Godot Returnal

I have managed to somehow regain my capacity for actually making things after what seemed like months of losing said literacy.

Where were you for months???

I believe it crucial to understand that I was spending considerable sums of time pursuing multiple goes at analog prototypes, spreadsheets for reference game data and iterations that all hammered at a question I kept having- what is the core gameplay of all this stuff? What is the core point of what I am doing with 70+ stat types? How do species play into it?

In an earlier prototype I was very preoccupied with temperature's affects on player stats, especially with the relationship between processing and hull resilience in pursuing a positioning based tradeoff mechanism. The issue was that temperature management simply was tedious even at the prototype level. It didn't really add anything that a 'mode' augment didn't and positioning via geometry and hazards in the game world along with media density already gave a lot of environmental meta. And that is before the scanner mechanic was realized as a critical mechanic for interfacing with the game world outside of simply rote combat.

One of the things that made the December prototype an unweldly mess was that it simply put, had horrid scalability and got excessively clunky. It was very much me jamming in mechanics to see how they play out and any future iteration would need to find a way to better handle all the processing alterations and factors that altered the max processing per tic a player has.

I also have been back and forth on top-down vs isometric. Top-down won out as I didn't think the drone management and scanning mechanics drafted out needed isometric perspective and it just is easier on my end as making 12+ sprites for everything is just not in scope. Perhaps if this becomes something people care about enough to actually subsidize via donations on Kofi that might change but at this time smaller proof of concept missions is what I view as the quickest way to get feedback from people.

The Datasetting

Another thing I had done was what can be considered a form of preproduction involving datasets on 'paradigms' and 'substrates' etc. for the various sapients my setting has in a way that I felt could be quickly iterated on and applied to game logic. I already have a script that produces JSONs out of it but the scale is such I feel like an SQLite approach is also necessary. I wanted to use it as testing out some dev ops stuff just because as well, mainly with messing around a bit with oracle.

All of the stagnation emerged from trying to figure out the best way to go about the cyborg creator again, of which kept occurring because I kept jumping ahead to it despite not solidifying a clear model of what the player does, what kind of game it is and what the impact of cyborg mods actually mean. Some of this is because in 2024 the Daedalus System was actually meant to be a more narrative RP deal where traits given were basically player flavor / situational checks like the Missile Merchant trait meaning you are good at handling homing missiles. As I exist in a feedback blackhole that failed to get any interest, I had gone back to the drawing board and feel like the daedalus bot never really got used well. It did teach me a lot about databasing and gave me some dev ops muscle I didn't at all have before but it didn't even get a small base of interest. There just was no audience for it.

Solutions?

One of the things I attempted was to build out social media presence some more via bluesky, but bluesky didn't deliver on what people claimed about it. I was told I would get more human engagement but there was just a total indifference to any of my ventures, illustrations, scifi thoughts or lorebits there. It felt like I had no idea who to even talk to about my prototypes or lore or even illustrations. Constantly just a wall of indifference.

And that does get demotivating more than I had realized. If only because I seem to at least need 4-5 people to care about something I do and there needs to be more than 2 people who care about this.

So I had to think differently. I had neglected the ghost blog, sidetracked again and again by all sorts of weird things. Be it addictions or simply forgetting to despite having something made. I did make those module boards for the cyborg creator, but I didn't bother blogging about it. I did make an elaborate spreadsheet, but I didn't bother blogging about it. I did make detailed illustrations about one of my major sapients, but I didn't bother blogging about it.

Such lack of communication appears to be an issue along with the lack of core hook for Epoch 7903.

To address this, no idea. I work in ways not too congruent with theme despite having thematic elements in motifs and the general seeking of a setting where biological and technological evolution blur and the aliens suffer from similar tortured evolutionary development to our own species.

And this is all sort of tangential to the game itself. Said game had too much core complexity, too much mantle without a clear core. Temperature management, modular cyborg creators, multiple sapients and such all are things that come after figuring out the baseline game and yet I kept thinking of mantle or even crustal features where I needed to make the minimum viable. At some point I was watching someone talk about games made in the 90's that gave me an epiphany.

They were games that were simple and highly defined in their interactions, they weren't games trying to layer up thermal and drone management onto the player along with constantly managing processing power for every little action taken.

So I revised the player and game loop to remove processing costs from movement and just not deal with any drone management for the time being. No thermal management, it didn't make sense for an advanced encounter suit to expect manual thermal management anyways. I also made sure to write down every control the player would have (short of revisions to swapping should it scale up too much to be a button press swap, weldable inputs are the most subject to change).

Control Schema

• Basic Movement
  • WASD / Arrow Keys
    • Forward (move forwards relative to the focal)
    • Backward (move backwards relative to the focal)
    • Left ('left' strafe relative to the focal)
    • Right ('right' strafe relative to the focal)
  • Aim (rotates character to look at where the focal is, rotation handling may be slowed or absent in some situations like in a strafing move or rapid movement)
• Actions
  • Weldable Operation - Left Mouse (clicking or holding down depends on weldable)
  • Scan Operation - Right Mouse (hold down or click depends on scan module, scan operations happen where the focal is)
  • Special Operation - Spacebar (varies)
  • Move Operation - Shift (operations that change movement operation modality, never is a hold down as it is tic cool down based)
  • Timescale Shift Up - r (increases timescale, tics are faster, per press)
  • Timescale Shift Down - f (decreases world timescale, tics are slower, per press)
• Swaps
  • Swap Move Operation - X (swaps move operation, per press and unlikely to be scaling problem for now)
  • Swap Weldable - E (Swaps the welded tool, might be a scaling issue)
  • Swap Scan Operation - C (Swaps the scanning mode)
  • Swap Special Operation - Z (swaps the special operation, per press and unlikely to be a scaling issue)
  • Swap Arm - 3 (swaps arm/position the weldable is held by the character/borg. With a human that just means left/right arms)
• Meta
  • TAB - Overview Screen - TAB (unclear usecase, the menu for character/noosphere data basically)
  • Esc - Exit Screen - Esc (screen that has options and return to main menu etc.)

As I likely will continue to blog now that I have managed to get myself to, make sure to sign up!