dgbaumgart

The async stuff is built for multithreading. All that I needed is what amounts to coroutines (in eg. Unity). Async et al is probably fine if you're a more knowledgeable programmer than me, but I learned to code in *art school* with all that entails - and I'm here to make a game, not learn CS!

Got into weird stuff today:
- fixed bug deep in my CSV parsing that dumped entire lines if a comment character ("#") was in *any* part of the line
- replaced NPC turn handling via janky use of C# async (which is more powerful than I need) with a dumb but straightforward sorta FSM design pattern.

Now given I have some time to add new (broken?) (NO) stuff:
- on-map tutorial hint for moving between locations
- add a 'profile' file to store outcomes of scenarios (ie. so you can complete S1 then have choices show up in S2)
- load games from start menu. Bit of an oversight to miss this!

Other fixes:
- locked movement to other areas during tutorial!
- don't allow save/load during dialogs
- ... if game exited during dialog, reloaded, make sure to purge dialog options from previous state!
- fixed broken save/load tooltips
- and, as ever, fixed various content scripting edge-cases

A test case for showing the dice reroll tutorial. I really botched the position calculation so the tutorial element is almost completely off the left side of the screen with just the end of the arrow pointing out.

Here, it works. Not shown: 5 screenshots of the various ways I screwed up the positioning while trying to fix it.

Goblin Friday!

Plowing through a short list of Issues that came up when M. tried to play the game. (As all devs know, the instant a tester even looks at a build, everything breaks.)

Among them, the disappearing dice reroll tutorial hint. Where'd it go?
(See that arrow peeking in from the left?)

This is kinda it, huh.

"AI" tech fundamentally doesn't work as marketed, but working isn't the point. The *point* is to shift distribution of wealth to be more unequal.

That's what trillions of investment $ is buying: never having to pay white collar workers like white collar workers ever again.

In short, it's more profitable to not be evil. And yet!

That's just the thing - a weird crossover psychology-ideology of desire to dominate people surpasses the goal of maximizing productivity, and even the rationalized goal (bracketing out, ahem, externalities) of maximizing profit.

The goal is to be king among slaves, no matter the cost! It's insane.

The Classic Simpsons bit: Lionel Hutz asks "Can you imagine a world without AI?", sees visions of world peace and happiness, then shudders at the thought. This is literally every business executive right now.

literally every business executive

Amazing. I both love and hate this!

The former is kinda interesting! I can see why they make it frictionless though - I don't think an AAA game can really explore the implications therein.

The latter is common eh - but I think my requirement is that it has to be, in-narrative, its own currency that causes FOREX friction!

Ohhh that's neat! Making the resources dual-use in terms of mechanics is probably the most interesting way to do it.

Put that brain to work, we need answers!!!! (no pressure)

(Oh man, gaming in Japan is a whole world that I know so little about!)

I don't think intermediate holder of value quite works - like, I dunno, finding gems in some RPG and selling them for gold doesn't make those gems a currency right? Even if you can use them, they're not 'in another economy'.

Ah! I've played that one - yeah, and as you describe. It's like "separate faction currencies" which is common enough - and doesn't fulfill what I'm looking for exactly...

Darklands (for instance) does interesting stuff with the Fuggers and letters of credit vs weight of coins, but this doesn't count. Lots of examples of condensing value for inconvenience.

How about any game that deals with two or more separate currency economies and the friction between them?

Does *any game* use currency exchange as a mechanic?

I'd constrain the question to just RPGs or something, but I can't think of any. I'd suspect some capitalism-sim might do FOREX? But it feels like "an annoying thing every designer immediately abstracts away".

This is why the phrase comes up in so many of the things I've written about AI.

AI does three main things:

1) dismantle the institutions necessary for democratic society to thrive

2) transfer wealth upwards

3) create the permission structure for (1) and (2)

The poundcake has a large divot eaten out of it. In the background, a blurry little gray tabby cat is pretty sure she didn't see anything unusual happen in the last hour.

Came back to the kitchen and found that SOMEONE ate a big chunk out of the pound cake. Asked around. No one fessed up.

Hmmm.

Power overwhelming!

The upper left corner of the map for my goblin game. It's got lots and lots and lots of little trees, fading toward brown/purple/gray at the edges where you're not supposed to worry about. In the middle there's The Tavern, where Terrible Adventurers hang out. Below that are some golden fields leading to Grubb's Farm, where you can steal food (and a giant turnip in the tutorial scenario). To the right is the river with and old-looking stone bridge - that's the Troll Bridge, and if you want to cross, it's going to cost you. You can try to sneak over, or talk your way through, but the Trolls will look poorly upon such shenanigans.

And I've been (very slowly) getting the upper left corner of the map redrawn. I'll probably do a bit of that for the end of today as a break from staring at code/dialog script.

(I love drawing maps btw!!)

This is the save/load modal panel. I'm trying to make it less ugly, so I've offloading some secondary information that was in the save game entry buttons into a tooltip (which, btw, was ending up on a layer *under* this panel, so I had to shuffle things around there). The quicksave/load is still incomprehensible, but I'll fix that up another time. Also, everything is too greenish-brown. I mean yes, this is a goblin game, but we can do better!

Here's a slightly improved "turn upkeep" widget which shows all of the player's goblins eating food and/or having status effect changes during the upkeep phase. I did get a bit of feedback about making the turn structure more explicit, so I'm going to have to stew on that and make a new UI widget to make it very clear what the turn stages are and what they mean. Somehow. Indeed, not everyone has had Magic: The Gathering rules crammed into their brain at a tender age.

Goblin Friday!

Doing lots of small items for a (secret) test build:
- improved save/load layout + tooltips (still ugly)
- fixed turnip stealing fail/retry error(s)
- fixed dialog keyboard control errors
- fixed selected token visuals reset in various cases
- tooltips tooltips tooltips!
- _timing_

Let's just say, uh, "numbers subject to change"; still balancing and getting a feel for the context of all this stuff.

Ahhh, that'd be good. But no - this is New Stuff!

Exactly :)

A Starsector dialog - the player is in some kind of trouble involving a bad propaganda broadcast and has come to Rayan Arroyo for help.

A Starsector dialog - Rayan Arroyo is insisting that the player character needs some PR help, and uses a certain old environmental disaster caused by Tri-tachyon as an example of good PR work.

Just doing #arroyoposting

(This is a new sequence from some new story mission stuff in @amosolov.bsky.social's #Starsector; it's always a joy to write some more Arroyo dialog.)

A dialog from my game. Bennybog the goblin finally manages to pull a giant turnip out of the ground. He was, of course, spotted in the moment of victory, so we'll see how that goes... As for the memory rewrite, the weirdest error that resulted was the arrows showing what direction you were moving on the map were pointing the wrong way... sometimes. Turns out this was caused by an erroneous "check if value is greater than" call where I put the "return" keyword on the wrong line... and it worked, but was wrong. On the upside, I can do things like pull out chunks of memory grouped into a "context" and do stuff with them - save, delete, re-add later. Plus a bunch of other stuff works really cleanly, particularly save/load to file. What's next? I just need to make sure all the existing stuff works correctly so I can get an ultra secret test build out to a couple people.

Goblin Friday!

... ugh, whew. Spent part of last night and most of today entirely rewriting the scripting memory system. Fixed some old structural errors (and added news ones - fixed, eventually).
It's cleaner, more efficient, easier to use.

Also here's an "item gained" dialog element! (Turnip.)

I deleted a file with code! Possibly for the first time ever.

One more look at the save/load menu I've been working on for the past three days. Still pretty ugly, but 1. it works, and 2. it's involved cleaning up a bunch of internal handling of game state and save file formatting in a way that makes everything cleaner, safer, and simpler. Why did I need this? Well: to assemble metadata about a save file I need to read the whole save file. And the best way to do that is to dump it into a copy of the game state memory handling class, called "GoblinMemory" (of course) - except this class is a huge mess and uses a bunch of bad static methods and I have no idea why I thought any of it was a good idea. So I just.. wrote a cleaner, standalone version of the whole thing that cuts out an entire layer of unneeded organization. (I don't want to get into it. It's classic "overthinking the architecture" then, after using it for a while, realizing how many parts are completely unnecessary.) ... Now I just need to get the rest of the game working with the new game state memory handling, which should only be a moderate pain.

"ever" was the word I was looking for. Anyway, it works!

Another look at the menu. Yes, it looks almost the same as before - but I rewrote how save files are formatted AND wrote a new version of how game state memory is handled (which I need to roll into the main game).

It's all way simpler.

... I'm not sure I've never deleted a file via code before. Wow.

Revised save/load menu. You don't have to click over to a different mode to save/load anymore. It ain't pretty, but it's all there.

And my lovely modal confirmation dialog just slots in anywhere, and it's so easy to use!

Revisions!

It's a bit messy in terms of layout and styling, but it more-or-less works (minus some backend stuff: need to revise how save metadata is pulled and make deletion actually delete the file, not just the entry in the list).

Also need to add tooltips. Everything needs tooltips, always.