Gregory's Server
New instance, new #introduction
I messed around with a lot of old Maxis games as a kid and kind of expected more would come out that would teach me how the world "really worked" in a way I could use to decide how to live my life. I still don't know what that would be like, exactly, but I figure *somebody* does, so I'm making a tool to help them, whoever they are: the Life Simulator Engine, #LiSE, pronounced "lies".
The core feature is time travel. The development kit for Inform 7 had this, and it seemed so obviously useful that I needed to have it. This replaces save files; now, everything that ever happened in any playthrough of your game lives in a database.
There's also a rules engine, similar to the one in Ren'Py's Dating Sim Engine. By compartmentalizing the complexity of your game's rules, it should make them easier to reason about, and there's a way to time travel to just before or after any particular rule, to see if it did the right thing.
Take a look:
The workflow I have in mind for #LiSE is "incremental gameness"
1. have an idea for a simulation
2. implement it in the IDE using only the default interface
3. slap an easy, menu based interface on it to get some kind of player interaction going. iterate until fun
4. implement a minigame for a key aspect of the simulation. iterate until fun. repeat until you have a minigame that is more fun than the main game
5. redesign the interface around the minigame. while you're at it, make it pretty
6. in fact the default interface kit isn't doing this game justice anymore, let's rewrite the frontend in Unreal
7. video game
The workflow I have in mind for #LiSE is "incremental gameness"
1. have an idea for a simulation
2. implement it in the IDE using only the default interface
3. slap an easy, menu based interface on it to get some kind of player interaction going. iterate until fun
4. implement a minigame for a key aspect of the simulation. iterate until fun. repeat until you have a minigame that is more fun than the main game
5. redesign the interface around the minigame. while you're at it, make it pretty
6. in fact...