One of my primary means of child care for this week had a last minute drop in availability, and I'm hesitant to try and take my almost three year old down to the garage while I run the belt sander and orbital sander. So, maybe I'll get some done tomorrow. Still expect to be done before Halloween!
As someone whose dad has done woodworking for as long as I can remember (he started when he was in high school), some of my earliest memories are in the garage-turned-shop that my dad was using. I still remember getting to press the button to turn on the table saw when I was 3 or 4. Orbital sanders are (generally) safe enough for kids to be around, have him "help" by holding fresh pads or checking the surface to see if it's smooth. Give him an experience to enjoy!
It's more than I'm weary of the dust the sanders create. I'm fairly conscious of the health hazards of breathing in foreign particles from my first career. And he definitely won't keep my P95 on his face.
That's a fair point. My dad has always had a decent dust collection system, so airborne sawdust isn't something I really think about much. I definitely wouldn't have kept a mask on at that age!
This monday I went back at it and I'm the living proof of measure twice, cut once. This week I made backwards progress... I had to disassemble stuff, throw out some of it, reuse some of it and make new parts including painting them. The painting, or rather drying, is what holds me back from further progress. I will do some stuff today. I will hopefully get to the point I wanted to make on monday.
If I make it where I want, I will be left with roof. I have to yet think of how to attach the roof so no screws are visible. I'm not doing wood joints or any advanced stuff. I may throw in some beams and simply do 90 degree corner on the beam or something similar. We'll see in the near future. My goal is to be done by the end of the month and it is sti perfectly achievable.
I will throw some photos here later in the day or in a few days.
First - It was at this moment... He knew he fucked up - The red line shows where I did the cut, the blue line is where I should have cut, the orange crosses mark pieces I had to make new. This meant disassembling even the other side as it is screwed in the flat horizontal piece (the one that is lengthwise).
Right now I have painted and left to dry everything that is seen as bare wood on these pictures.
I have also thought about the roof and I have came up with a plan how to do it - attach it without screws directly visible. Or at the very least say beta plan, as there are still things to figure out.
For the past week, I mostly worked on basic ideas for talents/curses, and skills/abilities that should be added or modified. Didn't come up with too much that's clever, unfortunately. I still have a bit to go on making enough for there to be enough variety, from my point of view.
While I slowly come up with more modifiers to the base game, I've also been thinking about balance, and how often a player should be able to be forced to pick a talent and/or a curse. This may be the longest part of the testing, since it would require some playthroughs. I want to get to a point where it seems like those elements have impact after a bit and don't seem like just a small addition, but I don't want to keep bugging the player every few minutes and eventually end up with ridiculous amounts of stacks of everything near the end of the game. I need to properly think of what should actually trigger a choice, which may be even harder.
I might also need some playtesters just to see what others think of it and if balance needs to be tweaked somehow. Alternatively, I may just throw it out into the wild with an explicit disclaimer, maybe make it a bit on the harder side, and see what people think of it.
Mostly unrelated to actual progress, but: I fell down a rabbit hole with a certain element of the game and figured that there are two mods that, put together, would put the game at a decent "starting point". Those two mods still have a bunch of the original bugs that I was complaining about in a previous post, but they either add a lot of other elements or fix stuff that's harder to fix and analyze just in code. I figured that my changes can easily be rebased onto that anyway. The authors have put out a guide saying what I can do to integrate their mod into mine, but nothing on the other way around. I sent an email asking if doing that was okay... and got nothing back. I may actually have to "join the discord" to get an answer for that.
As I have assumed I would, I did find time over the weekend to edit my short story based on solo RPG prompts that I wrote responses to. I was away from home so I edited on my tablet. I’ll have to check once more for pagination and alignment of drawings, but otherwise it’s pretty much done and I just have to export to PDF and also turn it into a blog post, which due to the platform I use will be a little tedious for the graphical elements.
Thoughts about it after editing: I can’t say I am seeing this as some major accomplishment, but more like “fun writing practice” to hopefully motivate myself to do more. But hey maybe I am just too harsh with myself. We’ll see once some people actually read this thing.
Work has been tough, so evenings have been lacking motivation to work on anything, but I hope the pace slows down next week so that I can fit some of this work in my lunch breaks. Evenings tend to be too busy during the week, between dinner, dog walks, family time. This weekend it seems the weather will suck big time, so I might just do it then.
Most of my time over the past week was putting together the mod description pages and taking screenshots to showcase the mod. You can see the gallery on Curseforge for the proper images, but in this comment you'll get what nobody else (besides me) has seen: what's lying just outside the camera's frame.
The kitchen was my first build, and it's just a few walls, a basic ceiling which you can't even see in the final screenshot, and the worst farm out the back to make it look like there's something there. In the foreground you can see a demo I was showing a friend, plus the inspiration for the garden fence.
Speaking of the garden, it's actually pretty close to the kitchen build. It's also just above the chapel which is, again, just a plain box.
The screenshot of a player placing a pane into a window was taken at a place I built to have at the original icon of the mod, but later changed to the rose window. It's a tiny monstrosity of block placements, and no angle could capture its true unbeauty. The trapdoors and stairs were to make the right shapes when looking out through the window.
The rose window is just floating in the sky, with the barest minimum built around it. That's actually the reason why the gallery image is cropped to be square, you can see where I haven't built in the full screenshot.
The art gallery window is just a segment of wall, open to the elements (and the local invaders).
There are two locations that didn't get screenshots. After seeing the diamond frames being so good as a garden wall, I wanted to make a little scene like the Lizard Consulate from Divinity: Original Sin II (a game I love dearly. This is the only screenshot I could find online, which doesn't really show it off). I started in one place, realised how wide of an angle I'd need for what I wanted and abandoned it. I then went somewhere with the water colour I wanted, but abandoned that because I didn't want the mangrove in the background. You can see the items on the ground from when I /killed myself.
I have some stretch goals that I'll be piecing away at, mostly adding new window frame materials. At the moment it's just Iron, but I'd like to do Gold and the 4 (actually 8, including waxed) types of Copper. I don't know how the game handles the aging of Copper, but I'm sure they did it in a way I can re-use.
Today's bonus image comes from debugging. In order to ensure I am drawing the glass correctly, I've been going into spectator mode, turning my speed right down, then clipping inside the frames to see where the vertices/edges/polygons are. Thanks to the near clipping plane of the camera, you end up with some crazy shapes.
Was playing around with some basses in Vital while sorting through some preset packs and found a really thick dubstep bass patch that I fell in love with. Quickly made a bassline with it, added some drums, a bit of atmosphere and we got a vibe going.
Now the titan that I must face is arrangement, I have an intro going and the drop, but I can't seem to glue them together just right. Build-ups have never been my forte unfortunately, especially since I used to make very slow, melodic beats where I could just progress naturally through my instruments up to the climax.
I'll persevere through it and hopefully we have the first track ready this week. I'll have to make a miracle happen to get the second one done for the showcase, but I'm gonna do my best.
Outting myself here as being Mr. Alpaca, but yeah our dog got pancreatitis when we returned from vacation so no updates to my music project this week, been dealing with that. She seems to be doing a bit better but still on meds. Hoping that by next week I can try to get back into the music project.
I followed up on last week's decision to change my project and I've committed to making shears/scissors (I'm still not sure of the difference). The handles have been forged out (although there's a crack in one that I'm not sure about), the blades have been drawn out to their final shape, and the holes for the rivet have been punched. I've done a bit of file work on the blades to smooth and flatten the inside face, but one rivet hole protrudes a bit more than I realized so there's almost 1/8" (3mm) between the blades that will have to be solved with more heat.
So my plan for this week is to flatten the rivet hole, true up the blades so they sit flat against each other, and fix up the handles before riveting the two halves together. When everything is fit nicely, I can quench the blades like a knife (leaving the handles "soft") and temper for a hard edge. I'm not sure if that's a weekend thing, since Saturday is filled with Halloween festivities and Sunday is our anniversary, but the forge work needed should be minimal so it might fit in a weekday evening. If all goes well, these will be done before next check-in, let alone before the end of the month!
I want to share about my batch 2 of fruit. The winemaker where I work had one block she was very worried about. The fruit set was very poor this year, and this block in particular had a bunch of tiny berries on the clusters. She was at first worried that these would fall through the slits on the shaker table we use, and then decided that she didn’t want them anyway since they would be low sugar and high acid. With their permission, I grabbed a 5 gallon bucket and filled it with these tiny berries. I crushed it a bit by hand and let it ferment. Turns out the sugar was around 24 degrees brix, which is nearly identical to what the main lot was. I did once per day punch downs. I tried to keep it somewhat warm to speed it through fermentation. I had a lot of stems, and so extended stem contact would not have been good for the wine. It finished without an issue, and I pressed it by hand to get about 2 gallons of wine. I blended it with the Zinfandel that I talked about before. This wine was far better than the Zinfandel, but I didn’t want to deal with multiple different lots of wine.
The blended wine needs more acid, so I will be doing acid trials probably next week with one of the employees at work. After that, I plan to carbonate it in a keg and serve it from there. Saves me the pain of bottling it.
First update since the beginning of TiMaSoMo, trying to write at least one song. I've played music for a long time and I do some solid arranging in the bands I've been in, but never seriously tried my hand at writing something whole cloth. First couple weeks were focused on thinking through things and reflecting on past experiences/attempts. Generally delayed as I prepare for an extended work trip, but I brought my instrument with it and have sat down with it on some limited evening free time and the weekend and I think I have a chorus put together!
There's not a "right" answer to work towards and I'm finding that to be a challenge. Finding a starting point was part of the difficulty; I'm heavily crimping from a song my guitarist has written by pulling a chord structure to work from as a template (great artists steal, right?) and it's given me a decent foundation. I expected lyrics to be the toughest part, but I'm finding it tricky to establish a melody (this is likely because as a bassist and backup vocalist, I'm primarily a supporting musician). I also expect a bit of back-n-forth editing between lyrics and melody, so plenty of work ahead. Still, have made solid progress and hoping to continue that towards the showcase in early November!
Did some more brainstorming for the card game based on assigning way-too-deep meanings to the suits. That mainly involved studying the court cards WAY too closely for potential symbolism, particularly the Queens. (I found a site with scans of card decks. One deck for some odd reason swapped the queens for Clubs and Spades. I feel oddly offended on their behalves.)
Today I decided I'm done analyzing. There is nothing to be gained at this point, I've settled on the concepts they represent and looking at cards from the 1600's doesn't help with playing (seriously guys my notes doc includes the direction of sashes and angles of the chest hems on the Queen cards). Time to figure out ACTUAL gameplay and rules. So!
The suits represent societal aspects: Diamonds is Authority (royalty, nobility and wealth); Hearts is Culture (arts, knowledge, and shared ideas among people in general); Clubs is Religion; and Spades is Warfare.
The game's premise is the four aspects are competing for dominance in the realm, and the goal is for your suit to gain the most influence. I'm starting by trying to develop solo gameplay first because... Well, I need to test it, and easier to do that alone xD
And to that end, I somewhat shamefully turned to ChatGPT just to use as a soundboard, because A) the only solo card game I know is solitaire, and B) none of my friends are actually interested in regular playing cards, or refining the finer mechanics and balancing in game development. I had several rules/concepts in mind, just needed to bounce them off someone to figure out how to incorporate them into a game. (Most development was driven by ChatGPT making suggestions, and me automatically thinking "No, no, that's too complicated/I don't like that. This option would be better.")
I now have some good groundwork and ideas for the overall gameplay loop. It involves collecting number cards to represent "influence", and how the Jacks of Hearts and Clubs can betray their suit and join Diamonds and Spades. I still need to do actual play testing to iron out details, but I think I have a good starting point.
But! As part of this brainstorming, I came up with a neat little twist on High/Low Card that can probably stand on its own. This is untested and these rules are made with the number cards (2-10) in mind due to the nature of the greater game. It may not be properly balanced yet since it's based on the greater game... but it has balancing. When have you ever heard of "balance" when talking about high/low card??
So here's the rules for that!
Power Struggle High/Low Card
Preface: Remove all Kings, Queens and Jacks from deck. You can remove the Aces, or count them as a 1.
The four suits have a bit of a hierarchy/power balance:
Diamonds and Spades are the "strongest" and are equal in power. This is because Diamonds represent existing rulers/nobility and thus already have power, and Spades have martial power on their side. However...
Clubs beats Diamonds. This is because historically in Europe, religious power supercedes noble authority. The Catholic Church could even revoke royal power via excommunication. (See King Henry VIII, who started a whole new church just so he could legally divorce his wife and try to have a son.)
Hearts beats Spades. This is because culture (namely the arts and knowledge) has a way of persisting even in the face of war. Even when a society is wiped out, their cultural artifacts often remain. Also, culture can be used to unite people and turn the tides of war.
So, in a matchup:
Clubs will automatically win against Diamonds, and Hearts automatically wins against Spades. Number does not matter.
All other combinations (Diamonds vs Hearts or Spades, Hearts vs Clubs or Diamonds, Clubs vs Hearts or Spades, and Spades vs Clubs or Diamonds) play as normal.
In the event of a tie:
Clubs beats Diamonds
Heart Beats Spades
Spades and Diamonds are a draw and both discarded
Diamonds beats Hearts
Spades beats Clubs
Hearts and Clubs is based on the orientation of the pips (more are right-side up):
If they have the same orientation, it's a draw and both are discarded.
If the tie is a 2, 4 or 10, or a J, Q or K, it's a true draw and both win.
Optional: You can collect the winning cards, and discard losing cards (hence me mentioning it in the draws). The suit with the highest number at the end wins. (And this is where the potential balancing issue could come in, it may be weighted in favor of Hearts/Clubs as a standalone.)
So at bare minimum, I've made a fairly simple variation of an existing card game. Worst case scenario, if I hit a roadblock with the greater game, I can refine/expand the gameplay around that rule set to work as proper PvP game (maybe even a 1-4 player game) for the showcase. Because I AM SUBMITTING SOMETHING TO THE SHOWCASE THIS YEAR DANGIT
But yeah, pretty satisfied with the brainstorming I did tonight. I wanted to come up with something different from the usual "get specific/bigger number" rules, and give some weight to the suits and "characters". I think I got foundations for something that has some actual strategy involved. (Particularly the traitor Jacks. That's fun.)
Next step is proper play testing and refinement! (And on that note, if anyone tries out the high/low card, let me know!)
Update already: just did an initial playtest, and game is functional and playable! Needs balancing and other adjustments of course. I made notes on a Google doc as I played, then made a copy and cleaned it up. Pretty sure the rule set I included has all the rules I set for the first test. Here's the play test doc!
I originally considered keeping the full rules to myself until the showcase, but decided to share this because it highlights the importance of play testing in game development.
Right off the bat, I had a useless-to-me card in my hand. I also had to make a decision on a rule I hadn't fully defined in the first round. Then later, I ran into a scenario I hadn't envisioned and just made an on-the-spot rule decision. (Also fun because the odds of THAT scenario happening are probably pretty dang low, since it required a specific pair of 2 cards in one turn.) Also got lucky with the number of cards in the deck allowing for a perfect number of rounds with no leftover cards.
All of these are things that I just didn't think about in the planning phase. Before QA testing can get into breaking a game, first you need to make sure it works. This is why testing is important people!
More testing is needed obviously, but it was a good first test! It wasn't just mindless, I had to put some thought into my moves. That said, I actually barely put down any cards on my turns because of the matchups I got. Out of 13 rounds, I actually used a card from my hands... 3 times. (Oh wow. Worse than I thought.)
RNG (and subpar shuffling) definitely played a big factor in this. But in this case, RNG also basically represents "actions of 3 factions and the rest of the world", so... ¯\(ツ)/¯ It kinda makes sense lore-wise, but in terms of gameplay, maybe not so fun. Will need to do another round or two to be confirm how imbalanced it is, and then I'll need to tweak rules to make it a bit more fair.
Also, this just reminds me of how much I enjoy this aspect of game development in particular. Looking at fine mechanics, figuring out how they can interact and work together, tweaking them for balance... Probably my favorite part of game development in college, though my classes typically focused more on the programming compared to this part.
Still puttering along. Now the entire kill team minis have some paint on them. I ended up doing the basic painting on all of them instead of focusing exclusively on a few. Still need to sort out the bases, use some washes, maybe some light from some weapons etc and possibly edge highlighting. There's really not a definite "now they are done" point I'm starting to realize!
[OP] kfwyre | a day ago
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goose | a day ago
Since my last update, I have done a hot NOTHING!!
One of my primary means of child care for this week had a last minute drop in availability, and I'm hesitant to try and take my almost three year old down to the garage while I run the belt sander and orbital sander. So, maybe I'll get some done tomorrow. Still expect to be done before Halloween!
Banazir | a day ago
As someone whose dad has done woodworking for as long as I can remember (he started when he was in high school), some of my earliest memories are in the garage-turned-shop that my dad was using. I still remember getting to press the button to turn on the table saw when I was 3 or 4. Orbital sanders are (generally) safe enough for kids to be around, have him "help" by holding fresh pads or checking the surface to see if it's smooth. Give him an experience to enjoy!
goose | a day ago
It's more than I'm weary of the dust the sanders create. I'm fairly conscious of the health hazards of breathing in foreign particles from my first career. And he definitely won't keep my P95 on his face.
Banazir | a day ago
That's a fair point. My dad has always had a decent dust collection system, so airborne sawdust isn't something I really think about much. I definitely wouldn't have kept a mask on at that age!
Pavouk106 | a day ago
I'm building the Hotel Ritz bird-feeder house.
This monday I went back at it and I'm the living proof of measure twice, cut once. This week I made backwards progress... I had to disassemble stuff, throw out some of it, reuse some of it and make new parts including painting them. The painting, or rather drying, is what holds me back from further progress. I will do some stuff today. I will hopefully get to the point I wanted to make on monday.
If I make it where I want, I will be left with roof. I have to yet think of how to attach the roof so no screws are visible. I'm not doing wood joints or any advanced stuff. I may throw in some beams and simply do 90 degree corner on the beam or something similar. We'll see in the near future. My goal is to be done by the end of the month and it is sti perfectly achievable.
I will throw some photos here later in the day or in a few days.
Pavouk106 | 7 hours ago
As promised, I'm back with some photos.
First - It was at this moment... He knew he fucked up - The red line shows where I did the cut, the blue line is where I should have cut, the orange crosses mark pieces I had to make new. This meant disassembling even the other side as it is screwed in the flat horizontal piece (the one that is lengthwise).
I have the same picture without markings and another picture of my progress.
Right now I have painted and left to dry everything that is seen as bare wood on these pictures.
I have also thought about the roof and I have came up with a plan how to do it - attach it without screws directly visible. Or at the very least say beta plan, as there are still things to figure out.
Liru | a day ago
FPS Game - Roguelike Game Mod
Previously: [1, 2]
For the past week, I mostly worked on basic ideas for talents/curses, and skills/abilities that should be added or modified. Didn't come up with too much that's clever, unfortunately. I still have a bit to go on making enough for there to be enough variety, from my point of view.
While I slowly come up with more modifiers to the base game, I've also been thinking about balance, and how often a player should be able to be forced to pick a talent and/or a curse. This may be the longest part of the testing, since it would require some playthroughs. I want to get to a point where it seems like those elements have impact after a bit and don't seem like just a small addition, but I don't want to keep bugging the player every few minutes and eventually end up with ridiculous amounts of stacks of everything near the end of the game. I need to properly think of what should actually trigger a choice, which may be even harder.
I might also need some playtesters just to see what others think of it and if balance needs to be tweaked somehow. Alternatively, I may just throw it out into the wild with an explicit disclaimer, maybe make it a bit on the harder side, and see what people think of it.
Mostly unrelated to actual progress, but: I fell down a rabbit hole with a certain element of the game and figured that there are two mods that, put together, would put the game at a decent "starting point". Those two mods still have a bunch of the original bugs that I was complaining about in a previous post, but they either add a lot of other elements or fix stuff that's harder to fix and analyze just in code. I figured that my changes can easily be rebased onto that anyway. The authors have put out a guide saying what I can do to integrate their mod into mine, but nothing on the other way around. I sent an email asking if doing that was okay... and got nothing back. I may actually have to "join the discord" to get an answer for that.
Paul85 | a day ago
As I have assumed I would, I did find time over the weekend to edit my short story based on solo RPG prompts that I wrote responses to. I was away from home so I edited on my tablet. I’ll have to check once more for pagination and alignment of drawings, but otherwise it’s pretty much done and I just have to export to PDF and also turn it into a blog post, which due to the platform I use will be a little tedious for the graphical elements.
Thoughts about it after editing: I can’t say I am seeing this as some major accomplishment, but more like “fun writing practice” to hopefully motivate myself to do more. But hey maybe I am just too harsh with myself. We’ll see once some people actually read this thing.
Work has been tough, so evenings have been lacking motivation to work on anything, but I hope the pace slows down next week so that I can fit some of this work in my lunch breaks. Evenings tend to be too busy during the week, between dinner, dog walks, family time. This weekend it seems the weather will suck big time, so I might just do it then.
secret_online | a day ago
Well, I released my Minecraft mod: Leadlight. It's only available on CurseForge (and GitHub) right now, but once it clears Modrinth's moderation queue (estimated another couple of weeks) then it'll be there too (link for when that happens).
Most of my time over the past week was putting together the mod description pages and taking screenshots to showcase the mod. You can see the gallery on Curseforge for the proper images, but in this comment you'll get what nobody else (besides me) has seen: what's lying just outside the camera's frame.
/killed myself.I have some stretch goals that I'll be piecing away at, mostly adding new window frame materials. At the moment it's just Iron, but I'd like to do Gold and the 4 (actually 8, including waxed) types of Copper. I don't know how the game handles the aging of Copper, but I'm sure they did it in a way I can re-use.
Today's bonus image comes from debugging. In order to ensure I am drawing the glass correctly, I've been going into spectator mode, turning my speed right down, then clipping inside the frames to see where the vertices/edges/polygons are. Thanks to the near clipping plane of the camera, you end up with some crazy shapes.
arqalite | a day ago
Progress is slow, but we do have progress!
Was playing around with some basses in Vital while sorting through some preset packs and found a really thick dubstep bass patch that I fell in love with. Quickly made a bassline with it, added some drums, a bit of atmosphere and we got a vibe going.
Now the titan that I must face is arrangement, I have an intro going and the drop, but I can't seem to glue them together just right. Build-ups have never been my forte unfortunately, especially since I used to make very slow, melodic beats where I could just progress naturally through my instruments up to the climax.
I'll persevere through it and hopefully we have the first track ready this week. I'll have to make a miracle happen to get the second one done for the showcase, but I'm gonna do my best.
crialpaca | a day ago
Well went on vacation... I was still sick... Returned to a dog with acute pancreatitis. So I've done nothing lol.
Paul85 | a day ago
Sorry to hear that about your dog. Hope he/she gets better soon.
crialpaca | 19 hours ago
Thank you! She's in a kind of ambiguous spot but fingers crossed we'll be heading in the right direction soon.
dhcrazy333 | a day ago
Outting myself here as being Mr. Alpaca, but yeah our dog got pancreatitis when we returned from vacation so no updates to my music project this week, been dealing with that. She seems to be doing a bit better but still on meds. Hoping that by next week I can try to get back into the music project.
Banazir | a day ago
I followed up on last week's decision to change my project and I've committed to making shears/scissors (I'm still not sure of the difference). The handles have been forged out (although there's a crack in one that I'm not sure about), the blades have been drawn out to their final shape, and the holes for the rivet have been punched. I've done a bit of file work on the blades to smooth and flatten the inside face, but one rivet hole protrudes a bit more than I realized so there's almost 1/8" (3mm) between the blades that will have to be solved with more heat.
So my plan for this week is to flatten the rivet hole, true up the blades so they sit flat against each other, and fix up the handles before riveting the two halves together. When everything is fit nicely, I can quench the blades like a knife (leaving the handles "soft") and temper for a hard edge. I'm not sure if that's a weekend thing, since Saturday is filled with Halloween festivities and Sunday is our anniversary, but the forge work needed should be minimal so it might fit in a weekday evening. If all goes well, these will be done before next check-in, let alone before the end of the month!
Weldawadyathink | 23 hours ago
I want to share about my batch 2 of fruit. The winemaker where I work had one block she was very worried about. The fruit set was very poor this year, and this block in particular had a bunch of tiny berries on the clusters. She was at first worried that these would fall through the slits on the shaker table we use, and then decided that she didn’t want them anyway since they would be low sugar and high acid. With their permission, I grabbed a 5 gallon bucket and filled it with these tiny berries. I crushed it a bit by hand and let it ferment. Turns out the sugar was around 24 degrees brix, which is nearly identical to what the main lot was. I did once per day punch downs. I tried to keep it somewhat warm to speed it through fermentation. I had a lot of stems, and so extended stem contact would not have been good for the wine. It finished without an issue, and I pressed it by hand to get about 2 gallons of wine. I blended it with the Zinfandel that I talked about before. This wine was far better than the Zinfandel, but I didn’t want to deal with multiple different lots of wine.
The blended wine needs more acid, so I will be doing acid trials probably next week with one of the employees at work. After that, I plan to carbonate it in a keg and serve it from there. Saves me the pain of bottling it.
HEBV5 | 19 hours ago
First update since the beginning of TiMaSoMo, trying to write at least one song. I've played music for a long time and I do some solid arranging in the bands I've been in, but never seriously tried my hand at writing something whole cloth. First couple weeks were focused on thinking through things and reflecting on past experiences/attempts. Generally delayed as I prepare for an extended work trip, but I brought my instrument with it and have sat down with it on some limited evening free time and the weekend and I think I have a chorus put together!
There's not a "right" answer to work towards and I'm finding that to be a challenge. Finding a starting point was part of the difficulty; I'm heavily crimping from a song my guitarist has written by pulling a chord structure to work from as a template (great artists steal, right?) and it's given me a decent foundation. I expected lyrics to be the toughest part, but I'm finding it tricky to establish a melody (this is likely because as a bassist and backup vocalist, I'm primarily a supporting musician). I also expect a bit of back-n-forth editing between lyrics and melody, so plenty of work ahead. Still, have made solid progress and hoping to continue that towards the showcase in early November!
Habituallytired | a day ago
I have progress but nothing worth sharing. It's al slow going over here.
streblo | a day ago
I have... accomplished nothing this week!
I should have a lot more time this week though, so I'm not really stressing.
CannibalisticApple | 13 hours ago
Did some more brainstorming for the card game based on assigning way-too-deep meanings to the suits. That mainly involved studying the court cards WAY too closely for potential symbolism, particularly the Queens. (I found a site with scans of card decks. One deck for some odd reason swapped the queens for Clubs and Spades. I feel oddly offended on their behalves.)
Today I decided I'm done analyzing. There is nothing to be gained at this point, I've settled on the concepts they represent and looking at cards from the 1600's doesn't help with playing (seriously guys my notes doc includes the direction of sashes and angles of the chest hems on the Queen cards). Time to figure out ACTUAL gameplay and rules. So!
The suits represent societal aspects: Diamonds is Authority (royalty, nobility and wealth); Hearts is Culture (arts, knowledge, and shared ideas among people in general); Clubs is Religion; and Spades is Warfare.
The game's premise is the four aspects are competing for dominance in the realm, and the goal is for your suit to gain the most influence. I'm starting by trying to develop solo gameplay first because... Well, I need to test it, and easier to do that alone xD
And to that end, I somewhat shamefully turned to ChatGPT just to use as a soundboard, because A) the only solo card game I know is solitaire, and B) none of my friends are actually interested in regular playing cards, or refining the finer mechanics and balancing in game development. I had several rules/concepts in mind, just needed to bounce them off someone to figure out how to incorporate them into a game. (Most development was driven by ChatGPT making suggestions, and me automatically thinking "No, no, that's too complicated/I don't like that. This option would be better.")
I now have some good groundwork and ideas for the overall gameplay loop. It involves collecting number cards to represent "influence", and how the Jacks of Hearts and Clubs can betray their suit and join Diamonds and Spades. I still need to do actual play testing to iron out details, but I think I have a good starting point.
But! As part of this brainstorming, I came up with a neat little twist on High/Low Card that can probably stand on its own. This is untested and these rules are made with the number cards (2-10) in mind due to the nature of the greater game. It may not be properly balanced yet since it's based on the greater game... but it has balancing. When have you ever heard of "balance" when talking about high/low card??
So here's the rules for that!
Power Struggle High/Low Card
Preface: Remove all Kings, Queens and Jacks from deck. You can remove the Aces, or count them as a 1.
The four suits have a bit of a hierarchy/power balance:
So, in a matchup:
In the event of a tie:
Optional: You can collect the winning cards, and discard losing cards (hence me mentioning it in the draws). The suit with the highest number at the end wins. (And this is where the potential balancing issue could come in, it may be weighted in favor of Hearts/Clubs as a standalone.)
So at bare minimum, I've made a fairly simple variation of an existing card game. Worst case scenario, if I hit a roadblock with the greater game, I can refine/expand the gameplay around that rule set to work as proper PvP game (maybe even a 1-4 player game) for the showcase. Because I AM SUBMITTING SOMETHING TO THE SHOWCASE THIS YEAR DANGIT
But yeah, pretty satisfied with the brainstorming I did tonight. I wanted to come up with something different from the usual "get specific/bigger number" rules, and give some weight to the suits and "characters". I think I got foundations for something that has some actual strategy involved. (Particularly the traitor Jacks. That's fun.)
Next step is proper play testing and refinement! (And on that note, if anyone tries out the high/low card, let me know!)
CannibalisticApple | 11 hours ago
Update already: just did an initial playtest, and game is functional and playable! Needs balancing and other adjustments of course. I made notes on a Google doc as I played, then made a copy and cleaned it up. Pretty sure the rule set I included has all the rules I set for the first test. Here's the play test doc!
I originally considered keeping the full rules to myself until the showcase, but decided to share this because it highlights the importance of play testing in game development.
Right off the bat, I had a useless-to-me card in my hand. I also had to make a decision on a rule I hadn't fully defined in the first round. Then later, I ran into a scenario I hadn't envisioned and just made an on-the-spot rule decision. (Also fun because the odds of THAT scenario happening are probably pretty dang low, since it required a specific pair of 2 cards in one turn.) Also got lucky with the number of cards in the deck allowing for a perfect number of rounds with no leftover cards.
All of these are things that I just didn't think about in the planning phase. Before QA testing can get into breaking a game, first you need to make sure it works. This is why testing is important people!
More testing is needed obviously, but it was a good first test! It wasn't just mindless, I had to put some thought into my moves. That said, I actually barely put down any cards on my turns because of the matchups I got. Out of 13 rounds, I actually used a card from my hands... 3 times. (Oh wow. Worse than I thought.)
RNG (and subpar shuffling) definitely played a big factor in this. But in this case, RNG also basically represents "actions of 3 factions and the rest of the world", so... ¯\(ツ)/¯ It kinda makes sense lore-wise, but in terms of gameplay, maybe not so fun. Will need to do another round or two to be confirm how imbalanced it is, and then I'll need to tweak rules to make it a bit more fair.
Also, this just reminds me of how much I enjoy this aspect of game development in particular. Looking at fine mechanics, figuring out how they can interact and work together, tweaking them for balance... Probably my favorite part of game development in college, though my classes typically focused more on the programming compared to this part.
archevel | 8 hours ago
Still puttering along. Now the entire kill team minis have some paint on them. I ended up doing the basic painting on all of them instead of focusing exclusively on a few. Still need to sort out the bases, use some washes, maybe some light from some weapons etc and possibly edge highlighting. There's really not a definite "now they are done" point I'm starting to realize!