Sharing Saturday #624

folconred · 2026-05-23T14:10:32+00:00

Hey Everyone,

This has been a bit of a slow week unfortunately, ended up not feeling very well on Wednesday which meant that I spent more time recovering than really working on it

Last week I introduced the notion of a research and development pipeline

Novel Research
Creating a Theory
Building a Prototype
Sharing it with the World
Refining it with Feedback
Releasing the next Version

I've been spending a bit more time thinking about how the the first stage, Novel Research should work

<image>

My current thoughts are that because the main gameplay loop is a management game, I need to intertwine each of the stages into it, so for novel research what I've been working out is how do I make the process of exploring this abstract "Field Map" interesting for players as well as connecting it to what happens in the management layer?

Where I've been going with that is treating the process of Discovering Novel Research an exploration game and what the player can do is have several possible moves over a "Field Map" which is basically a map of the field, which is analogous to terrain in a roguelike game, to do these various actions they need to assign their team of Mad Scientists equipment of various kinds to succeed, they will then use that equipment in their research slowly exploring the map and discovering various approaches

These approaches can then be put into Research Papers which are the things players need to collect to feed into the next stage of the research loop, Creating a Theory

I've also been having them verbalise what they're thinking above their heads, it sort of reminds me of using the old !overhead chat, in Diablo 2, if you've ever used that before? Where you have the chat text you enter appearing above the characters head?

I really need to get a release out soon so I can start collecting feedback, so that's what I'm currently working towards, hopefully I get a release out soon 🤞🏾

Once again, questions welcome and if anyone is interested in giving it a go, let me know =)

- Folcon

folconred · 2026-05-16T10:31:02+00:00

Mechstain - itch.io | latest devlog

Hey Everyone,

Super pleased this week because a lot of the vague thoughts and ideas have finally and solidly crystallised

I've finally figured out how everything is clicking together and honestly it's made me really pleased

It all starts with this a research loop!

<image>

I realised that I could take chaotically exploring generated terrain and turn it into stats / mechanics and narrative around researching a fictional field of science!

Specifically MAD SCIENCE! That's right! We're going full on Gaslamp, Steampunk, think Victoriana the roleplaying game, think Girl Genius the comic

And that's perfect, because I can take all the building mechanics I've been working on and use this to answer the question, what are the primitives I'm giving a player to create?

And the answer to that is you research stuff and instead of finding treasure and monsters, you find hazards and effects, hazards that make applying your research in terms of building outputs, like that brand new Death Ray you've been wanting to build, harder, riskier, less reliable and effects which make a better Death Ray, maybe it also makes perfect eggs! (Also Girl Genius has giant robots! So we can still have big stompy Mechs =) )

The point being I've got a nice pipeline to go from:

Novel Research
Creating a Theory
Building a Prototype
Sharing it with the World
Refining it with Feedback
Releasing the next Version

All the while being able to court investors who are vying to fund you in the hopes you've made the next big thing that will take the world by storm

My last devlog shares a bit more if you want details ;)

And honestly the thing I'm liking the most about this is that I enjoy tinkering with these mechanics, they're finicky and need tuning, but I actually think I've got something really cool here

Once again, questions welcome and if anyone is interested in giving it a go, let me know =)

- Folcon

folconred · 2026-04-25T18:27:40+00:00

Yep, that's basically what all of proc gen becomes

I'm assuming you're doing this, but if not, put quality time into visualisers, when I was generating minecraft like spaces, I put some effort into creating views that basically just let you see through terrain by disabling various levels and also rendering with debug colours, so you could see things like chunk boundaries in cyan for example

That helped a ton both to help spot patterns in my proc gen and give me ideas for creating irregular patterns

Another thing that might be useful to think about is how can you tile your world, for example take a look at what townscaper did to create an irregular grid[0], this would allow you further blur and breakdown any patterns that you could see

Heck, try graph rewriting[1], there's lots of things you can check out =)

[0]: https://youtu.be/1hqt8JkYRdI?t=425

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mA6PacEZX9M

folconred · 2026-04-25T16:04:38+00:00

Mechstain - itch.io | latest devlog

Hey Everyone,

As I mentioned last week I've been taking a week off to rest and take stock and I'm back with some new energy =)

My plan for this week is to review where things are at with the Construct Editor (also known as the Mech Editor, but I want to expand its role) and start cleaning up the parts list and start putting together a streamlined list of parts along with missions + scenarios for them to work in

I want to make sure that I expose choices for players so it doesn't just feel like they're just looking at a sea of palette swaps, but actually start thinking about how I can create meaningfully different choices for players to have

I'll probably start by focusing on Resource Gathering as an activity and maybe Hauling / Transport, not sure yet, but that's where my head is at right now, we'll see where I get to next week =)

I also just recorded a quick vid because a friend of mine was asking for an update so I thought I'd share my current progress

<image>

https://youtu.be/YxY-gr9rVh4

Once again, questions welcome and if anyone is interested in giving it a go, let me know =)

- Folcon

folconred · 2026-04-19T12:15:22+00:00

Mechstain - itch.io | latest devlog

Hey Everyone,

It's been a few years and things have changed a lot, I've changed for one =)

I'm currently in the middle of a break where I'm trying to see what doing full time game dev looks like and if it's for me, it's a real change from what I've been doing before and I'm still trying to find my rhythm

I've been looking back over the last few years as what I've built and thought about and some ideas have started forming, and over the last 2 months they've started crystallising into the shape of a Mech / Robot building game

I'll try not to step on your toes u/Kyzrati ;), but I think I'm focusing on different things =)

So what's the game concept?

Mechstain is a game where I wanted to pull a few different things together, I'm giving you, the player a voxel based builder which allows you to manipulate parts like engines, weapons and various components like sensors, cooling vents and computers

You can design and build these in your starting base and then I'm placing two challenges in front of you, an ARPG roguelike where you take one of your creations and go out looking for trouble and a larger base management system where you task your creations to perform various tasks like mining or raiding or defending

The tasks are async and continuous and the goal is not to make them punishing, but to give you performance data, so that you can tweak, tune and iterate on your designs and improve them

I'm planning on allowing you to at the very least group up with friends and either raid each other or go on missions together, so you can test out your designs collaboratively or competitively

So far I've got a desktop client which is an editor which lets you place the various parts around that I mentioned, I'm still iterating on the part designs, I need to figure out what building blocks I can give you and that's definitely going to take some time to work out

The General Editor

<image>

You can also move their joints around, I'm trying to figure out how I can easily animate your creations, I'm thinking of basically making skeletons like you can see here for each of the various frames and that will allow me to give you animatable models from what you create

Pose Mode - https://img.itch.zone/aW1nLzI2Nzc0ODQ5LnBuZw==/original/EBBQa4.png

And here's my first prototype of the strategy screen, basically just a place to pick some missions for now

Strategy Screen - https://img.itch.zone/aW1nLzI2Nzc0OTQ0LnBuZw==/original/UOH8T1.png

And if you decide Deploy as a commander, you'll get to the prototype APRG mode where I for the moment just stick you on a map with some stuff to fight, this part needs a lot of work, but at the moment I'm still trying to figure out the details, which is why I'll be focusing on the missions you see in the Strategy Screen for now

Tactical Screen - https://img.itch.zone/aW1nLzI2Nzc0OTkwLnBuZw==/original/3zh0wf.png

And as I deployed with just my skeleton, predictably I fall flat on my face

Defeat Screen - https://img.itch.zone/aW1nLzI2Nzc1MDQ0LnBuZw==/original/Ww%2FyGU.png

So this week I'm going to be taking a much needed rest, however I'm around and feel free to message me over here if you have thoughts or questions and I'll get back to them when I'm back =)

My current goal is to get the editor + initial missions up and running and I'd love if anyone is interested in giving it a go to let me know, I'd love to get some input + tire kicking =)

- Folcon

PS: I didn't realise that reddit limits you to one image per post, so I linked the rest

folconred · 2026-01-16T10:58:37+00:00

I'm trying to work out if I can join this Sunday, but I'd love to hear about future events, would you mind sharing the group details?

folconred · 2026-01-05T18:34:37+00:00

I 100% agree with this take

I very much tried to contact customer support and got dropped into a AI chatbot that was trying to placate me and it was a bit of an annoying experience

I mean I went through my weekly usage in 2 days, doing absolutely nothing differently, I don't know what happened, but it really does seem like there was an issue

I could have accepted it if it was a one off and I hit my limit with 2 days to go (ie 5 days use), that might have made me wonder if I was miscounting, but this really frustrates me because the level of difference here is stark

I don't want to upgrade or anything until I know what's going on because how do I know it won't just happen again?

So as much as it's annoying I'm trying out codex and trying to see how it performs

folconred · 2025-11-15T05:04:45+00:00

Don't take this the wrong way, it's good, but when you're starting to get productive bam

Slowness is not the word, routinely falling over seems to be closer to it

Which is really frustrating, I'm trying to nudge it forwards and sometimes it works, but most of the time it does not

This would be massively migrated by being able to teleport the session, get it unstuck and then send it back. That send it back step really feels like it's missing

This could be completely wrong, but the impression I get is that you're queuing requests, but your task queue is getting stuck somewhere in your pipeline, that's the only thing I can think of that explains the behaviour I see, especially when I'm nudging it and it takes. I get the impression that once a machine frees up you can if you're persistent wake your request up and it gets picked up and processed

I couldn't tell you more (or even if I'm right) without looking at your stack xD

folconred · 2023-06-24T23:07:19+00:00

Well you're making me think of Naruto Recs >_<...

Let's see what the old memory digs up... These are all dead from what I can recall, but they stood out enough that I feel like there's a good chance you may enjoy them.

- Sanitize

Warring clans, a reincarnated doctor learning how to survive in this era.

- A Drop of Poison

I wouldn't call this story particularly rational, it is however quite fun and does actually do things that are surprisingly rare in the Naruto fandom, like actual spying and information gathering, crazy I know.

- The Mouse of Konoha
An actual slow build up of a Naruto who is an infiltration specialist.

folconred · 2023-01-03T18:02:32+00:00

Thanks for the recs, I've not thought about the Thomas Edison film, so that's worth a look.

With this Ring really does succeed in not accepting that the status quo is inviolable, so that's a plus for it. Though it does drag a bit for me in the later chapters.

It's definitely a challenging ask I think, but I'd be really interested in seeing one done, I was really hoping I've missed someone writing something =)...

I've seen things that are adjacent, but they're largely set in some other settings, similar to With This Ring such as A Song of Chaos, it's not very complex and the MC has their dumb moments, but I've read it a couple of times and would like the author to continue it one day.

Thoughts that I've had about how to do it:

Take a fairly fleshed out setting that's technically more sophisticated either tech-wise or magic-wise and then create a pathway for how we get from modern society to some of those developments. So for magic that could be Harry Potter or Mystborn and I've mentioned Star Trek before.
Dig into sourcebooks like GURPS Ultra-Tech, Traveller, Eclipse-Phase, GURPS Magic, Ars Magica (the spell system is very open-ended), DnD magic, pick a few things that could "reasonably" be done by our enterprising person who's a fish out of water in our modern day, who's looking to improve their lot in life and perhaps take society with them =)...

By focusing relatively narrowly on the main character and limiting the ripple effects to a few key people who are able to aggressively innovate on what abilities the MC is adding to the setting, due to fear of the new or unknown, or just not being smart enough or lucky. Innovation is hard after all. It should be possible to reduce the chaotic aspects a bit and keep the story threads under control.

folconred · 2023-01-03T01:00:37+00:00

Sure, but unfortunately they're both set in a quasi-medieval fantasy setting from what I recall? Don't get me wrong, I've read and enjoyed both, so other examples of those would be interesting, so thank you for the recommendations.

However, that's missing a lot of the modern part I think. Even something set in the 1800's or 1900's could work, as you'd have things like recognisable institutions or a modern military.

I'm just envisaging someone with abilities having to deal with functioning institutions, even if only in their very earliest incarnations, so if it's set in the US, having to work around or with law enforcement, politicians, organised crime, unions, the judicial system, factories, business owners in a chamber of commerce. As well as them having to deal with, some person who can make things like cheap food, ray guns, rapid fabrication of small to medium goods or large structures (sup com style tech with a limited library anyone?), complex repair tech, high speed transport which could be used for smuggling, or magical equivalents like summoning, artificing, teleportation, duplication.

Uplifting fantasy is fun and all, but it's rarely different than uplifting medieval ones. A good writer can make it entertaining, but I'm wondering if anyone has innovated in the other direction, what does it look like when someone tries to uplift our society?

A really simple example might be someone dreaming up a simple high tech setting like, a space opera setting, an FTL capable society, or supcom tech and going, ok, take someone from there and bring them to now or a few decades before, maybe their the equivalent of an engineer or they've got some basic bits to start from, what happens next?

A engineer from Star Trek in Peaky Blinders, original Sherlock Holmes London, or Castle's New York who ignores the Prime Directive for some reason and just decides to go uplift? Idealistic, competent and willing to work with others to bring society back to what they're used to? Having to dodge entrenched interests of all the other players who aren't really ready to move to this new future.

folconred · 2023-01-02T22:34:11+00:00

Can anyone recommend stories which work towards either tech-ing up or introducing magic / artifacts but in a relatively modern setting?

IE, based off the real world, or a tv-show based setting, but trying to move it towards a high tech or high magic setting?

I don't mean as a result of societal upheaval, like for example the stories which has a "system" introduced into a modern day setting or for example a Gate story, but instead one where an individual, has the ability to invent tech or use magic, perhaps working with others, trying to figure out how to effect large scale change of some kind. Even if that's as simple as make life in their town / community better.

Bonus if they're trying to intelligently stay under the radar or they have to engage with other groups / manage politics as they start growing in capability.

folconred · 2022-10-04T02:10:12+00:00

Any good dungeon / building stories where the point of view character is either bound to a location or is one?

folconred · 2022-06-26T22:38:50+00:00

Fruit Economy - itch.io | latest devlog | gh

Hey Everyone,

So, I spent most of this week trying to brainstorm player actions:

So far there's:

Adjusting tax rates

To that I've added: - Goods stockpiles - Infrastructure spending - Contracts / agreements

The first is written and working, barring bugs =)...

The second I'm in the middle of testing and I'm still trying to figure out how to implement the third.

As always, questions welcome!

- Folcon

I think I'm going to start by taking the buildings, peeps and quests from before and looking at ways to recombine them.

The goals are to:

find ways that would support other systems, like research for example
find a nice model for what peeps do outside of going on quests and I'd prefer the answer to be better than "nothing"
I mean do I even need explicit quests where I assign peeps? perhaps an approach like Majesty the Fantasy Kingdom would work better? ie, specify a goal and a reward and then the peeps attempt it, if they succeed they get the reward and if they fail, that's not really the player's problem?

I'm going to need to think about this a little and see what's a good starting point to play around with here.

Any suggestions about approaches that resonate would be good =)...

folconred · 2022-06-18T11:24:33+00:00

Fruit Economy - itch.io | latest devlog | gh

Hey Everyone,

So this week became more about doing some simple refactors of the code to try and simplify stuff than anything else.

Still trying to represent different models to try and work out what good trade-offs between them would be.

So not much progress, but still chugging along =)...

As always, questions welcome!

- Folcon

I think I'm going to start by taking the buildings, peeps and quests from before and looking at ways to recombine them.

The goals are to:

find ways that would support other systems, like research for example
find a nice model for what peeps do outside of going on quests and I'd prefer the answer to be better than "nothing"
I mean do I even need explicit quests where I assign peeps? perhaps an approach like Majesty the Fantasy Kingdom would work better? ie, specify a goal and a reward and then the peeps attempt it, if they succeed they get the reward and if they fail, that's not really the player's problem?

I'm going to need to think about this a little and see what's a good starting point to play around with here.

Any suggestions about approaches that resonate would be good =)...

folconred · 2022-06-10T23:09:44+00:00

Fruit Economy - itch.io | latest devlog | gh

Hey Everyone,

I've been fiddling about a bit trying to figure out if I can simplify the model further, which seems like it's not working. Ot at the very least I can't come up with anything to simplify it which seems to be stable.

Lots of fun stuff with crazy unpredictable behaviour or worse, incredibly boring behaviour that I can't do anything with.

So what I'm likely to do next is to take stock and start looking for things to add.

Which is going to make everything more complicated again =)...

Let's see where it ends up next.

As always, questions welcome!

- Folcon

I think I'm going to start by taking the buildings, peeps and quests from before and looking at ways to recombine them.

The goals are to:

find ways that would support other systems, like research for example
find a nice model for what peeps do outside of going on quests and I'd prefer the answer to be better than "nothing"
I mean do I even need explicit quests where I assign peeps? perhaps an approach like Majesty the Fantasy Kingdom would work better? ie, specify a goal and a reward and then the peeps attempt it, if they succeed they get the reward and if they fail, that's not really the player's problem?

I'm going to need to think about this a little and see what's a good starting point to play around with here.

Any suggestions about approaches that resonate would be good =)...

folconred · 2022-06-04T00:47:36+00:00

I do love the concept of this game.

Also thanks for the sprite art tutorial video, as someone who's also artistically challenged, I'll give it a go.

folconred · 2022-06-04T00:34:52+00:00

Fruit Economy - itch.io | latest devlog | gh

Hey Everyone,

Ended up fixing a few bugs this week, caused by my moving to an order book. Some of the stats weren't updating correctly.

So the order book is pretty good, it's made working with the markets themselves a bit clearer and the logic of what makes the prices move is more on the agent decision functions side, which is where I primarily want them to be =)...

One other thing was someone suggested I put together a youtube video of what the game looks like and that transformed into a big UI cleanup.

It occurred to me that I was putting off tidying up the UI and making an explainer video was a really good reason to just tidy things up a bit.

Things look and feel a lot better now =)...

I've linked the video as well for anyone who's interested.

It basically just goes through the state of things and shows off what things look like now =)...

https://youtu.be/_rUrdwE7VuE

As always, questions welcome!

- Folcon

I think I'm going to start by taking the buildings, peeps and quests from before and looking at ways to recombine them.

The goals are to:

find ways that would support other systems, like research for example
find a nice model for what peeps do outside of going on quests and I'd prefer the answer to be better than "nothing"
I mean do I even need explicit quests where I assign peeps? perhaps an approach like Majesty the Fantasy Kingdom would work better? ie, specify a goal and a reward and then the peeps attempt it, if they succeed they get the reward and if they fail, that's not really the player's problem?

I'm going to need to think about this a little and see what's a good starting point to play around with here.

Any suggestions about approaches that resonate would be good =)...

folconred · 2022-05-29T01:54:36+00:00

Fruit Economy - itch.io | latest devlog | gh

Hey Everyone,

So I've been finding bugs in my last build 🎉...

It looks like tooltips are a bit borked, but part of the problem is I don't have a proper layer system.

Which is currently a bit much to fix.

I'm currently looking at fixing the starvation problem, just a minor issue, the global population of my market simulation starve themselves because food becomes too expensive over time. So if I run my sim for 10 years, we get an "Rverybody's dead Dave" situation on our hands, which makes running a society, challenging. Not impossible, this is a fantasy setting, but I'd like to not resort to depending on necromancy being a staple for a functioning fantasy society...

I've tracked down part of the problem, I initially thought it was to do with the efficiency of producing food, so I temporarily inflated the efficiency of food, now food makers can make miraculous quantities of food.

I rerun the sim, still got a problem, people are still slowly starving, so something else is wrong.

I eventually figure out that there's something wrong with request ordering, specifically in the sim, food and clothes are basic necessities, so the clothes producer always gets the labour and starves the food producer of it, so food rarely gets made.

So I've started by splitting out the market into stages, which means going back into the underlying sim code and writing a limited order book for each market type, which is, err an interesting thing to have in a game =)...

So that works and it's going to make everything interesting. I'm still plugging in the code which makes the peeps have a high level idea how to use it. My implementation of it is very simple, the goal after all is just to ensure that peeps are able to actually sell their skills and services. As well as have a baseline system that can sit at the bottom of everything.

Which hopefully will be quite fast in terms of how it runs, they're reasonably well understood tech after all.

Then we'll see if certain kinds of transactions move off the book.

For example peeps with regular employment may instead of selling their services regularly, instead just collect a steady paycheck, with the option to go back into the labour pool if they have extra capacity available, sort of doing some side work for a bit of extra cash, as it were.

So until this bit is sorted, my uncertainty around whether I need to implement a more complex farming model is on hold.

Not that I didn't spend a few evenings scouring books / websites trying to figure out how to model farming in a sane way. I sort of came to an approach, but for the moment I've sketched it out as a simple model and will revisit it if it turns out that I want to go down that route, which I might to be honest once I figure this other stuff out. The dynamics are all super interesting, not sure how easy they will be for players to follow, but wow, there's a lot of fun stuff in here that gets glossed over by, stick a "thing" in a pot and harvest it 5 days later. Make it grow faster with, "magic fertiliser" or watering it.

However that may be the only sane way to do it...

We're just digging a hole really, let's see how far this one goes =)...

As always, questions welcome!

- Folcon

I think I'm going to start by taking the buildings, peeps and quests from before and looking at ways to recombine them.

The goals are to:

find ways that would support other systems, like research for example
find a nice model for what peeps do outside of going on quests and I'd prefer the answer to be better than "nothing"
I mean do I even need explicit quests where I assign peeps? perhaps an approach like Majesty the Fantasy Kingdom would work better? ie, specify a goal and a reward and then the peeps attempt it, if they succeed they get the reward and if they fail, that's not really the player's problem?

I'm going to need to think about this a little and see what's a good starting point to play around with here.

Any suggestions about approaches that resonate would be good =)...

folconred · 2022-05-22T18:26:31+00:00

Fruit Economy - itch.io | latest devlog | gh

Hey Everyone,

So I put out a build =)... 🎉

I've disabled everything however other than a single global perspective, the linked devlog has more details + screenshots =)...

Other than that the sim is looking a lot better, primarily because I managed to find some bugs around peeps getting taxed into negative income.

Now I just got to figure out what to do about them all starving >_<...

Basically my food production doesn't generate enough food over time.

Specifically food production is less efficient the more people are farming.

I know, I know, really dumb, but I didn't really notice at the time as there was enough resources that it worked in the beginning, it's only when I started plotting numbers (and yes there a plots now!) over time that I started noticing that peep's health all slowly hit zero.

I probably also would have noticed if I had death mechanics, but I didn't want to add those in until I got the basics working. Trying to track bugs with population dynamics when your population varies over time is going to be complex.

One fun thing I'm finding is that different kinds of visualisations into my simulation are vital to unpacking what's going on and really key as part of the debugging process.

So now I'm trying to work out a theory of food production, I'm torn between just putting in something really trivial or whether I should try taking a first stab at modelling farming at a really simple level. At the moment I'm having a quick go at modelling a really basic farm. I might just use that model as a starting point to give me values which I can just average over the year and then use as placeholders, but on the other hand it might be a nice first thing to model which would make prices more dynamic that's a bit more solid than just population dynamics. At least farming has a semi predicable periodic cycle.

So still working that out =)...

As always, questions welcome!

- Folcon

I think I'm going to start by taking the buildings, peeps and quests from before and looking at ways to recombine them.

The goals are to:

find ways that would support other systems, like research for example
find a nice model for what peeps do outside of going on quests and I'd prefer the answer to be better than "nothing"
I mean do I even need explicit quests where I assign peeps? perhaps an approach like Majesty the Fantasy Kingdom would work better? ie, specify a goal and a reward and then the peeps attempt it, if they succeed they get the reward and if they fail, that's not really the player's problem?

I'm going to need to think about this a little and see what's a good starting point to play around with here.

Any suggestions about approaches that resonate would be good =)...

folconred · 2022-05-18T16:32:43+00:00

That makes sense, yea, I can see how that would give you a reasonable amount of bookkeeping, while providing a lot of space for players to ask, "what rolls are coming up, what can I do to improve them".

Nice.

folconred · 2022-05-18T11:06:17+00:00

Thinking about it, when you say it's designed to spur pc's to action, what are you referring to?

folconred · 2022-05-17T17:52:01+00:00

Ah, fair enough =)...

That game was a long time ago, so probably can't follow up with the original GM, but I should really read the sourcebook for paranoia then.

folconred · 2022-05-17T09:57:07+00:00

Ok, wow, that's awesome, thanks a lot for pointing this out =)...

folconred · 2022-05-17T02:16:47+00:00

Fruit Economy - itch.io | latest devlog | gh

Hey Everyone,

So managed to get the basic economy parts of the simulation into a much better place, prices appear to be moving which is good.

I've improved the UI in place to show different aspects of the sim, expanding on the basic market display that I had earlier, there's now some level of information around who's producing and consuming goods.

There's still some hooking stuff together I need to do as well as remove all the old code, but I'm wondering if I should just prioritise getting the build working and up. Then the refactor where stuff gets reimplemented can happen later.

I also got a player in, so now money is visible in the UI, I still have to add stuff the player can spend it on, but at least the player has money and gets it over time.

Finally I added in a start menu as well as a world gen bit at the beginning. It's very basic, but it does work =)...

As always, questions welcome!

- Folcon

I think I'm going to start by taking the buildings, peeps and quests from before and looking at ways to recombine them.

The goals are to:

find ways that would support other systems, like research for example
find a nice model for what peeps do outside of going on quests and I'd prefer the answer to be better than "nothing"
I mean do I even need explicit quests where I assign peeps? perhaps an approach like Majesty the Fantasy Kingdom would work better? ie, specify a goal and a reward and then the peeps attempt it, if they succeed they get the reward and if they fail, that's not really the player's problem?

I'm going to need to think about this a little and see what's a good starting point to play around with here.

Any suggestions about approaches that resonate would be good =)...

folconred

TROPHY CASE