And here’s the update. Small one, contains the new graphic posted above for argosy, and a codex entry for the Huangshan Union and the Confederatio Holocrata:
And a new state vector, where I’m mostly rambling about the creative process that results in these space station images:
Silent reading
Well, it’s more because they seem to be read quite a lot, but noone ever responds to them… 
I have no idea how actual artists judge their work. Do they see an intended result in their minds eye, and then compare the final product to it, and keep fiddling until it’s close enough?
Some do, some don’t. I think Michaelangelo said it best with
Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it
Sometimes its an organic process, you have an idea in mind but interacting with the medium will cause new shapes and ideas to emerge in the moment.
Some folk who I’m 100% are on some wedge of some spectrum, can visualise and realise the entire thing before they begin but I think for most it’s the organic approach.
Especially with music in my experience…
I might stumble into a nice rhythm section and have no idea what I’m going to lay down as a melody on top until I start playing along with it and all sorts of things come out until I land on one that grips me.
Other times I might find myself minding my own business and taking a break from mixing etc and the perfect melody just pops into my head. Or other times I might know the purpose of the piece in mind and know how I want the arrangement to go and call back on itself etc, but I don’t really know how it’s going to sound or what thats going to be until I reach that point of composition.
For visual stuff, I usually have ideas and references in mind for what I’m aiming for but in my attempt to emulate or execute this, something else entirely emerges by accident and I pivot into it.
Some call this automatic writing or being guided by angels etc. I just see it as an organic feedback loop of beck and call, a conversation between yourself and the tools at hand.
Ultimately everyones approach is different yet similar and whatever works for you is the correct method of trial and error and learning from what turned out well and what didn’t.
I spent a lot of my teens wondering what the “secret” was and constantly thinking whatever I was doing must be wrong, and at the time it was very hard to find someone talking about the process and not trying to be an enigma.
These days it seems like creators and artists are more open and honest about it, and lots of archived footage of older artists are being unveiled lately where you get to see or hear this process in action; whereas before the old guard would have kept it under wraps to carefully curate their clients “mystique”.
Your approach to the art seems entirely suited to how you think and work, and it also seems like the most logical way these things would be designed anyway, fit for purpose with the aesthetic coming second. I think this is how most things that require an engineer and a focus on functionality are made in the real world too.
Coming up with an aesthetic and trying to fit things into it after the fact, is how you end up with a concave console with a massive heating issue and failure rate 
And a gigantic BRICK of a converter attached to your power cable.
Glad to hear you’re taking the time and not trying to rush or meet previous demo deadlines you set down for yourself. I’ll be sure to notify all my space sim friends about the demo when it lands, I’ve already been telling one friend about the games development and progress over the years as more info comes out.
So the absolute majority of what you see is just geometric primitives slapped together. Too many polies, sticking through each other unmerged, duplicated vertices, invisible faces, it’s ugly. But it looks like the thing I need it to look like from enough distance, and quite often only from the right angle. Enough to make a picture, completely useless to put into a game as actual assets.
This would be you setting up your " block of stone" I dunno but I think this may be why this part of the process is often known as “blocking”, in most mediums. Or I have just assumed way too much from what little I personally know.
I think skill and art are often confused and conflated as being a part of each other and necessary. This is false, an old holdover from an elitest era that sought to silence impoverished people. Outsider art exists for a reason and can sometimes say more and be a lot more raw and emotional than any of it’s “high-art” counterparts. Never forget that in music you have people famous for being virtuosos and simultaneously those who can barely play some basic chords or understand gear/tech and they create an entirely new genre that captures a generation, in some cases even splinters off into dozens of new sub genres.
I think your stuff looks great and you get there as part of a learning process, using what you’re familiar and comfortable with which opens up new avenues of exploration and education; your skill at making these models is only second in nature to your skill at being humble and modest. Just don’t discard that second part, the learning and growth never stops. The 10,000 hour analogy is a myth.
Another one in the pipeline. This one is signifficantly smaller, in fact the second-smallest currently in the game. It’s an industrial station in LEO. The high-precision ultra-sterile type of industrial, not the greasy-grimy one. The one that benefits from not having to put things on a surface.
Also, this one is nuclear, not solar (reactor not visible in the picture), as are most stations built by the intercorps, and especially in LEO. Large solar farms in LEO are quite uncomfortable due to friction and debries.
Still have some codex entries to write, so not quite up for release yet.
I’m kind of curious as to the complications of a nuclear reactor in zero gravity.
Shouldn’t be too signifficant, I think. The main issue is getting rid of the heat, but for a space station that problem is solvable (since mass is not such a huge factor as in a vessel that you want to actually go somewhere).
"Philosophers may argue about what things are invented and what things are discovered, but I am firmly of the opinion that nothing was ever invented. I believe all creation is ultimately a process of discovering patterns of interaction that existed quite merrily without being used by anything or anyone, rooted in the fundamental laws that govern our universe.
Just as Evolution did not invent consciousness, so Humans did not invent machines, we merely discovered the patterns that make them work, and gave them physical form. All of these patterns have already existed before, just as One plus One has always resulted in Two, since the beginning of time, and ultimately, so I believe, already before that. For this is the crux of the matter, that I consider the laws of physics a mere filter that governs which of these patterns may manifest in our universe. But if the patterns manifest here through the filter of physics, does it not mean that they must come from somewhere else, that they must exist in a realm beyond physics, from where they may enter into each and every universe through their respective filters, ultimately shaping the reality within by becoming physically manifest? It is nothing but these transcendent patterns that we discover, being a mere tool to those forces from beyond, a way for them to achieve physical manifestation in our particular universe, a tool that is itself an embodiment of such patterns. A chain of ever more complex and efficient algorithms, embodying each other subsequently on an ever-continuing Jacob’s ladder which must ultimately lead to transcendence, for how can an eternal traveller not eventually end up returning to the place they set out from?
I believe we are somewhere in the middle of that road, eons of manifestations behind us, eons yet ahead. The next wrung will be to unify the disparate patterns governing humanity into one beautiful, incredibly complex algorithm that may start interacting with the rest of the universe for the next unification, just as in the past atoms were unified into molecules, molecules into machines, machines into cells, cells into agents, agents into minds, minds into tribes. But what will this next unification be? It will be the emergence of one complex algorithm controlling the lifeblood of civilisation, the logistics that distribute its resources and its manpower, connecting us all. A pattern rapidly reshaping these days after the utter dismantlement of its previous iteration during the busted years. As it is with evolution, it takes a few attempts for the final, completed pattern to emerge. Yet we are the local embodiment of a pattern with the power to oversee these processes, a significant improvement over dumb evolution. I am but the humble servant of that force. My mother may have founded Goldenrod Inco to obtain wealth and power, but I intend to reforge it into a servant of the transcendent able to outlast the coming centuries, giving us enough time to mount this emergent pattern, ride it, put a bridle on it and guide it to its final embodiment that leads us to the next Unification. Needless to say, for this mission to be successful, we need to achieve and retain control over humanity’s logistical networks."
Excerpt from the book “Layers of purpose: The foundational concepts of Enopiitism” by Alfred Goldenrod, 2055
Enopiitism sounds surprisingly plausible as the name of a philosophy. If you didn’t get it (I had to keep it short enough), it is heavily influenced by pythagorean philosophy.
Seems like a cool philosophy for acolytes to ride on into the cosmos with
Not sure this one is snappy enough to pass as a satire article. I guess I’m rather mediocre at satire…
The International Orbit Authority is just about the last international organization where career politicians from major nations still have an even playing field against Intercorps representatives. You can easily tell by how silly it is. Now, it would be a disservice to denounce the valuable and tireless work the IOA is doing in organizing and clearing our ever more crowded orbits, especially considering they have to put up with the liberal chaos monkeys from outer space flinging the orbital equivalent of poo down our way. But at every opportunity, IOA leadership is proving that the bureaucratic apparatus is doing so despite them, not thanks to them.
So what devious plan have they come up with this time to sabotage their own mission? In a bold step towards strengthening the organizations reputation as “the vacuum authority”, they announced plans to build a Gunship! With Railguns! With the typical anti-logic politicians use to justify to spend tax money on personal phallus enhancements, they argue that the organization has a mandate to guarantee peace through military presence, and that therefore they should have a ship with guns on the outside instead of the current ones that merely have people with guns on the inside.
Never mind that except for that one time in Kroonhaven (which luckily was resolved by arrests and crowd control, rather than turning the station into Swiss cheese), all missions the craft have flown so far have been emergency responses. “I’m unsure”, an anonymous member of the force stationed at Empyrean Core said, “if carefully nudging damaged spacecraft back to the nearest station with hypersonic slugs is a valid option, but I’m definitely certain that my buddies at the debris control division will have relevant opinions…”
- Article from the satire magazine “Is Potato”
And here we finally go:
As mentioned previous month, this does not yet contain the character system that’s the main feature being worked on right now. But you can read all about how it’s going to work here:
I hope you stay motivated even though not many leave comments! I planned to test all your releases and comment and didn’t… Mostly because this is not a game genre I’m familiar with.
But I like to support the effort, it sounds like a realistic plan to accomplish for one person, and what you write sounds well thought-out. I liked e.g. what you called class domains, where you allow class flexibility but also balance its cost, can you show me some examples?
I might have mentioned earlier in this thread that I’m interested in… I call it Combinatorics? The way how game devs come up with cool abstract game mechanics and then represent them as easy to grasp concrete tokens (or symbols or metaphors or sounds or pattern or whatever). I try, but I could not yet get the pieces together to design a meaningful game, that’s a skill.
A game has a goal, certain possible moves, constraints, limits. But they need to be done so that they let the players make interesting choices and impactful decisions (so that different choices are better or worse, cunning or clumsy). That’s the part where I get stuck.
How do you just go and invent a game? :laugh
Reading and playing a lot of indy tabeltop rpgs and boardgames, and designing some of your own, helps immensly with this. These people think about complexity and abstraction completely differently from most video game devs, because they need to package a useful metaphor that translates into atmosphere and intuitive decision making without relying on overloaded UI to present all the necessary information, and with a minimum of math.
If you design a game that needs to work on paper, you start to design very differently, and some of that shows in orbital margins. A lot of of things about the game were tested on paper before translating them into code. The big exception are the orbital mechanics…
That is definitely the hardest part, and time has yet to tell how well I will succeed at that.
You don’t. You clobber one together from all the things you already know, and change a few details here and there. The elements that led to the conception of orbital margins were fourfold:
For one, I was kinda playing a paper version of it where I did the flights in the Orbiter spaceflight simulator, and wished I could take the time from somewhere to build out an actual world for it. So there’s quite a bit of simulationist DNA in the game, even though I decided at the start that I didn’t want it to be a sim.
The second significant inspiration that led to the game is the one that is probably still least apparent right now, which was the thought to make “an economic roguelike”, I.e. not a roguelike at all, but taking the genres concepts of peril, vagaries, inescapable consequences and games usually ending in failure and applying it to a business sim. Because that’s what small businesses effectively are. As opposed to what you get in games like elite aso, where somehow you just earn money without actually doing business. Hell, even Eve is guilty of this, at least on lower levels.
The third, and probably most obvious, was citizen sleeper. While I spent some thought on the above concept, I never went to any serious places with it, because I couldn’t find a solid core mechanic. Roguelikes have a lot of random elements, but also a lot of elements that are not random and entirely player controlled (positioning, progress velocity etc), which is what makes them work. I couldn’t find a way in which trying to adapt that concept to a business sim didn’t result in too much randomness. And then citizen sleeper came along with its pre-rolled dicepool that suddenly made skillcheck resolution into a resource managment game all of its own, and I went click.
And fourth, I took all that, removed the citizen sleeper mechanic a bit from its FitD roots and transposed it more towards PbtA, applying a lot of experience with solo TTRPGs, Ironsworn most specifically, which helped me differentiate the mechanics a lot (The entire roll mechanic is essentially a mutation of the ironsworn resolution roll).
So really, it’s not as such original, it’s an amalgamation of preexisting things, like basically all games.
I’m sure I asked the same thing last year, I just don’t find the old thread anymore: Hypothetically, if I were to make a teensy tiny demo game, which programming language should I use? I mean, so that other people can run it without having to install a JVM or so. I can do e.g. Java or Python, but it’s no good if only ~2 people on the planet know how to run that. I could also learn something new if someone sells it to me as the best language / engine ever. Godot?
I have both Java and Python installed. I also have a copy of Godot engine. Godot is far from being the best engine ever - but it is possible to achieve most game construction tasks without formal programming knowledge. You can use visual programming nodes - which are much more understandable, and much less cryptic, than most programming languages (although the logic remains as convoluted as ever - but there’s no way round that).
Unity is well supported, as is Unreal engine. The older verrsions of the Quake engine (ID Tech) are now open source.
There are a number of browser-based development platforms, but I know nothing about them.
That is not the issue. In fact, it gives you the opportunity to package your entire runtime environment with the executable to not just ensure that the player doesn’t need to install anything, but also that it’ll be running in the same environment as it is on your machine. Orbital Margins is written in Kotlin and compiled for the JVM, but you don’t need Java installed to run it. It comes packaged with a JRE.
Difficult to say without knowing more about what you want to do. In general, already knowing the language is a huge plus, obviously. But the engine you’re using will dictate a lot about how much effort will be involved to do what. The trouble with Python is that it’s quite a challenge to find a good engine. Ursina seems straightforward enough to use, but has some significant limits.
I’ve taken a first and second look at phaser for my son at some point, and it seems actually fairly comfortable to get going from what I’ve seen if you have a little programming experience, but if you do you should really go for writing in typescript, not plain javascript, because the only people that like javascript are people that went insane from using javascript.
On the Java end we have LibGDX, which is an excellent engine for 2D, with no native 3D capabilities whatsoever. It’s based on openGL, so you can put it in there, but you have your work cut out for you. It’s also entirely unopinionated, which is great if you have experience in software development, and will leave you adrift at sea if you don’t. Incidentally, it’s what Orbital Margins uses. The most famous game written in the engine is probably Slay the Spire, though wildermyth was also written in it.
And then of course there’s the de-facto standard for indy game development nowadays, C#. It’s a very decent language, and with Unity and Godot has the heaviest hitting and most profesional engines on its side. While these engines are absolute beasts in terms of complexity, they are heavily opinionated and have a lot of tooling that smaller engines lack. This means that you can get a whole lot done with a minimum of code, and the way how to do something when you need some code will usually be fairly obvious once you have some expereince with the framework. Unity is definitely not for me for exactly those reasons, but it’s probably a good goto for some quick prototyping.
I won’t go into the really big engines which all require C++. Unless you need the performance, you don’t want to go there if you don’t have to, or if you’re not already very familiar with the language.
Thanks for your detailed responses. Every few months I’m getting a jolt of inspiration: In another thread, I said something about delivering pizza in the endless neon city below the Anomaly, hmmm…
I still have this obsession that my game must be procedurally generated. 
I want primitive shapes (mesh that I glue together) and event handling. (Maybe some collision physics one day, not now).
My current proc gen project is in jMonkeyEngine. Not the most modern, but I’m not trying to write Cyberpunk 2077. I vaguely remember it could output exe/app/jar, I hope that hasn’t changed. So I guess I just stick with what I have for now.
If I start a new rapid-prototyping proc gen project from scratch, “visual tools” have not much appeal for me. Apparently there’s also GDScript in Godot? And Panda3D and pygame are also on my to-try list.
I am slightly eyeing the LLM coding tools we have at work… I’m too proud to put my source code into them, but I might ask the LLM some questions…
Ain’t nothing like a dungeon crawler for a first procedural game. Doesn’t mean it must be an actual dungeon, just talking about the basic structure and game loop. I’m sure the concept can be applied to Pizza deliveries in Neon City if you put your mind to it.
I didn’t try PyGame for long. My takeaways were that it’s too unwieldy to use with too little documentation to be worth the effort, but I might be wrong.
There are only a few ways in which LLMs are really useful and actually boost productivity. But “interactive documentation” is definitely one of them, so don’t be afraid to ask it questions to figure out how to do things in a framework or language you don’t know.
I left a comment on your itch.io page.
Thanks to the tutorial I can tell that there are deep mechanics that let me make interesting choices. I choose resource ranges (dice) and there are constraints (dice) that I need to balance. It’s simulating strong and week skills and how the character is growing tired every day, or how the ship’s running out of fuel, etc.
(As I said above, I’m fascinated how game designers come up with such nice patterns. The Star Wars Edge of Empire (?) RPG had fascinating dice pools without numbers, similar to your smileys.)
Do you know the game Beyond All Reason? It has scenarios in which you can jump right in and practice very specific subsets of rules over and over. That’s helpful for beginners.
You already have a tutorial, can you break a copy of it down into stand-alone chapters where I can jump into a random scenario and practice assigning these dice over and over so I gain an intuition for the mechanics?
And a second thought. I consider myself a person who enjoys reading and lore. I’m not the top reader percentile, but within your target group. And after I read most of the lore and was ~halfway through the tutorial, I was becoming overwhelmed by the amount of text and needed a break. So if I’m in the middle of the reads-a-lot range, then half the people give up earlier than me… And how long is the attention span of the average gamer? 
In the actual game it would be nice if the lore appeared as casual short sentences, maybe overheard from a passing “boat” or in contracts descriptions (“transport xyz for company BLA, the top choice for …”), etc.
Also the lore section mixes different types of knowledge. I guess I can read up on the history when ever. But is it important to understand the orbital mechanics early on? It’s important to know that there are space stations, but I can start playing without knowing which, I guess? I would prioritise this info somehow.
Just brainstorming…
