The Inevitable Slowdown

School has started back for the year, and tha invariably means that my number of posts starts to slow down. It also doesn't really help that my wife has moved for work to a town that's an hour drive away. So a lot of the time that I might be oorganising and writing blog posts I'm now spending travelling in a car across the rural outback.

This is getting me in the mood to complete the Walkabout game, but I've dedicated my immediate future to finalising the Familiar project. It's kind of a tricky choice. One's a game about surviving the post-apocalypse by working together and overcoming many of the issues that brought about societal collapse (without falling into worse situations against monstrous creatures that are the embodiment of hubris and corruption)... the other is a game about restoring magic to a world where it has been captured and crushed by an oligarchy over the course of centuries, and enjoying the little things in a society caught between oppression and indifference.  

 

Thankfully, they tell similar stories, use a similar system, and I've often considered Familiar to be a prequel to Walkabout... so any work on one basically helps lay the groundwork for the other.

While digging through a bunch of old external hard drives, the I've found the code for the earlier Familiar character generation platform I'd been working on. I've also found a few of the working documents I'd been using to think through some issues in the game. This is probably why it's sometimes good to take a step away from a project every now and then. The stuff that I've looked at for the games "fruitful void" in recent posts was narrowed down and refined in previous iterations of the game. This is both a good thing and a bad thing.

I'd created an array of 78 tarot cards that was shuffled, then used the first 5 cards to generate the character... but to maximise the use of the randomised array, I plucked later cards from the sequence to activate certain random effects in the generator using a cascading series of priorities. Was the character born male or female? Did they present themselves as male, female, or androgynous? Were they attracted to those who identified (or presented) as men, women, or androgynous? Did they belong to a minority ethnicity for their community? Were they physically impaired in some way (cosmetically or otherwise)? Did tey have some form of neurodivergence? There had to be some way in which the character was marginalised for them tto be considered a viable symbiotic link for a familiar withi the game.

Forcing someone to be pigeon-holed is problematic thinking in the game, especially when the essence of the narrative is based around identity and what that identity might mean to someone. I'm still thinking of including this sort of random identity assignment for players who are struggling to develop ideas on their own, but it feels a bit heavy handed to force this sprt of thing on to every player....it really goes against the essence of the game. It's like that whole adage of forcing a cat into a box beig a whole lot harder than allowing a cat to sit in a box of their own free will. 

There's a few other bits and pieces that certainly need streamlining, but thanks to the helpful comment from many folks over the last week or so, I now know some much smoother ways to ensure certain tasks are resolved in the program (via dictionaries and other python tricks). 

The last thing to note here is a return to an old system based on the documentation I've uncovered. It goes back to the "Otherkind Dice" nature of the system, an instead of modifying a single die to determine whether extra motivation is gathered by a character based on the injustices seen around them, they might roll a cluster of six sided dice. One die if they see an injustice, and an extra die for every identifier they have with the person/people who are being subjected to the issue. I'm wondering if the whole systems has started deviating away from that idea too far... I guess we'll only know with playtesting.

Anyway... back to the grindstone.