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[recycicle]

mortemized! will be a text based game where you live in a small post apocalyptic community of super complex NPC’s. it will be a living project, and as such it will never truly be finished. i will consider the game done when the NPC’S begin questioning whether or not they’re in a simulation, without being programmed to do so. the game will be playable sooner than never, though.

each of the NPC’s will have things to do and places to go, and relationships and beliefs and stuff. basically they’ll all have lives, and you’ll just be entering into those lives rather than being like a hero or a leader or really anyone of central importance to the community. you CAN still be those things, you have to get those reputations on your own.

i plan to have a pseudo-dialogue system that’s based on individual words '''(QUESTION) [YOU] [HAVE] [BUG CHIPS]''', that processed by the characters to generate thoughts, and those thoughts generate words and memories and feelings, all of which are described using this language model. characters may interact with you of their own volition, a construct i have not seen in many games. the WordBlock system i came up with translates basic words into '''Rick asks you if you have Bug Chips.'''

when i get further into development(currently i’m struggling with the UI. UI design, along with basic syntax, are the hardest parts of coding for me), you’ll be able to do pretty much anything.
like… start a company and buy off up all the shops in a town, or spread rumors and lies to get someone ousted from a public office, or get involved in a love triangle, or join a club of tight knit Bros who sneak around at night to vandalize people’s houses. the genre of the game can vary wildly based on both your actions and those of the NPC’S .

before i make the playable mode, i’ll make a sort of history generator where you can read the character’s actions like a book.
the next post in this tidily redesigned log will show my planned list of features.

[recycicle]

here is my list of planned features.
key:

• still mostly in my head
• fully planned out on paper
  
• partially in code
  
• finished and very glitchy
  
• finished and only a little glitchy
  

CHARACTER PSYCHES

• dozens of emotions arranged in binaries (joy/sadness, confidence/betrayal)
  
• idle thoughts when not focusing on something, where the person’s mind flows from concept to concept based on associations they form over time
• beliefs, values, and goals
• people gravitate towards people with similar attributes to them
• relationships & impressions of others
• different ways of expressing and reacting to their emotions
• devise and revise ways to to achieve goals, ranging from humble & mundane plans to villainous plots
• decisions made based on Maslov’s hierarchy (bodily health & sustenance, safety, social acceptance, then fulfillment)

• memories of facts they believe to be true based on what they’ve experienced or heard from others these facts may or not be true.
  this allows for rumors, deceptions, conspiracies, relationship drama, and really opens up a massive window of possibilities.

• passion projects, hobbies, topics of curiosity & research
• dream jobs, favorite idle activities
• favorite books/entertainment, and authors/entertainers
• religions, superstitions, spirituality
• crushes, one way relationships, parasocial relationships with popular people
• different manners of coping, showing empathy/affection

COMMUNTIY

• clubs & cliques
• political parties
• societies (groups with members in various positions of influence, allowing those who join to have benefits)
• celebrities, outcasts, leaders & influencers
• town pride & rivalries
• skilled trades & training schools
• entrepreneurs creating new services
• chain shops & formation companies
• town government
• internal and inter-town politics
• crime rings & gangs
• item-based economy in which people trade things directly

universal Central Bank that collects & catalogs items, creating standardized item values

• some people won’t care about item values
• the actual structure and practices of the bank can vary greatly, from transparent & nonprofit to greedy & power hungry

money-making schemes

• trying to monopolize supply of a specific item
• false banks & Central Bank collectors
• embezzlement
• sabotage of business competitors
• heists, robberies, hostages

art and book creation

• fiction, poetry, historical records, opinion essay, biography, diary, how-to, almanac/reference

drawings, sculptures, paintings, photos, engravings, ect.


GAME FUNCTIONS

• a language system that looks like: ‘‘‘(COMMAND) [YOU] [EAT] [PINEAPPLE] (IMMEDIATE PRESENCE)’’’ and turns it into ‘‘‘Rufio commands you to eat the pineapple.’’’
• a map generator
  
• a pseudo history generator that renders characters interactions for as long as you want until you decide that you want to enter the world
• a ‘‘‘reader mode’’’ allowing you to watch the history unfolding via a feed that shows the actions of selected characters
• at least 75 different items to provide a variable economy
  
• a sort of crappy name generator
  
  
  
  

[recycicle]

take a long, hard look at these UI buttons i crafted in study hall. marvel at their graceful form and heavenly hue. they are the very model of beauty in design. any art school graduate who looks upon these masterpieces will begin to weep tears of shame, shame for the mediocrity of their own creations, knowing the ovens of their minds could never bake a confection that could compare to the sublimity of these three morsels of pixelled perfection.

uh, wait. that first one is not a button. it’s the mortemized! logo. whatever, my rant still stands.

shitposting aside, i should probably have a test UI programmed by Friday(or Monday.) it will be programmed in React.js.

[recycicle]

after approximately 3 school hours of fussing with only mildly frustrating CSS, i made the first page of mortemized! it’s a major achievement for me, because i’m currently not very good at CSS, or the other Web3 languages. i’m typically pretty good at conceiving of website and app designs, but this is the first time i’ve accurately reproduced one.

by the way, those masterpieces i made last post are now obsolete. time to figure out how to to routing in React, so i can add the other pages.

if you would like to give me pointers on cleaning up my slop trough of an editing environment, or just check out the game’s progress, here’s the current location. it may change slightly from time to time, my school’s wifi keeps trying to block the website i’m hosting and editing on, forcing me to alter the project’s name.

[recycicle]

sorry if i’m a bit slow in the process of making the UI. writing CSS is like running through the the desert while on fire, in search of a lake to jump into. it sucks, but DAMN it feels good when you get where you want to.

over the weekend, while waiting for a friend to arrive so we can plan our future roommate situation when i get the boot upon graduating(he didn’t show), i wrote out a bunch of algorithms on paper for how the dialogue system, which i’m coming to realize will be the backbone of the entire game. the characters’ thoughts, memories, and yes, dialogue will be built on it, as well as the game’s narration of events and descriptions. also, the contents of books and such will rely on this. probably tomorrow i’ll post an outline of one of the ways a character processes inputted dialogue, and turns it into a thought.

[recycicle]

hello, humans. i’m still fussing with the UI, but in the meantime, i’ve been working on some MECHANICS. and i was being melodramatic when i said i would be kicked out once i graduate. nothing of the sort is happening. this relevation will make the ThatGuyGlen video of this game much less compelling, while this sentence will make it much more self-deprecatingly narcissistic.
in the event that no one else has made a dialogue system based on individual words, i’m naming it Word Block to avoid a more technical name being created out of it. here’s an infographic describing a bit of it.

[recycicle]

'''sincer'''

[recycicle]

hello, humans.

okay, here’s an update on my long, convoluted internal dialogue over the past 6 days. i watched a cool video

, which led me to a cool game, which caused me to become INSPIRED and almost drop my current project(this one) as i deep fried my brain for ideas that embodied the vibe i got from those cool links. i sound like a hippie. i just like the word '''vibe''', because vibes. ANYWAY. sometimes i find out about a creation, or an event, that i find really, vaguely cool, which causes me to want to make my own idea, or search through my own crushing catalogue of ideas, that captures the essence or feel of the thing. that’s what i mean.

i’m veering off course. i made a paper board game over the weekend. i also made about 50 more item ideas, fleshed out the language model a little more, and drew some self indulgent fanart.



these are not stylized depictions of people, they are anatomically correct renderings of what humans would look like in mortemized!, had it been graphical. but that’s a whole thing we don’t need to get into right now.

i’ve decided that rather skip the UI portion of coding and cut right to the meat. i’m better at logic than i am at syntax and styling. probably tomorrow i will put up a post looking for someone who can throw together a bare-bones React page using the surprisingly good designs i made in Canva.


so anyway, as i get that squared away, i’ve started working on what is arguably the biggest hurdle to developing this game: the language system. i will start out with 100 verbs, probably 100 adjectives, and all necessary nouns(the items, and words for things like time and land and such) i’m writing them as a JSON text file like this:

it’s fairly repetitive and easy, but it will take a long time. right now i am working on the inflections of the verbs, using only the ones that i think i will need. i could use any and all help you may want to give(bad sentence), so here’s the link if you have some spare time. i will post the list of verbs requiring entering, in the same format seen above, in the next upload.

[recycicle]

these are the verbs i’m starting with, they are just what came up when i Ecosia’d '''100 most common verbs'''. i am absolutely certain that i will need to add more to make the game functional, but it’s a start.

• say
• call
• ask
• tell
• talk
• speak
• go
• come
• leave
• run
• move
• follow
• get
• make
•   know 
• think
•    take
•    see
•   could
•   want
•   look
• find
•   give
•   work
•   may
•   should
• try
• need
• feel
• become
• put
• keep
• let
• begin
• seem
• help
• turn
• start
• might
• show
• hear
• play
• like
• live
• believe
• hold
• bring
• happen
• must
• write
• provide
• sit
• stand
• lose
• pay
• meet
• include
• continue
• set
• learn
• change
• understand
• watch
• stop
• create
• read
• allow
• add
• spend
• grow
• open
• walk
• win
• offer
• remember
• love
• consider
• appear
• buy
• wait
• serve
• die
• send
• expect
• build
• fall
• cut
• reach
• kill
• remain
• mean
• lead
[/b]

at least one of those verbs has no conjugations, so ignore it if you’re helping.

[Pako]

Most people I know who tried to make such a large scale projects usually quit a quarter way there, so good luck  .

Anyway, the game you're describing sounds similar to Dwarf Fortress, so if you're ever in need of some 'inspiration' , you can check the game (I think the code is open source but I'm not sure).

[recycicle]

it does sound a bit like Dwarf Fortress. i came up with it a while before i knew of DF’s existence, in… 10th grade? sometime during the lockdown. finding Tarn’s masterpiece is partly what caused me to start focusing on this project again after leaving to gather dust for a few years.

i HOPEFULLY won’t quit, but i will certainly pause from time to time, because i have many, many other plans.

[recycicle]

i am going to start remaking the code in a different editor, because my school network likes to block Glitch.me. Glitch.me also just sucks.

[recycicle]

THOUGHTS SINCE YESTERDAY:

the map generator gets more complex each time i start scribbling it down on paper. i would already be finished with the paper plans if i didn’t keep getting distracted by the cool board game prototype i made. it involves generating the original world, with elevation, sea level, soil fertility, weather, ect. then it calculates the vegetation and civilizations(basically just empty cities). then it skews all the stats like temp and sea level and changes the properties of vegetation(trees -> rubber mushrooms). it is a lot less complicated and in-depth than i’m making it sound, though… you’re picturing Dwarf Fortress of Caves of Qud. Picture those, but made by a lazy ADHD teenager.

another thing: i found out that this cool game allows you to install it as an IOS app without the use of the app store. you just add the page to your homescreen,  installing it as a web app available offline. i am SUPER excited about this, because i intend to have all my stuff available for free, on every OS, without the use of external platforms. what i mean is i’ll have all my games and webcomics and stuff available on my websites that i haven’t made yet, and those websites will be installable as offline archives.

[recycicle]

approximately 3 school hours of battle with Github.dev, and i have finally achieved this:


i’ve been researching PWA’s today, and i consumed some great knowledge. for example, i now know that an installable web app is called a '''PWA'''.
the road should be smoother ahead than it was today. i’m done coding today, because i am teetering on the edge of ADHD hyperfixation.

[recycicle]

i no longer need to look for someone to do the React UI for me, because i found an extension titled Sculp UI on github.dev. it’s cool. it lets you sculpt the UI.

[recycicle]

today i’ll be scraping my shit together into a coherent Plan. i will first create a sort of mod editor—the Mortemized Moddificator—before working on some Other Stuff. the moddificator will mostly make adding in all the WordBlock logic easier. i’ll get back to you later.

[recycicle]

hello, humans. i’m a bit busy today… unfinished assignments, English project due in 2 days, the works. the mod editor is looking pretty good, and over the weekend i ambitionized it into oblivion with the lightspeed circuitfry clusterfuck that is my ADHD brain. here’s a pic:

[recycicle]

i also realized that a Moddificator would produce Modifications. Modifications is a real word, which simply will not do. the editor is now called the Moddimalyzer, and it produces Moddimalyzations.

[recycicle]

expect to see a new, darker color palette he next time i start posting screenshots.

[recycicle]

english project is FINISHED. while i was doing that, i found a beautiful note taking app/website: https://okso.app/

i’ve been using it a lot, because it has an endless canvas, and you can put pages inside of pages inside of pages insi….



i think i’ll be able to bear down on some leet haxxor projects today. i might have a passable Moddimalyzer by friday.