Bay 12 Games Forum

I'm making a unified system of cell materials, where a single cell in the gameworld can have a variety of things in it (air, dirt, etc).  The most prominent material forms the base color and the tile graphic if nothing special is present, but shows the most prominent special material if there is one.  Every cell has a foreground and background material, which poses some questions about displaying things in a console-based format.  I think as long as I'm using Libtcod as a display crutch anyway, I'll take advantage of it's 150-ish color format instead of the standard 16, but I'm not going to bother with prettiness until after I've done every core gameplay thing I can think of.

My method of thinking through one feature at a time might be an issue though, this cell-material business might not lend itself to placing cells, or carrying cells as items, or building structures.  But it will play very nicely with cave-ins, fluids, gas-clouds, and other cool shit I really don't need to be planning at this stage.

In the process, I'm also moving moving most of the content-handling into external files à la Dwarf Fortress raws.  This is not to accommodate future modding support so much as making it way easier to develop content, although I guess it does both in theory.  One of those things I figured would be better to do sooner rather than later.  I've already planned out how to store materials, items, my ill-conceived item graphics, and map-generation parameters.  I haven't started map-generation yet, but I kinda have to to make use of my cell-materials rewrite and it'll probably be among the easier major components I've tackled.

I haven't planned out the actual mining mechanic all this crap is made to support, but I'm hoping to have at least a slapdash implementation done by New Years.  Got a lot of vacation time coming up.

I'm guessing this is one of those things that goes unchallenged, because the founding fathers were pretty much the embodiment of Jesus, but better because they were American, so their word must be super-holy...

It goes unchallenged because they didn't have any say in the matter, and it actually has been challenged many, many times.  We capped the number of Representatives instead of tying it to total population.  The Senate is now an elected body instead of an appointed one.  The variety of people who can actually vote has increased by orders of magnitude since then.  And the President is... well, technically still chosen by the Electoral College instead of an actual vote, but it's not only unthinkable for the College to not reflect the popular vote (in each state anyway) but impossible for them not to.  And it did take two hundred years, but there's a pretty strong momentum going to make it an actual direct election.

Y'know, within a generation or two.  For the same reason all the other stuff is still basically the same.  The elected representatives are the only people with the power to change any of these rules, and they usually directly benefit from the rules being kinda screwy.

So, for anybody who thought yesterday's news that John Boehner was giving the finger to the Heritage Foundation, et al., was just a one-off fluke of passing a budget before Christmas, today he really came out swinging.

But when groups come out and criticize something they've never seen, you begin to wonder just how credible those actions are.

A statement so dripping with irony you could power a car with it, but nonetheless it looks like Boehner has finally lost his patience with the tigers he's been riding around on for the last five years.  Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation is saying Paul Ryan, the guy they tried to draft for President not even two years ago, is not really that conservative because of the budget deal he agreed to.  I think they're rapidly approaching their Robespierre threshold.

Well across two new characters I have been spoiled for barely-used Apex research facilities.  Nothing interesting in them, just ready made housing.  I finally tired of Planet Hobo after I plumbed the depths of the hobo mines (I don't know if they're mines run by hobos or mines that produce hobos) and departed for a nearby desert moon.  So much surface iron, oh yes.

Protip, Iron Hunting Bow knocks out Level 2 creatures in one shot.

There also appears to be a merchant aboard my ship.  That was startling.

Made a new character.  Heading to the right I found death in many varieties, as my planet is host to some really nasty baddies like the guy with eyes all over his tail, and the dude with a skull mask, and the evil deer thing.

Went left from my landing zone and found an abandoned Ape research complex, doors wide open for the taking.  Pretty livable after I got rid of the propaganda posters and stuffed all the brains in jars into the basement.  The basement also happens to host a gigantic gauntlet of spike traps that I killed myself with a few times before I remembered I can just tear up the spikes.  Sadly they're useless as a defensive mechanism and there was nothing at the end of the gauntlet.

And with all that fully explored, I'm back to tedium, trying to find just a few more pieces of iron on a truly iron-poor world.  At least I found a chest with a couple slow but hurty axes.

Wait... How is it peaceful, it is red!
Everything on my planet that is aggressive is a warm color, and everything that is peaceful is a cool color. Is this not standard for everybody?

On my planet, it's green and/or purple.  Like the bubble-spitting toucans, the adorably deadly beaver monsters, or the giant rape-me-in-the-ass armor plated gorillas.

I happen to respect the last ones, since they have the decency to look like a child's vision of an apex predator.

Jeff Bezos, the CEO of Amazon, is a charlatan.  He is a master of manipulating Wall Street.  He needs the share price of AMZN to continually increase because a lot of AMZN employees are compensated with stock.  So he throws out all of these fancy ideas and people imagine all sorts of wonderful things about the company.

And suddenly the whole act makes much more sense.  I had a feeling this was the case, I just wanted to see other people thought about it.  It's one of those things where I assume a company that manages to be ubiquitous must be making enough money to light on fire.  Why I assume this when I already know better... eh, whatever.  Drunken Predator Drone already told me everything I really needed to hear.

Likewise, I like how their launch video of an Amazon shipment center doesn't show the small army of sub-minimum-wage slaves scurrying around like Jawas trying to keep up with Cyber Monday shipments.