My Actifit Report Card: January 15 2022

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Another slower day, in part due to the temptation to just finish off Man, Economy, and State (I did not succeed, it’s a heck of a book), and in part because I slept in to let my body recover from the crunch. This was not the best idea since I think it’s going to make it harder for me to fall asleep tonight, but I’m going to cross that bridge when I come to it.

Of course, another thing to help me feel well rested is that I got a lot less physical activity, though I did go out for two walks today for a total of five miles or so, so that’s not actually too crazy. One thing that I keep getting bummed out by is that my step count keeps falling, but some of that is a consequence of having a much more aggressive pace while I’m out walking. I’ve lost about 20-25% of my step count from my longer morning walk as a result of the change in pace alone, which has an added upside of making it take less time.

I also feel like the more strenuous my walk is, the more energetic I feel afterward, though it doesn’t help a ton when I’m not getting into work diligently.

Kenoma is coming along nicely. One of the big time-sinks today that kept me from writing as much as I’d like is that I spent time going in and breaking down a lot of the more mechanical aspects of the game to provide a more balanced and nuanced approach to how the statistics are going to play out in combat.

The game design elements that go into designing a game are complex, and I’ve explained them over on my blog @loreshapergames, but one of the things that I was working on today was a way to mathematically represent firearms designs that feel right without getting too nitty-gritty, and I think I succeeded in coming up with a way to balance out the opportunities.

It’s not so much about making all options equal, because I don’t have much interest in that. It’s about making them feel distinctive. Automatic weapons in particular are going to be a weird thing, because you’re basically choosing between economy (firing a single shot of cheap ammunition) or power (single shot of expensive ammunition, burst of cheap ammunition).

It’s a little ironic because actual military doctrine would be semi-automatic weapons for efficiency, but in real life the calibers used by the military are similar in cost with the exception of special operations forces and heavy weapons.

In an apocalyptic setting, you start worrying more about how much your ammo costs and where you’re getting it, to say nothing of how much you can carry.

Kenoma is going to shape up to have an interesting economy of bulk, where characters face limits on how much they can carry and need to strongly consider what they take with them. If you don’t use up resources, it’s fine to travel fully loaded, but if you’re taking hits in combat you don’t heal unless you’re unencumbered. Likewise, if you’re not unencumbered you take a defense penalty, though it’s trivial to drop stuff to get down below that level in most cases.

This is one thing I learned from Degenesis: if you want stuff to feel valuable, the sacrifice comes in both currency to acquire things and the opportunity cost of having other things.

In this case, one thing that players need to be aware of is weapon weight. A character’s unencumbered carrying capacity is typically going to be between 9-12, so a spare magazine, rifle, and body armor go right up to that limit for most characters.

You can carry double your unencumbered capacity with no out-of-combat penalty other than not recovering unless explicitly at rest. For some characters this is more important than others, so that can be part of the decision-making.

One of the things that I’m enjoying about working on games again is the ability to lose myself in stuff like this. When I wasn’t working on games that part of me was dormant.

I thought it was there when I was working on my thesis, but I see now that it was two different things at play. The writing spirit seeks a new world, something that it can touch and feel. The design spirit seeks purity, something to understand and master.

Kenoma is at a much more in-depth point of its development than Exoworld was, in part because my push with Exoworld was for setting rather than design. The setting of Kenoma has just come to me, and as a consequence I haven’t needed to do a lot to make it work.

This report was published via Actifit app (Android | iOS). Check out the original version here on actifit.io


15/01/2022
7748
Walking



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