiative number to movement points it even makes physical sense because you’re moving faster/further; at which point you might consider move down/attack up as an alternative.

Great thread on initiative systems.

There’s one not mentioned here which is multiphase resolution — where your moves occur in a separate phase to your attacks, allowing players to reposition if they have a lower initiative to make the attacks harder (due to facing, cover etc)

I’m with one of the commenters on this one.

i have never wanted to make a YouTube video before, but now i want to make one that's basically: Books Are Not Free Content For You, Stop Stealing From Authors, You Scabs.

we are not the enemy.
every dollar folks think they're taking from Amazon, they're taking from authors more.

Like you can take your innate 250+ column matrix and brush it up against a similar matrix controlled by a generalised intelligence both trying to pattern match to an atomic Turing complete language.

I keep my latent contempt for most things in check except for people who somehow think a mostly smooth 9.8m/s/s acceleration field somehow makes an activity interesting.

Like have you even heard of dancing?

Related: People I know IRL who know what I do for a living often ask what they need to know about online safety for their about-to-be-teenagers, and there's a lot of answers, but the thing I always emphasize most is: under no circumstances should you ever threaten to take access away from them.

So both kinds of sub games bsky.app/profile/andr...

At this tech level you could probably 3D print ships out of sand + water

*I* have to do it

I’ve already tried outsourcing space combat rules once in my space game (didn’t work out for reasons) which is how uninterested I am in vehicle combat rules

I once knew a Federal bank examiner, and one time someone asked him why we had to KEEP inspecting banks over and over. He basically said every new batch of business school grads invents bank fraud from first principles.

Great news! If you were thinking of including combat rules in your TTRPG, it turns out you don’t have to include submarine vs submarine combat rules because it’s not something that’s happened more than once.

Oh, you weren’t planning on doing that?

Ask yourself why not?

The downside of making a sci-fi game is that I have to simulate sci-fi concepts

We got to the moon more times than we got a submarine to successfully shoot another submarine

So it turns out submarine vs submarine combat is as science fiction as spacecraft vs spacecraft combat.

You could also be launching a starship to another solar system or building a Dyson swarm or emancipating the robots but it turns out that those things are less interesting than looking at fish.

Ok I’ve written a couple of hundred pages of my sub game, I’m now at the point of the core game loop which is looking at fish. To set the scene, you’re posthuman investment bankers capable of doing and surviving almost anything with a vast array of technologies that you can develop by patenting fish genes. To do that, you have 1-2 hours once you get to a fishery to identify which fish have valuable genes before the competition turns up. I need a list of actions to figure out which fish are interesting.

This is what you’ll be doing for the climatic 15 years of my 2000+ page magnum opus TTRPG Sixty Years in Space

I wonder if Mastodon is better for these game design noodling posts because they don’t seem to get much interaction here

And of course the OSR classic:
5. There’s a hole in the ground you may have to go inside

So far I’m thinking:

1. Fish isn’t what you’re looking at
2. Fish is big
3. School of fish is dangerous to travel through
4. Fish has laser beams