Weekly Review for 16th of October

I'm back from my trip to Newcastle and had a grand time. Lots of it involved catching up with my aunts but we also went on some outings, saw shows and events.

Read

After Reading the original Dungeons and Dragons Player's Manual I got into a second piece of DnD history, the Dungeon Master's Rulebook. It very much expected you to have read the Player's Manual first and I believe they came as a set. Again it is a very slim volume compared to its modern counterparts.

First thing in it was an example dungeon for a group of adventurers to have their first game in. It was an abandoned castle with various monster encounters and magically enchanted furniture. I did think it was a bit unfair in how many monsters it expected novice adventurers to fight, hordes of kobolds with ranged weapons and the very first monster was a carrion crawler which in these rules was very nasty as it had eight attacks which caused paralysis each round. I could easily see a group of four adventurers succumbing just to that.

After that there was a listing of various situations the party might find themselves in and what the DM should do. It included some guidance for when things come up which aren't in the rulebook.

Next was a listing of monster stats which had the interesting mechanic of hit dice amounts reflecting the hitpoints of the monster and also its relative strength. Interestingly everything rolls for its hitpoints total with even a dragon having a variance of 8x between maximum and minimum hitpoint totals. It did seem like monsters were rather simplified in only having a few stats such as number of attacks and damage. Later versions of DnD gave every monster ability scores.

The most in-depth and interesting monster entry was for dragons of which there were already six different kinds. Some were intelligent and could talk or even cast spells. The rules went into how to subdue dragons and have them work for you which is a rather novel concept. Already Golden Dragons were the best of the best having the greatest stat values and being able to take human form. Thankfully they are lawful and probably don't want to kill you on sight.

At the end of the monsters section were loot tables for the different kinds of monster. It also went into more exotic loot like jewelry and enchanted magical items. These items had some classics of the game like the bag of holding and gauntlets of ogre strength. Of course any magic item could be cursed and potions had unknown effects until sipped, both rules that result in some 'fun' results.

Lastly there was a section on making dungeons which recommended coming up with a theme for the dungeon and using grid paper to map it out. There were some guides for having monsters of a certain difficulty appear in a range of dungeon levels and some wandering monster tables for each level. It very much put me in mind of the dungeons you would find in something like the videogame Rogue, which is not too surprising seeing as DnD was heavy inspiration for that genre of videogames.

Right that's enough about DnD, how about what I got up to in Newcastle.

Watched

First night in Newcastle I went to the performance of a play by the amateur dramatics group that one of my aunts is part of. It was a performance of the play Love From A Stranger which is based on a short story by Agatha Christie. It is something of a slow burn psychological thriller about a woman meeting a man and falling in love with him but not all is what it seems. The acting, whilst not perfect, did result in a very exciting finish where a murderer is foiled.

Later I went to the cinema to watch Comédie-Française, a French language film about a theater performance of Macbeth that is beset by troubles in the run-up to its premier. It was a very fun watch as new problems are piled upon one another. Even though the situation seemed hopeless the characters decide to press on to uphold the prestige of their theater company, the Comédie-Française.

I expected the film to be longer as it abruptly ends just as they start the performance itself but it is clear it is all going to go terribly wrong, no silver lining here. On reflection the buildup to the performance had enough drama in it and the characters had already come together to see this through to the bitter end. The main character gave an excellent performance as she tries to keep the troupe and herself together.

Listened

The last night in Newcastle I went to a concert performance of War of the Worlds based on the book by H. G. Wells. Not only was there some rather good music they also had narration of the events in the story and a screen with animations of the events the music was about. Really good strings, electric guitar, synths and vocals.

I believe it faithfully recreated the events from the book and there was the iconic design of the tripods. All the animations were 3D renders with a rather pulpy sci-fi aesthetic. Only complaint would be that each song was rather long and could perhaps have done with more variation within each. Still I thoroughly enjoyed having such a novel experience with such high production values.

Visited

We visited the Bowes Museum in County Durham which is an art gallery with a famous animatronic called the Silver Swan. The building itself is very impressive, looking like an immense country house with vast, high ceilinged rooms. The exhibits were of collections of aristocratic artifacts with some neat early forms of pianos and metal sculptures. There was also a wealth of art which was mostly displayed in a dense array like the galleries you would find in aristocrat homes. There were some more down to earth pieces like a collection of sketchbooks by a coal miner depicting life in a mining town.

The main attraction was the Silver Swan automaton which would be performing its animation. The swan, which was over 250 years old, had a neck made of silver bands which allowed it to have an impressive range of movement. In its performance it moves its head side to side, bending all the way backwards before dipping into the pool of water in front of it to pick out a fish. It really was impressive how fluid its motions were and there was a very nice effect for the water made out of rotating glass rods.

We also went on a boat ride along the Tyne. It went downstream all the way to the ocean and then back the way to cross under all seven bridges of Newcastle. It had a pretty good commentary as it picked out what was visible on the sides of the river and also talked about what was previously there in Newcastle's industrial heyday.

Honestly the signs of industry that were still there were most impressive with truly giant cranes, huge cable reels and dry docks. It was very interesting to learn how much of the surrounding banks were shaped by the shipping industry as ships would dump their ballast onto the banks, building up these considerable hills. The ballast could be soil or stone from all over the world so some unusual species of trees had grown up on the mounds from seeds transported along with the ballast.

It was nice going to Newcastle again as it gave me a chance to become even more familiar with the layout of the city. My dad and his sisters grew up there so they were full of stories about how the city had changed. I do like how enormous some of the constructions there are with bridges looming over whole houses down at the quayside. It seems a more lively place than Aberdeen too.

Other

Ludum Dare will be starting tomorrow and there have been votes happening for the theme. There are a lot of promising themes in the running this time, see below for how I rated those in the finals.

Honestly I wouldn't particularly mind which theme wins as I think they could all prompt some fun games. I'm glad that none of the submitted themes that were complaining about AI got into the final round as I feel that would result in some rather negative entries.

Indeed the specter of AI generated content has loomed over the competition. It is more likely to be used in the three day jam whilst I'll be taking part in the two day competition but even there people are concerned about AI code generation. Personally it won't be an issue for me as I still haven't looked into AI code generation on a serious level and I think it would just slow me down if I started using it for this competition. 

Anyway I'm a bit anxious but looking forward to the competition. My last entry did rather well and I've been on something of a streak over the last few Ludum Dares. Even if I don't manage to finish anything I'll still write about the process here.

Weekly Review for 9th of October

It's been one of those weeks where it was difficult to remember what I was up to at the beginning of it without reading my journal and my mood seemed to dip. Still there were a fair amount of things that I did.

Read

I read through the original Dungeons and Dragons Players Manual and found it to be a neat historical artifact. It was clear that tabletop roleplaying was a novel idea at the time and the rulebook slowly introduced players to it in the form of a Choose Your Own Adventure format in the book itself.

The Choose Your Own Adventure in itself was pretty interesting in what it introduced in terms of mechanics and monster types. It was pretty challenging for a single character and you would have had to know what you were doing to get through all of it. As it was I took 3 goes at it and only died in one of them. It was apparent that there was a lot of conditional logic that had to be squeezed into the numbered sections for which number you turn to and that combat with only one player character is kind of dull.

The rest of the book had the character classes which were limited and demi-human races like elves and dwarves. The demi-human races didn't even get to choose classes being all the same. Elves seemed to be very overpowered having good combat and spellcasting ability.

Speaking of spellcasters, magic users seemed to be at their weakest with tiny hitpoint amounts, only one spell per day and hardly any offensive magic to choose from. The Players Manual being quite short only had first and second level spells listed in it. The version of the rules I was reading had clearly been written after the panic of DnD being called occult as it was very clear to point out that these weren't real spells needing some kind of ritual.

Lastly there was some gentle introductions to the dynamics of playing in a group, sharing loot and having a dungeon master to organise the adventure. Seeing how simple the book was it was thus intriguing the minutia it went into concerning carry weight of loot with individual coins being tracked as how encumbered you were. More than 100 coins or any kind of armour would result in you being slowed down.

The tone of the rules were much more conversational and you got a feeling that this had come from a group of players who had decided to make their own rules up for the games they were playing. It kind of put me in mind of the articles that you would get in early (circa 1999) Warhammer White Dwarfs. Very much hobbyists.

I also read quite a bit about AI this week getting through several months worth of weekly reviews of AI research in Import AI by Jack Clark, one of the cofounders of Anthropic. It is neat that among the practical reporting on research papers there is also some speculative fiction.

Watched

I watched quite a few AI related things this week. One being the interview with Jacob Coxon, the AI researcher who recently resigned from Anthropic, on the Daily Show. I don't normally watch the Daily Show so it took a bit to get used to its blend of humour but the interview was good with Coxon explaining the problems with the labs in terms of safety and that actually he does believe in the potential of AI to bring about an utopian state.

Indeed it was very interesting to see the difference in perspective, perhaps brought on by experience, between Jon Stewart's reaction to the idea of there not being jobs in the future and Coxon arguing that there would still be meaning. I expect a future where you aren't forced to work to survive would be rather popular but going off of the comments people don't trust AI corporations to deliver that.

There were also interviews with another researcher who resigned from Open AI, David Robinson, on the Ezra Klein show and Yuval Noah Harari on The Rest is Politics. The latter was quite sobering in terms of the choices facing Britain about how dependent we could be on future, American, AI models.

Lastly there were a few AI generated music videos being shared, AI is a normal technology? being one of the better ones. What is significant here is that it was made by a language model calling other tools rather than a generative video model, all those animations were written in code. It's a sign of how good AI models are getting at at being given a complex task and just going away and doing it.

Played 

I completed the rest of the RealIndustry demo, getting into more advanced processing facilities like electrolysis and chemical plants. The game was just getting into the oil age and there was a wealth of new ore types in industrial scale mines. Understandably the content in the demo cuts off before many of the later intermediate resources get used.

There were some interesting new mechanics added like automation done without colonists, pumps as renewable resource inputs to recipes that don't get consumed and less powerful but consistent energy sources like wind. I have to say the complexity was kind of getting to me as aluminium and stainless steel were being added as I found it difficult to keep track of which part of the production process took place in which building. Also the difference between the likes of tin, nickel and zinc in terms of which gets used in which recipe.

The end of the demo had some underwhelming real world puzzles which amounted to plugging questions into google to get the answers. That the company is actually controlled by amoral AIs feels very played out and honestly your AI advisor's lines could have been cut completely as they are so generic.

Still the game idea is solid and just as a show of the support to the sole developer, who is a computer science student in Ukraine, I bought the full version. I haven't booted it up and I'm a bit averse to the idea of having to go through all the tech tiers again. I will be looking forward to learning about all the new resources though. Also the soundtrack is rather nice and freely available here on youtube.

Programmed

Playing RealIndustry really got me thinking about how I might make a game like it myself and what I'd get if I took my simple project and asked an AI to improve it. To that end I've been brainstorming about what I'd want to have in my own realistic factory building game and wrote some basic code for an incremental clicker version of it.

Of course RealIndustry is already kind of an incremental clicker game but I thought it could hew more closely to the likes of Cookie Clicker by having a very simplified model of automation where you build multiple buildings to help you gather resources more quickly. I also thought it would be nice to compress everything onto one screen instead of having separate screens for each building.

I didn't get very far in it other than making a list of 108 resources and programming an interface to go through the production loop of collecting resources for and then with wooden and stone tools. Still it was nice to do a bit of Javascript programming again and do my usual Program/Control/Simulation/Display structure with proper classes for once.

Other

Speaking of programming, the Ludum Dare programming competition is going to be happening the weekend after next. I was a bit concerned that it wouldn't happen due to the website not being functional for a long time and it has taken a while for the theme voting to commence. it's up now though and I've thrown my own theme ideas into the ring. Either 'big numbers' or 'the factory must grow'. I certainly know what kind of game I'd make with such themes.

I'll be away in Newcastle from tomorrow so I won't end up writing about the usual kind of things next week. Still there will be places to visit, shows to see and books to read.

Weekly Review for 2nd of October

September is over now and I'm still blogging which is a good sign. I've made a good routine of doing these weekly reviews and I think it is having a good effect on my memory of what happens. 

I did try doing a little bit of a monthly review in my journal but really I can just look at the month's blog entries. Perhaps some tracking of stats would be good. I wrote 6 blog posts and journaled 70,000 words. Only about 7,000 of those words got onto the blog, not sure if I'd want that to be bigger or not.

Anyway this week has been nice as I've really gotten into playing games myself instead of simply watching people play them online.

Read

I finished off the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebook this week, getting through the last section on priest spells. Their spells are a lot more support magic with a bit of an overlap with wizard spells for detection and divination. Because druids were a new type of priest in this edition there are lots of spells focused on plants and animals.

Priests do get some offensive spells, an amusing one of which is an animated hammer to attack people with. They also get some spells with elemental affinity to the classic 4 elements of earth, fire, air and water. Ignoring the oft mentioned question of why they don't use the actual elements they get to cast protection from a certain element or to summon a spirit composed of that element.

Reading through the whole rulebook was nice to do because it was at once nostalgic but also shed light on the state of the game at that point that I hadn't noticed at the time. DnD is really a collaborative, freeform game so whilst having set rules is nice the Dungeon Master can always change them to make things more fun.

Tabletop roleplaying is such a enjoyable pastime and the influence of DnD can be seen in so many other TTRPGs and videogames. In a way it systemised aspects of all the stories and myths that came before it. I have fond memories of reading through the Monster Manual for later editions and looking at how varied all the different types of monster were.

I'll be going even further back in time for my next book to read which is actually the rules to the very first edition of DnD. My dad had it stored away from the time when he started playing it as a university student. I've heard there are some interesting quirks in it and it'll be neat to see how it described this completely novel pastime.

Watched

I did watch a little bit of youtube this week, such as some Gnomoria videos by Aavak who was making videos on the game twelve years ago. It was still in development back then so it was interesting to see what has changed since that early period.

Another game I happened across videos of was RealIndustry being played by Wally1169. It's an intriguing game that just came out which boasts of being an industry management game with realistic resources and production chains.

I didn't watch much of either series of videos though as they both got me wanting to play the respective games myself. I suppose I was getting a bit frustrated in terms of how inefficient their playstyles were and in the case of RealIndustry I could see that the game had lots of lore to read that Wally was glossing over completely. 

So to that end I spent a whole lot of time playing both games this week.

Played

I had a grand time with Gnomoria this week, spending almost the entire weekend on it. I started a new map and set it to be completely flat so I could cover it in fields. The appropriately named kingdom of Farm Field started by harvesting all the timber and wild crops to make nice organised fields and groves of. The map was tiny so I tiled all of it with wheat, grape, strawberry and cotton fields and pastures for yaks, emus and alpacas.

Nestled in the fields was our settlement with busy workshops, a shared dormitory, a modest feasting hall and fancy personal quarters for visiting dignitaries from other kingdoms. It was fun getting all the different kinds of workshops built and fully exploring their products.

The surface tamed the gnomes then set about mining into the ground. I set up workshops to sift through all the lose dirt looking for trace amounts of metals whilst the bedrock was mined through systematically looking for ore veins and gemstones. Mining is pretty fun in Gnomoria because when your miners break into a cavern you can see all of it at once stretching into the depths.

After the first year passed with winter almost claiming all our farm animals the gnomes started on their megaproject, a city in a tower stretching to the heavens. I planned out production centers on each floor, grand kitchens supplying a truly impressive great hall and apartments for all the gnomes. At the same time they mined down to the very depths of the earth where there was gold, platinum and a sea of lava. Those metals would be perfect for impressive statues to dot our great hall.

Honestly the kingdom might have been too successful as I was playing on peaceful and life was very easy for these gnomes. The food and drink stocks were overflowing and their valuable trade goods allowed them to buy anything from the traders. The only thing that I didn't do on this map was invent all the different contraptions that are in the game. There are automatons that do the work for your gnomes!

All in all I had a great time exploring the map and the game's systems. It feels like such a shame that development on it stopped completely after its release back in 2016. It feels like a model organism of colony builders, stripping away all the complexity of Dwarf Fortress to leave the core of the genre. It could have been such a good foundation to build from.

Indeed, whilst playing this map made me imagine all the different playthroughs I could do with other kingdom focuses, mining, forestry, combat etc. it also made me think about what I would like to do in a colony builder game of my own. The single tile per inhabitant or terrain object is a bit limiting and I wonder what you could do with a game with a finer grained terrain system. 

The other thing I played was the demo for RealIndustry which is a very interesting example of what new games can come out in the age of AI.

The AI influence is very clear from the way the interface is styled to the detailed but not quite right graphical assets. Even the dialogue is AI generated. It is not something the developers try to hide as they say on the Steam page that AI was used and there is the expected backlash against it in the reviews.

Still what I had seen in Wally1169's video had me intrigued as the prospect of a game with real life industrial processes and hundreds of resource types is rather appealing. The start of the game is charming too as you begin with prehistoric technology going through hand gathering, wood tools then stone and iron. It felt like a Civilisation game in the way you researched new ways of gaining and using resources.

One thing I really enjoyed was that every resource had its own, encyclopedia-like entry ingame which could be accessed anywhere the resource appeared in the interface. These entries went over their composition, historical significance, production and consumption recipes. There were even some interesting facts about each which were reasonably good although very much AI generated text.

The game did have some roughness around the edges like an automation system which felt far too complex and clunky to be introduced so early. It also seemed like automation wasn't be needed as research and building construction costs were so low. The game seems to be going for increasing complexity so perhaps it becomes more required at higher tech levels.

My biggest pet peeve was that basic mining for things like coal and limestone was done with stone tools even when you were in the industrial revolution era. Why can't I give my colonists iron tools yet? Huge oversight if you ask me and I would not be amused if it turned out to be that way due to game balance reasons. Also electricity before copper wires.

I'll see what the rest of the demo is like and wishlist the full version. I like the idea of the game but am very much thinking about changes I would make in my own version. It is almost an idle game and I've always wanted to try my hand at one of those.

Other

The gaming wasn't confined to the computer this week as I also played the board game Spirit Island with my brothers. It's an interesting game where you play as magical spirits driving off colonists from your peaceful island. The players are collaborating together to defend the island and victory happens when you wipe out or scare away all the invaders.

The game has quite a lot of complexity to it what with loads of individual power cards, events and different opponents. Honestly it is a bit much for me as I don't play it enough to really get a feel of the systems. It also didn't help that we had gotten an expansion which added more cards and more spirits to play as. All of us went for new spirits with quite a lot of complexity to them.

It looked a bit dangerous with how many invaders had built up settlements and started ravaging the island, leaving blight in their wake but we produced enough fear tokens to win through that mechanic. 

I found my spirit a bit weird to play as as it almost wanted the blight to happen in order to counter it. My brothers were playing as a mischievous chaos spirit and one that was all about luring explorers to their doom in deep dark jungles.

It's a nice enough game to play sometimes but it takes so long to play we must've been playing for four or five hours. Still it was something to do together with my brothers.

So that's the week and the end of the month. For October I hope to keep up reading, writing and blogging like this past month. It would also be nice to do some more programming and blog posts about projects. One thing I'm looking forward to is the Ludum Dare game programming contest mid October. I'm also going down to Newcastle for a weekend.