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.
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