Monday Musings #9

Musings about Wizard-Time! Time-travel and Alt-Time.

Good Monday, Gamer 🎲

Photo by Jamie Haughton on Unsplash

Hulu has four seasons of the 12 Monkeys TV series. I missed the last two seasons when it was live, so I started binge-re-watching from season one. The 12 Monkeys movie starring Bruce Willis was about time travel and stopping an event that caused the current apocalypse, It was a weird watch on my younger mind -but I was fascinated. The TV show is a giant funhouse of troupes we all love. The main character there is sent back in time on missions to gather information and prevent the current apocalypse -then shenanigans! The two seasons I did watch were a fantastic job of mythology and character-building. Already I'm like: I can run a campaign of this in X or Y.

For the GMs out there, I give you The Twenty-One Mystic forms of the Five Room Dungeon! May you also be compelled to thematically link these graphs into a super-structure!

My son and I have been comparing our different runs through Caves of Qud, a classical roguelike game on Steam. I think out of three. I raised one gamer and two game-aware children. I'm calling it a win. We'll start a new game Scythe this week before he returns to school. Scythe enamors him. It’s an engine-building, asymmetrical board game. We've got a couple of expansions, and he's asked to replay it a few times.🤷🏾‍♂️

Saturday was my Twilight: 2000 campaign. 50-some-odd sessions. There are probably six to eight non-trivial threads the players could work on, but think of the threads more like active fuses. No one session will address them all equally, and they will start to blow up. This weekend we lit a new fuse. It seems to me for long-running games, there is a threshold where GM prep introduces housekeeping of these fuse threads - which is fun, low-friction work. I have had sessions where my only prep was updating these existing threads and running with that. The regular prep is still there, just not as urgent, and I feel with a longer "cook time" becomes better quality.

I also got in some games of Netrunner the CCG, another asymmetric game —but cards! I miss the regular local Netrunner meetups when this was a live game. Why isn't there a Netrunner video game?! Maybe I should print that money...

I got some nice development work in on Project: Wizard Time! I've moved from prototyping in DragonRuby (Ruby wrapped around SDL2) to Lua/Love2D. Lua is a scripting language built around C/C++ -my first love of programming languages. My frustration here, and in non-video game programming, is the documentation. I like a great reference doc and a good trivial project code. I usually find that decent reference doc. Most of the example code projects are so trivial as to be meaningless. I got super lucky with Lua. There is an open-source project on Steam called Bytepath. I might be using Lua a little longer than scheduled -and that's a good thing!

I'll talk more about WizardTime soon; right now, it's all in my head, and mad notes scribbled in my journal. My big milestones are getting the game development workflow and concepts down so I can make prototypes quickly. Then figure out the fun in a Vancian magic system, and build some prototypes around it. Is it fun?

How was your weekend?

See you next week!