MegaDevLog. Everything I am Doing.

Written - 10/31/2023 | Posted 10/31/2023

Portfolio | Portfolio Directory | Prince Molder's Mind Palace

Happy Halloween! Hope you’re dressing up all fancy for this, the most special day of the year. I myself am dressed up even as I work my last night shift at my cafe. The owner has cut all night hours so I will now be working mornings, which I will somehow cope with. If only this cafe had caffeine of some sort, such as multiple blends of coffee. (lol. Just Kidding! It does.)

As we roll into November and dangerously close to NaNoWriMo, I am working on deciding which of my many projects will receive my attention during this time. Hopefully, this blog post will help me work my way towards an answer. Sadly, my Star Wars fanfic will need to sit on the back burner for the month, but I already have two updates saved up, so we shouldn’t even miss a scheduled posting. Damn I’m good.

Aquintain

First of the projects on the chopping block is Aquintain, a giant robot battling political thriller set in a SciFantasy world centering a boy from poverty working to live up to the high expectations set for him by society and his family. It is very much mirroring the anxiety I have felt before and after graduation from college. While working on the text, it intensified my anxiety, which might explain why I haven’t gotten back to it in a bit. The last time I worked on it was before I broke up with my last Ex, which was a long time ago. That might also be another deterrent to its continuation. Regardless, I think it's time it received a little more attention.

A young man is catapulted into a dangerous world of international politics by forces he does not yet understand. The text grapples with the realities of living within the imperial core of a nation. What does an imperial nation owe those it has violently harmed? How can its citizens rectify the injustices that allow them to lead comfortable lives? The titular nation of Aquintain is inspired by the bureaucracy of late 19th century Russia, particularly as it is portrayed in Dostoyevski’s The Idiot. It also takes inspiration from late Imperial China’s meritocracy; a falsehood equivalent to the American Dream.

Standardized testing designates one’s position in the social and economic hierarchy. Our impoverished protagonist scores unusually high, allowing him to catapult himself into the world of the wealthy and powerful. This discomfort is an important part of the novel, the disconnect between his difficult life and the lack of care many of his new peers have for their positionality. As one might guess, this is partially inspired by my experience attending an affluent college after a more restricted upbringing.

It was absolutely bizarre for me to interface with people who had such completely different lives from me. Never needing to be concerned about money or schooling or scholarships. It was a rude awakening, and I found myself surrounded by many people who shared my financial situation and only a few wealthy friends who were able to empathize with my life experiences.

Untitled Folder Game

The second project I am particularly excited about is a puzzle made out of nested encrypted files recording the calamitous events that shuttered an anomalous artifact storage facility. If you are familiar with the SCP-Wiki you probably already have an idea of its tone and inspirations. The SCP-Wiki is a fan-written collection of anomalous records of strange happenings and items, horrible reality bending aberrations. Some files in my project will be personnel records, others will be transcripts of security recordings, others will be artifact descriptions.

I love the SCP-Wiki, but I cannot help but think of where all the benign items might go. Like, sure, you’re going to put an immortal lizard who eats people in a high security facility, but where do you put a fax-machine that only dispenses the winning lottery numbers for the previous week? Not in a high security facility, probably in a storage unit in a strip mall in rural connecticut. That is where my story will take place and will have a decidedly corporate feel.

The employees working here are either ambitious upstarts taking their first steps on the way to greater things or humiliated and aging superstars exiled to a quiet and pointless post. However, this ambition will turn deadly as some of these harmless items are revealed to be substantially less than harmless.

The puzzles will all be password based, the simplest of the bunch being the employee’s actual passwords, the more complex being related to ciphers and inferred information.

Like the website, the project will be extremely lofi, consisting only of encrypted zip folders and .txt files. No audio, no images. Because of this it should be playable on almost any device, even phones, without much processing power or storage space.

I like this project because it will enable me to really flex my game development skills alongside my writing capabilities. However, I do find myself getting extremely bored when inventing information for forms. It is very achievable, very in scope, and I could probably get it done during NaNoWriMo.

Black Sky

Probably the most complete of the projects here, Black Sky is a tactical tabletop roleplaying game and campaign setting I have been writing, designing, and playtesting for the last couple of years. I have some samples of it in my writing portfolio but I’ll reformat those for the blog soon. Its mechanics are inspired by the X-Wing tabletop wargame that I absolutely love but those mechanics are expanded and simplified for a more streamlined experience.

My most recent work on the project involved making a combat reference guide for my players to clarify the flow of the mechanics. I have created over 80 pages of lore and rules and many other spreadsheets and character sheets for building one’s spaceship. I’m pretty proud of it and I’ve gotten some great feedback on it.

It’s set in a bleak corporate future in which mega-conglomerates have taken over the universe. The players are a group of experienced pilots making their way in the universe. I’m thinking about changing the perspective a little bit. Instead of centralizing human experiences I think it might be more impactful to center Colinites, living spaceships who are constantly drifting between human controlled sources of fuel. Not only does this up the tension but it makes the ship building aspect of the game more personal and important. Obviously, all the other species I have designed will remain in the game, but having a more defined point of view will make the setting and the game itself feel more distinct in both tone and marketability. There you go, marketing brain coming out.

Many TTRPGs currently available have a substantial disconnect between combat and narrative. Combat is so often a binary experience, either your character lives or dies. Resource management is also often profoundly boring. Consider DnD 5e. Any injuries are erased in an hour or eight of rest. Counting Arrows and rations is also very boring. In Black Sky, resource management matters. Mostly because you only need to watch one resource: your wallet. You need money to repair your spaceship. When parts of your spaceship are damaged it should not be a trivial experience, neither should combat. Getting into a fight should be an actual decision that either dissuades the protagonists from their goal or facilitates an awesome story.

By treating combat and roleplay as distinct systems I hope to make them more dependent on one another. Characters need to care about their resources and their fights to make them interesting rather than trivializing it. I’ll write a full DevLog about this later to explain it further but I hope you get a sense of what I mean.

Centering Colinites will require rewrites of existing content. Honestly, most setting stuff is relatively complete. I do need to add more points of interest and make a map but that’s it on the creative front. The more incomplete aspect of the game is its list of systems. More need to be added and some need to be changed to make the ship building aspect of the game feel more complete. Of the four ship tiers, only 1 and 2 are complete, and some cockpits still need to be added to both of those tiers.
I don’t think I’m going to work on this during NaNoWriMo because it's not really a novel, it's a game. Worldbuilding and mechanics are very different from narrative writing. Still, it's something I am intent on finishing. Just not this month.

Tales of the 213th

My Star Wars: the Clone Wars fanfiction focusing on the perspective of Clone Troopers on the ground and a completely original cast. I’ve already posted the first Episode in the fiction tab of this blog, so if this sounds like your cup of tea, I would appreciate your eyes!

I’m not going to work on this during NaNoWriMo. While fanwork is equally as valid as original content, I really want to use this period to work on something original and new.

Captain’s Log

Inspired by the recent explosion of card driven journaling games, this one is basically set in the universe of Star Trek and urges its player to write logs based on card generated experiences and decisions. It's still very early in development.

Mecha Murder Mystery

Another placeholder name, but I think this is the project that I will be expanding during NaNoWriMo. I like the idea of devoting this month to a new project and this one is still very much in its nascency.

I was out one night drinking with an acquaintance who serves in the military and he discussed how recruiters actively target people with ADHD or autism because they adjust easily to the rules and regulations of the military and it made me think about how the future might be different if the US Military exploited other disabilities.

I am disabled myself and so are many of my friends. I first started experiencing chronic illness flare ups my first year of college and it has been a long period of adjustment and hospitalizations. I’m finally coming to terms with my diagnosis but now seek to work through some of this trauma in my work.

In a grim future the US military has created a corps of people who willingly plug themselves into mainframes to have their consciousness transmitted into terrifyingly effective mechanized warriors. Obvious parallels can be drawn to military drone operators. A very kind young woman I knew in highschool became one such operator and is now deeply traumatized because of her actions. Militaries exact so much from their soldiers, forcing them to commit atrocities, destroying their minds and bodies, often in exchange for promises of better futures or compensation.

In this story, pilots, the ones connected to mainframes, exchange constant vigilance, being able to be cast into combat into any moment, for able bodied constructs able to exist at any point in the world. These constructs are metaphors for mobility devices and other accommodations disabled people require that are often either invisibilized or made highly visible. Wheelchair users are able to navigate specific parts of the world more easily with their devices but are often subject to increased attention. But then consider glasses. People rarely think of glasses as a disability aid and yet they are one.

I want to do more reading on how folks perceive and relate to their own disability aids. The ‘protagonist’ of this story prizes her mobility and is willing to sacrifice her flesh and blood, her life span, and her conscience for the ability to move about the world more freely. I also want to specifically research how militaries have interacted with disabilities historically.

Getting to the mystery. The protagonist of this story is sent on a mission to kill a rival mech operator. She fights through security forces and reaches the machine ensconcing her enemy and destroys it, only to kill herself. She had been fooled into targeting her own pilot pod with her machine.

An embittered detective who lost the love of his life to the pilot program pulls strings to investigate her death, not to achieve justice, but to find and publicize incriminating details about the program to get it shut down. He is joined by a pair of investigators who will likewise challenge him with their own perspectives, just as he will be challenged by the family, friends, and colleagues of the mech pilot.

Coincidentally, this story is set within the universe of Black Sky, just in the distant past of the campaign setting. Mars is just beginning to be colonized, a space elevator is beginning construction, and a planetary government unification is looming on earth, much to the chagrin of empowered parties.

Still, the mystery will be an intimate affair, with only limited suspects and leads. I have written mysteries before and they require extensive planning. I typically plan my writing pretty thoroughly, writing down scene beats to build to larger story arcs, and I have put almost no planning into this work, which makes it all the more exciting! I’ll be able to create the entire project throughout the month of November.

Conclusion

It seems I have decided to work on the Mecha Murder Mystery this month! I will post further updates on the project here in the DevLogs tab. I plan to continue posting on this blog twice a week. Some of those updates might be previous projects or old articles just being indexed onto the blog. Regardless of my involvement with this novel, you should still have plenty of content to keep you sated.

Well thank you so much for joining me on this decision making process! I’m sure there are some projects in progress that I have neglected to mention so I might add some updates to this posting later. Hope you’ll join me during NaNoWriMo and further hope you’ll have an excellent day!