silas of trees

i've been toying around with a ttrpg game system that uses a mind map/conspiracy pin board for story development and gameplay kind of like the Outer Wilds ship log, and recently Alan Wake 2 kind of did a similar thing with folders and case boards. this looks like it does something similar but in ttrpg form- i think i'll have to pick it up!

A strategy game of exploring solar systems and overcoming a hostile universe, set aboard the Auriga Vault, an interstellar gothic monastery. Venture into solar systems with a crew of Exiles, the last inhabitants of doomed Vault. Explore procedurally generated solar systems, harvest resources and artifacts, and survive by creating Stasis to keep your Exiles alive during hibernation.

the Banished Vault is somewhat deceptive, given its appearance. it looks and sounds at first blush like a moody sort of turn-based roguelike, perhaps like Darkest Dungeon, but the actual gameplay is as the store page presents it: a board game style resource management game. it's still moody, of course, and the atmosphere has a sci-fi horror short story style to it. aesthetically, the illustrated bits remind me of the board game Ascension, which has a similar sort of hand-drawn, nearly wood-cut style.

don't expect a lot of in-depth "lore" or long form narrative- i doubt anyone will want to have a wiki to read for the details of this game's world, but i think that's really a mark in its favor. the sparseness of details it gives you on the world mirrors the sparseness of space, with just as much potential in those empty spaces. while it is a very vibes based game, it is also a bit like if Chess had a sick soundtrack and you got to read a few cool lines of prose whenever you reached checkmate. it might be best to approach it with that sort of expectation in mind.

the friction that you might detect on playing the game and interacting with the ui appears to be intentional. it is smooth where it wants to be smooth, and harsh where it doesn't. the game is explicitly uninterested in giving you much of any resource tracking or calculator outside of the energy calculator and the handy numbers by each resource icon in the inventory. you can easily imagine the resources being presented as small tokens in a board game, so it mirrors the same lack of automated tracking.

full disclosure on the game's difficulty: i have only fully finished one journey of the game and i think i was probably pretty lucky to do so. i have had several other less successful runs, and the lack of any kind of undo or save ability made for a pretty harsh experience. there is the option to restart a system once or unlimited amount of times, depending on the difficulty you'd like to go with. that's pretty close to allowing saves, given the very mechanistic nature of the mechanics - you just have to remember what moves you made on the last run. regardless, if you want a chill time without too much deep thought, this game is probably not going to be your jam.

Frogress Bar Simulator 2023

Feat. @numberonebug

What???: Check out this post.

Note: Don't see anything? Frogress Bar Simulator 2023 does not work with reduced motion enabled.

a dog with a dataset

frogress bar

now

from an article in gamedeveloper, "Jerked Around by the Magic Circle - Clearing the Air Ten Years Later" by Eric Zimmerman:

Focusing on the math in making a game (such using a spreadsheet to juggle the relative experience point level-up curves of different classes in an RPG) might mean temporarily suspending a critical awareness of (for example) the sociocultural identity of the player base.

However, eventually the RPG designer would need to connect the pure math to the game's play and to its culture. A level-up experience point curve implies a certain tempo of play advancement relative to a reward/frustration pattern of desire.

And the shape of this play is certainly something that should be designed relative to an understanding of a particular kind of player's expectations and assumptions -- aspects of player attitudes that are closely tied to sociocultural identity.

In other words, the math bone is connected to the culture bone. [emphasis added]

you just gotta love the exasperation as the writer tries to explain that the "magic circle" concept is not like a literal magic Circle of Protection from Culture and Context

i'm reading this in context of a later article here: "Torture, Play, and the Black Experience" by Aaron Trammell