State of Projects

Hello! Today, my plan is to go over generally what I’m going to be working on for the foreseeable future as I start to get back in the groove of working on my projects. My current plan is to work on 3 projects in parallel: Maintenance Crew, my Factorio mod Arcana, and a worldbuilding project I’ll talk about a bit later. My thoughts behind this is sometimes I get either bored or stumped on a project I’m working on and that can often take all the wind out of my sails and make the rest of the day completely unproductive. Having other projects to work on (especially easier ones like the ones I’ve picked here) helps me have places to redirect my energy into if/when that happens. It won’t fix all unproductive days, of course, but it should help.

First off, Maintenance Crew. This is definitely still my main big project and my main focus. In one of my PAX blog posts I mentioned that taking a break from the project was probably a good thing. Being able to come back to the project with a new perspective (and several updates of similar games being out in the world for me to analyze) gives me the tools to make sure the game is as good as it can be. Right now, a big thing I’m starting to re-evaluate is the core gameplay loop of the maintenance tasks. While the main thing I’m really excited about in the game is the meta-puzzle system and the procedural generation, the game still has to be fun for a player who only engages at the surface level. I don’t have any concrete ideas for this at the moment, but when I do, I’ll be sure to write a post specifically about that. Currently, I’m vaguely thinking about leaning more into the crafting system I was messing with when I got busy, but that might not end up being the direction I end up going.

Next up is Arcana, my Factorio mod. I started tinkering with this again while I was in New York for Thanksgiving and I’ve had some new ideas for what to do with this mod emerge. As such, this section is likely going to be the longest, as I’ve been actively thinking about it in the past couple weeks. I dropped this mod a while back because my ideas for what I wanted to do with it were outside the scope of what Factorio mods can do easily — they weren’t outside the realm of possibility, but outside of what the engine handles well natively, so would involve me writing hacky code that would likely cause performance hits at the scale I was hoping to use it. This realization really ground this project to a halt, but now, equipped with better knowledge of what’s easily doable with Factorio’s API, I’ve started to come up with new ideas. The main idea of it being a mod that merges the technology of Factorio with the arcane is still in tact. How I’m planning to handle that has completely changed, however.

The original idea for the mod was that you would be using a small number of basic resources to do transmutations to turn those materials into whatever you wanted. That idea on the surface was cool, but the idea that you can craft whatever you want from 1 resource was boring in practice, so it needed something to spice it up. The idea I had for that was for these transmutations to have random outputs that you’d need to build systems to manage. This is the thing that wasn’t going to work at scale. Factorio’s recipes have functionality for random products, but not in the way you’d expect. The only recipe to use this in vanilla Factorio is the Uranium Processing recipe, which has a 99.3% chance to produce Uranium-238 and a 0.07% chance to produce Uranium-235. Seems simple, but the issue is these chances are independent of each other, i.e. each time you use this recipe, you could get one, the other, both, or neither. Handling random products in a manner where only 1 product is picked each time is possible — it’s been done in Space Exploration’s Arcosphere Balancing puzzle — but in that mod, it’s done at very small scale as to not encounter the performance hits. If I make random products the basis of my mod, it’d really limit the scale that people could build to.

Ultimately this means having to scrap the whole idea and start from scratch. This does give the opportunity to take a step back and consider what types of logistical problems and structures could be fun, cool, and/or thematic to play with. From the very beginning of originally planning out this mod, I always thought having to deal with mana as a liquid could be fun. The question then becomes what do you do with it. The natural answer to that is it’s a power source, but how? Do you use it to power a special generator to make electricity? Does the mod retheme the electrical system entirely into a more magical system? If so, is it just a reskin, or does it have its own unique mechanics to deal with? These are only a small fraction of the questions that having mana in the mod brings up, let alone any other thing I could think to add. Ultimately though these questions come down to how magic and how tech do I want the mod to be, and I think the answer to that is about 50/50, maybe with a slight lean towards tech. The reason for this is then I can lean on Factorio’s existing systems and not have to worry about retheming or redesigning the basic systems already provided and that people already know. My current ideas for mana are to use it in an itemized form early on, then have some sort of liquid mana production chain later on. As a holdover from the original plan, I still have an ore called manite that acts as one of the starter resources for the mod, so it only makes sense to use it as a simple intermediate early and then create new uses for it later, sort of like iron’s role in vanilla Factorio. In terms of how to use the manite to generate power for early machines, I got an idea from a Minecraft mod of all things: Applied Energistics 2’s crystal resonance generator. In short, Applied Energistics 2 is a mod for Minecraft that lets you build a computer system to store your items in. Naturally, this system needs power to operate, and the mod provides a very basic generator that creates a constant small amount of power in the form of the crystal resonance generator. In addition to this, other Factorio mods and modpacks already make use of windmills, which do pretty much the same thing. With all this precedent, it only seems natural to make this my mod’s early game power solution.

Beyond this, I don’t have a whole ton planned out just yet for the mod. I have some vague ideas of how this mana fluid production chain might end up working and the idea of having a “pre-research” game phase, that essentially involves doing a bunch of trigger techs to unlock the first science pack and basic machines.

Now, onto my worldbuilding project. I’m still not totally sure how much about this I want to talk about, but I can at the very least give some context into why I’ve been so hesitant to talk about it. About a month or so ago one of my friends who streams on Twitch brough up that he really wanted to do an actual play. An actual play, for those unaware, is essentially when people play a tabletop roleplaying game like Dungeons & Dragons on the internet, either streamed or otherwise. I mentioned offhandedly that I was also interested in doing something like that and he responded by asking if I’d be willing to run and actual play.

Oh boy.

Actual plays are already a lot of work as a player. For one, the game needs to be consistent or else it’s never gonna gain traction, so that means more than usual people need to set aside time in their schedules for it. Then there’s also the performative pressure that comes with being on a livestream, and not a normal live stream where there’s some expectation of times of low energy; this is the kind of livestream where people expect to be fully engaged for a few hours straight. Now take all of that and multiply that by the increased workload of being the game master for the game.

So naturally I said heck yeah I’d run it.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been doing worldbuilding and planning for a homebrew campaign setting for this actual play to take place in and it’s going pretty well so far. The main hesitancy I’ve had over writing about it is mainly the fact that if all goes well, people will get to watch this, so I don’t wanna go spouting spoilers about my plans for the story. Additionally, it’s entirely possible that my potential players could read this, so that’d be double bad if I spoiled the story. So I’m gonna try my best to give some information about the setting without getting too into anything related to the plot. Firstly I’m gonna be running the game in the Starfinder 2e system. For one, I’ve wanted an excuse to try the system out, even though mechanically it’s basically just Pathfinder 2e, which I’m very familiar with. But also this system is the most conducive to the sci-fantasy theme I’m going for in the worldbuilding. Now, for the actual worldbuilding things. First and foremost, I’m building a small dwarf galaxy (around 100,000,000 stars, which I promise is small for a dwarf galaxy). Obviously I’m not going to painstakingly build out every single one of those star systems, but this size gives me plenty of space to work with for a notable feature of this dwarf galaxy: rifts. Due to an event in the long past that I’m not gonna talk about, there are several large rifts and thousands of smaller rifts spread across the galaxy. The major rifts are each aligned to particular magical energies. For example, the Burning Scar is aligned to fire, thermal energy, and light. It (and the other rifts) have influences on the sections of the galaxy around them that I won’t get into here for now at least that should hopefully make for an interesting and diverse galaxy for my players to explore. Outside of this feature, I’m also planning to have a large number of factions (somewhere in the 10-15 range probably) that my players will be able to encounter and interact with over the course of the campaign, though I won’t go into them for now.

Obviously this is a fairly large project to tack onto the other two, but it has the benefit of being almost entirely creative. Usually when I run into roadblocks with my other two projects it’s not because I can’t think of any ideas, it’s because I’ve run into a programming problem that I’m having trouble solving. Having a project like this that doesn’t involve any programming since if I get tired with programming for the day, I can always fall back on it. On top of that, I have a slew of friends that I play other TTRPGs with that likely won’t be playing in this game, so I’ve got others I can bounce ideas off of both now while I’m in the planning phase as well as later when I’m doing week-to-week planning for sessions.

So there it is! The rundown of my projects as they stand now in preparation for regular blog posts again! My plan is to at least write one post a week, probably on Sundays, though if I think of something during the week that I really want to talk about immediately I’m not gonna stop myself from doing so. If all goes well, I’ll see you next week with an update on what I’ve done!