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[droqen]

Inspired by this very, very old concept by arne (concept by arne, not mine) of a remake of exile - a game which i've never played,
and some recent experiences with a few board games but especially Root,
I'm trying to get into designing a single-player game I've wanted to make for a long time about being an outsider in a big system of living factions.
Oh, and of course white lake (another game concept) and earthtongue, a released game on itch that i heartily recommend.

Currently I am playing around with grids and mazes and simple sprites. None of the art here is really representative of how I want the game to look in terms of theme or colour choices, but I like the feeling of solid tangible units and these 8x8 sprites with dead simple 2-frame animations are getting close.

Here is something I made a couple months ago that has a bunch of (very unintelligent) agents bouncing around and eating each other in a world. It's not really creating the dynamics I like but it feels so alive in a way that I love. I wouldn't want to make something quite as cluttered, I like empty space, but it just reminds me how much I like small sprites moving around.

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the way complex board games gravitate towards an ending. It seems like a crucial element I've been missing in my design of playable systems: without the idea of an ending, you have a sorta mushy thing that either

--- 1. Keeps itself balanced (hard to do without maintaining a precise state using intelligent spawners, which is kinda boring to me), or

--- 2. Slides into an extreme state (also kinda boring - in above gif prototype, the blue/red creatures (herbivores and carnivores) eventually die out and then the plants take over and it's boring).

Board games (again, see Root for primary inspiration here in terms of "complex systemic board game inspiration", but lots employ this tactic) have this slide into extreme states, but they also end. I've been fighting against the simple dichotomy of "win/lose" but I think I've also accidentally lost the idea of "endings," and a system that terminates is incredibly valuable. Detecting when there's nowhere interesting to go and calling it quits is how you make sure you spend the most time in the interesting parts of system runtime.

[droqen]

thinking about three factions who are all 'activated' in different ways during your entry into the world

- plants: supposing you're in some kind of craft, you smash into a hermetically-sealed facility and this allows plants to start growing from the outside. maybe you don't crash, and you just crack open a singular hole, but a crash seems messier and more likely to make it impossible to prevent the plants from spreading. plants are drawn to certain things that other factions don't care about. light? water?

- neon ants: glowing ants that leave trails of light in a similar way to how real ants leave scent trails? i dunno. i like thinking about these guys building nests of eggs. if not dealt with, the eggs hatch into way more ants, but they're easy to find because literally all the ants do is make nests and then search for food to bring back to their nests. they start in one place but spread quickly. maybe they're in hibernation (eggs) and just wake up (hatch) when disturbed and new food is introduced-- the aforementioned plants.

- maintenance robots: a strictly limited supply of robots that are trying to repair/rebuild everything in the facility. activated by your crash because reasons. originally these were sort of a "peacekeeper" faction but i was thinking about Root's "peacekeeper" faction, the Cats, and they're not really keeping the peace, they're actually trying to expand! they get points by constructing new buildings. they just start with all the turf in the game. so the robots need a more active role - i'm thinking the entire map is covered in broken machine features that you can fix, and the robots are setting off on the basically impossible task of fixing everything. the key thing, though, is that they're not just a peaceful faction hanging out trying to maintain the status quo -- instead, they have an endgame, a goal that you can hopefully see them striving to complete.

maybe i'll go back to my old design where they're maintaining the status quo if this turns out to be too chaotic, but i think the way each faction is designed to escalate the action will work out well.

[droqen]

rudimentary tests on thinking about "board-game-like" logic and entities who spread - i played some Civilization (the old board game) and the idea of 'doubling until capacity has been reached so that you must spread' is a good one, and unlike something like Root (or Chess), in Civilization (the old board game, but I guess the videogame too) every individual piece takes action on your turn, rather than you as a player choosing to take a limited number of specific actions, selecting 1 specific piece out of your pool of 16, while the rest stay peacefully in place.



so here are some little blinking green things moving around and trying to find a peaceful place to sit and duplicate.

[droqen]

just running at 11x is very satisfying. they spread out and don't overpopulate!

[droqen]

with that basic stuff out of the way i'm focusing on some structurally differentiated faction behaviour.

current demo faction is closest to "plants". they spread out without too much concern for anything except overcrowding. i'll make multiple independent factions of plants that can coexist without too much trouble.

the "robots" faction i'd like to feel kinda like playing against a coordinated but small group - a handful of builder units are just building everywhere they can. i'd like them to spread out throughout the map though!
> so they prioritize constructing buildings that are as far as possible, path-wise, from any other building. > oh! which makes sense if they need to return to these structures to "refuel". they spread the construction out because they want all spaces on the map to be within x cells of a building > very likely there are a few types of building. so there is sort of a "root node" structure that has the above-described behaviour, and other structures fill out those already-occupied spaces.

the "ants" faction is difficult, because i wanted them to draw visible lines of light connecting them to food sources... so they could bring food back to vulnerable nests... and that sounds hard but maybe i'll just start with one fixed nest that never moves, and they're always bringing food back there (where does food come from though?)


and then... how do factions interact? do they fight? they could fight over the "food" resource that i've decided the ants need.
here is an older gif of ants carrying water (from top-right source, invisible, and to bottom-left). i'll probably employ a similar visual strategy where the "food" is just some kind of object drawn on top of whoever's carrying it.

> ants memorize their path as they wander. if they find food, they lock in that memorized path and try to carry food home along it. they patrol back and forth, building on top of this scent trail until it's strong enough (over a few trips) that other ants actually start to notice it rather than sticking to their own paths. ants prefer trails that are very strong, but in the case of a near-tie will always prefer their own path. i'll have to use relatively stable food sources. WHhoaaa maybe the food source is something the player can just pick up and move around...

anyway. this is a good base. will probably post gifs later today.

[droqen]

current status: robots are super weak, whereas i think plants and ants are both equally likely to dominate. generally based on whoever gets to the food sources first. it's an interesting dynamic between them: the ants consume the food, while the plants just hang out and benefit from being near the food. (the food is that little pile of white circles.)

game status: still not a game! maybe i'll add a player avatar soon, but my goal is to make it fun to play with, not to make a real game. i'll probably end up making a real game anyway tho.

[droqen]

i finally captured it! an ant who's memorized a silly route to get to the food.

(unless this route becomes clogged and impassible and not worth the trouble anymore, this ant will keep walking this specific path back and forth until the food is all gone.)

[Alce]

Fascinating to read the thought process behind a simulation like this. Looking forward to reading more!

[alvarop]

tracking, droq.
 

[droqen]

Hello, welcome! I haven't touched it in a couple days, I was working through some messy af thoughts about what makes systems engaging and interesting and yelling on twitter about how perfect information games don't exist and then I wanted to make a game about really deterministic chain reactions? Except I never got to the deterministic part, and instead I made this



You can 'chip away' at the jewels (physics objects with what are effectively 'springs', and if you stretch the 'spring' far enough it snaps and the jewel is destroyed (in a game you'd probably collect it)) but it's impossible to get the ones that are too well-supported by their neighbours. This seemed like a fun thing to play around with so I might work on it some more today and get back to outsider after I'm done with this weird jewel-chipping game.

[droqen]

oops https://droqen.itch.io/being-jeweled

[droqen]

Thought about this for a while and I'd like to move in the direction of the player having some more direct control over a faction!

I had an idea for a game about being a doctor and screwing around with the delicate balance of people's insides.

Here is a gif of it from mid- last year!



I'm thinking about three basic factions that relate to each other and the player in consistent ways:

VIRUS - You always want to kill this faction, if possible. It is slow-moving!
BODY - You always want this to be the last faction standing.
MEDICINE - You have the most control over this faction: you can introduce as much medicine as you'd like! But...

All three factions fight each other indiscriminately, so introducing a ton of MEDICINE to fight VIRUS can destroy the BODY faction even more quickly than if you'd just stayed out of it. I'd like it if sometimes you need to fight VIRUS in small doses, allowing it to cause harm because the alternative is to do worse yourself.

Anyway, this is just thematic paint, the dynamic I'm interested in is:

> Three factions all fight each other
> Your most powerful actions support Faction #1,
> But you want Faction #2 to win.

edit: And really importantly my answer to the question of, "how does the player actually act upon the world" is answered in those points! You can support Faction #1. This is your primary form of agency.

[droqen]

something about these pills feels really satisfying to me.
this is all i've really managed to get done today in a new subproject (moved from 10-outsider to 11-insider lol)


i still have to play around with this, of course, but i like the idea of an attack - something you really do have to do - as something that has pretty severe side-effects. right now i'm thinking every time you take a shot, these pills blindly wander around for the rest of the level, becoming obstacles or possibly hazards for you. near the end you can see how cluttered spamming gets!

[droqen]

If enemies (both medicine and viruses) follow you and the body is safe but the virus hurts you, hiding in body is safe but endangers the body, and hiding in virus is dangerous but coaxes medicine into virus to make them fight.

[jb]

I love all of your gifs! Seeing all of these small creatures moving around is really intriguing. I'm not sure if the human body aspect is the most exciting to me but maybe I just need to see more. Watching the ants gather water was really captivating. I think you could get away with less of a game (like Earthtounge) if there is enough content or progression to make discovering and observing new elements worth it. It is amazing how that game is made so much more meaningful with the encyclopedia/journal mechanic. Hope to keep seeing more!

[droqen]

From the experience I've had showing people my 'being jeweled' project, I realized in retrospect I found the encyclopedia in Earthtongue really valuable because it let me look at the systems in a new light - now I understood why certain things were happening and it sort of unlocked a new perspective. rather than being on the outside trying to hypothesize underlying behaviours I was allowed onto the inside trying to see those underlying behaviours enact change in the world.

It felt good!

I'm going to vancouver for a couple weeks so don't expect any updates here for a while. this thread shall take a rest.