Traverse Fantasy

Some more Resourciv updates! These are actually implemented in-game, but they have implications for how I design leading forward. Production I was giving myself a headache thinking about how, whether I increased the granularity of populations or kept it as unitary as it is now, I would need to deal with the most annoying part of economic games: allocating labor. Assigning peeps to individual hexes is stupid but so is giving them a list of jobs which give and take any amount of random resources; what if the numbers worked around me? There’s a nifty little formula called the Cobb-Douglas production function which handles that as well as diminishing returns: if you imagine, just because you have a bunch of cooks in the kitchen doesn’t mean you make more food, and the same if you have more kitchens than you have cooks. Labor is apparently more useful than capital since its diminishing returns (if it exceeds capital) are less so than capital (if it exceeds labor), and this is represente...

Well. How quickly did you expect an update? When I ran my inheritance simulation , I also calculated the Gini coefficient of the population’s wealth distribution. The Gini coefficient expresses relative inequality within a population, where 0% represents total equality and 100% means basically one individual holds all the wealth. Partitive Inheritance Land has a Gini coefficient of 15%, while Primogeniture Land has one around 45%. Modern capitalist societies (and, as far as I can tell, most developed class societies) have Gini coefficients of ~80% with respect to wealth and around ~40% with respect to income. I calculated it by dividing the relative mean average deviance in half, but the typical method is by taking a Lorenz curve and doing some calculus bullshit. I don’t want a Lorenz curve necessarily but I want to know what it means for a Gini coefficient to be such and such. Here’s a solution: draw a square and bisect it along the diagonal. Then, in the lower right, draw a smaller s...

I’ve been procrastinating on Resourciv because I couldn’t come up with a demographic or economic framework (or perhaps meta-framework, since I really want to support different modes of production and distribution and so on) I was happy with. So I made some scripts to simulate different social dynamics in the hopes that I would land on a way to represent them without giving myself or the player a headache. Inheritance My least favorite of the two is an inheritance simulator. I read a couple books by historian and social scientist ( stricto sensu ) Peter Turchin, who’s most famous for his concept of elite overproduction, but I was struck by a point he made that inequality would emerge even in egalitarian societies if the society practices inheritance because families with less children divide the parents’ wealth amongst less recipients. I simulated a society at three sexes (for the purposes of reproduction: F, M, or X) and three age levels (young, adult, or elder) with each individual...

New build available on Itch ! :) I know it’s been a while, but I’d been doing shit the whole time: New resource system: Goods listed in the top-left are consumed by needs from habitats and workplaces! I’m not quite happy with the distribution logic quite yet, but at least most needs have a one-to-many relationship with goods. There’s also an underlying work-week system in the backend which I’ll expose at some point, letting you trade your peeps’ happiness for increased productivity. New culture system: Each point of influence earns a settlement a new hex, from which rural yields are collected or upon which buildings can be constructed (usually habitats or workplaces). Monuments and temples will increase your influence. Basic diplomacy: With my new expanded dialog system, I’ve added some diplomacy to change your relationship with other cultures. There’s no decision logic on the AI’s end to accept or reject requests, but this is the framework. New combat system: Meeps do a numbe...

Guess it's. Never. Really. Over! Although I thought it'd be neat , I didn't like the feel of rural hexes being both home- and work-places. Just felt difficult and nonintuitive more than anything. I've reverted to the previous (unreleased) system, where all peeps live in a habitat hex and work at a non-habitat hex, with the working-time system now in place (yay!). But I'm not really happy with it. Right now, there's no way to reassign peeps between different hexes, and honestly that's not the problem. If I had to actively reassign peeps to work hexes I want, that would suck. If it were automatic, it would still suck because it means I need to make the AI smart enough to know where to assign them (and this is true regardless). What I liked the most is what I have going in the released version, where you don't assign labor until you build buildings, and otherwise you don't worry about it and are even incentivized to improve rural hexes. So I had another...

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...

It's been really fun working on Resourciv! A lot has happened since my first post: wrapping maps with proper continents and climate simulation; combat between meeples; settlement borders that grow with population; animals which roam the frontier for meeples to hunt and collect food for their camps or cities; cultures with their own colors and tribe/city names; and a game observation mode for my convenience / enjoyment (pictured above). That being said, as I get ever-so-closer to completing the game's basic functionality, it gets difficult running up against the game's actual "design". This is especially true for each society's mode of production, the flow of labor and material wealth. Civilization doesn't represent a specific mode of production, but an abstract model of growth and productivity which vary quantitatively between different governments or policies. This is easy to implement, but not very interesting. It does not model the inter...

I've spent the last two weeks making a super basic Civ -like. You can see in the picture how far I've gotten: units, cities, research, fog of war. At this point it's so bog-standard that it's not worth getting into how it differs in the details. Instead, I'll try to talk big picture about what I'd like to accomplish—if I get that far! Resourciv is a take on the Civ formula more concerned with social development of a culture than exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination. (Again, talking as if it's not just messing around and seeing what I can do, which it is.) That's kind of a strange difference, since Civ 's conventions and mechanics implicate its particular perspective on history: one of a clash of civilizations, each with its own essential nature, all converging on a socio-technological path of evolution driven by domination. Different people have offered or implemented their own ideas of how to improve this model, to make it more ...