Traverse Fantasy

That's right. Naming this update for the Big Man himself because it's just that big. I almost considered naming it instead for one of my favorite tween boy-bands-slash-reality-television-shows, Big Time Rush, and the episode centered on their song Halfway There, because (let's see if I remember it correctly) we're almost kinda sorta close to being halfway there. Check out the widget below to download the game or visit the Itch page, or keep reading to learn about what I have in store after months of constant deliberation and anal-retentive bullshit. Resourciv by Traverse Fantasy Economy Good-bye to markets where granular goods meet granular needs. The angels revealed to me a new approach to economic simulation, one which sounds similar to how I had once envisioned this game would function much earlier on. Output yields are back and simple. You can allocate percents of a population in each city to each yield, using Cobb-Douglas to determine how much is generated each ...

I’m somewhat a connoisseur of cozy slop games. Ever since I played Harvest Moon (since renamed to Story of Seasons —don’t play games with me, kid) and Rune Factory via emulator in middle school, I’ve been trying to recapture the high of these Precious Moments looking baby farmer things. I followed Stardew Valley since long before it was published, and when it came out (though it was very impressive as a project and certainly fun) I wasn’t fully down with its aesthetic. Since it blew up, there have been so many takes on the formula that preteen me wouldn’t have had to download sketchy apps on my phone to scratch my itch, but a lot of them are lazy and sloppy and skirt by on there being now a massive audience for what have become known as “cozy games”. My favorite entry in the genre (far from being slop) is Fields of Mistria , but it’s in early access and PC-only, which means I can’t play it on my coral Switch Lite. So I was in the market and found a game which, though its premise doe...

Okayyy this is going to be a lot. Had a breakthrough so I don’t feel quite done yet. Hex Assignment One of the original benefits of discrete peeps was determining where they lived. You could hover over a city or suburb to see how many peeps live there, and whether there was any surplus housing or homeless vagrants (due to lacking housing). This felt mostly great, but it was missing something: the system presumed from the onset a division between one's home and one's workplace, as well as a division between the urban and rural (in that peeps, from the get-go, live in urban centers). So I made a weird decision. To start,  no one  lives in the center. You can imagine it as a sort of ritual meeting place such as Catalhoyuk is theorized as having been. Instead, peeps start out filling rural hexes, 1 peep per hex, and that rural hex serves both as their 'home' and as their 'workplace'. Peeps only live in the city when assigned to an urban workplace (which can't se...

I've been struggling with how I kinda really hate game design. No matter if I play things or run things or design things, the number one thing I hate is cruft masquerading as complexity. I like messing with dynamics and seeing what happens when multiple intersect, but I don't like having lots of levers and dials that you need to optimize in order to play well, especially when it all turns out to be a "solved game" of knowing what to do every time. This makes me more of a cutter than a creator, sometimes, like how my personal  D&D  rules boil down (my idea of) the game into extremely discrete, structural dynamics. This has proven a blessing and a curse for  Resourciv , my civ-like computer game, in that I'm terrified of adding anything for fear of making it needlessly complex—but then I don't add anything at all. I've been constantly saying over the last few months that I am running up against game design, and now I'm standing in front of a wall. Le...

Smaller post! I've made a deranged change to the structure of Resourciv . Every team now acts at random intervals; initially, this can be once every 1 to 20 years, but the maximum possible frequency will decrease as individual teams discover communication technologies (not important yet). This means the game gets "faster" as time goes on, but not arbitrarily. I don't like the tendency of later Civ games to railroad history. I'm thinking especially of the three-era system announced for Civ VII , and even the global era system in Civ VI , where historical eras are global rather than entered by individual civilizations. I don't like eras in general, since they reflect a specifically European teleology of history. However, it's better when (at least) these eras are civilizationally specific rather than imposed globally. It's even worse when specific cultures are put into specific era-buckets in Civ VII . Combine that with the world literally expanding bet...

What the hell happened to this, right? I think I like to rotate my hobbies every couple of weeks, so I've been back on this. I'm just going to walk through what it all looks like right now. First, I made a nicer-looking main menu from which you can actually pick a culture, a world type, and a world size. Each one of the 32 cultures has its own icon, now, which I pulled mostly from CC art (thank you, Game-icons.net !) and some obscure national flags. My partner offered to make splash art, which I would super appreciate (💖) but don't want to hold her to. In the meantime or either way, I used a random render of a ziggurat from Google Images as a temporary background. May add advanced settings for aridity, erosion, and geomass. Here's the 32 cultures, give me a drum roll... Akkadian, Algonquian, Arabic, Bantu, Canaanite, Celtic, Chinese, Dravidian, Egyptian, Germanic, Hellenic, Hindi, Igbo, Iranian, Iroquoian, Japonic, Korean, Kushite, Latin, Mayan, Mongolian, Nahuan, Numi...

I’m not a gamer. I had friends in high school that were, and sometimes I would play with them, but I’m not very literate about video games in general. Minecraft is fun! Pokémon is cute. I like Story of Seasons and Rune Factory . That last one was got me in a bit of a bind. My partner watches video game streamers to sleep, so when we sleep together she’ll ask me to play something for her. So one night, I was playing Rune Factory 3 , and it fundamentally bothered her that all the characters I was shrieking about looked just like Precious Moments figurines. Actually embarrassing. There is really no difference. So she gave me $20 for me to buy another game we were looking at, but was sort of expensive ($50) for what it was: Fashion Dreamer , more a toy than a game, where you dress up digital avatars belonging to yourself or to other players. You acquire new items just by “liking” them on the game’s social network, and any item you use to dress up someone’s avatar can be liked and used ...