@bussard said “OK, I went ahead and rebooted the Bussard codebase with a fresh start. The new version lives at https://git.sr.ht/~technomancy/bussard and is written in 100% #fennel”
https://git.sr.ht/~technomancy/bussard
Yay!
I won’t have much time during the week, but I’m still interested in figuring out how one would write quests. I’m imagining myself as a kind of Skyrim-mission-writer, and then the kinds of stories evolving from that would dictate the feature requests for the game engine.
Which means that the first step is: how does one write missions. 😄
Actually, perhaps a common touch point would be the genre. Is this going to be solarpunk? What sort of happy future is it going to be? What are our literary inspirations?
@technomancy was thinking of doing some kind of contrasting where the outer colonies are a solarpunk post-scarcity type society and the inner planets are capitalist, and having the game start with your ship being rescued on an outer colony world after drifting for decades following a struggle and botched launch from an inner-planets colony.
I mean, there’s inspiration in the Culture novels: artificial intelligence, space travel, post-scarcity.
Schismatrix used to be one of my favorites as a teenager. Basically it has life in the outer solar system, longevity, miners in the astroid belts, post-humans going for hardware, post-humans going for biotech, the earth lost... there’s a lot of grit and a message that basically says, life goes on, even after the apocalypse. For the solarpunk angle, one could deemphasize the grit. The idea of circumlunar space being full of political experimentation is very cool.
[Saturn's Children](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn's_Children_(novel)) might be relevant because of the idea that robots/ais are all that’s left and life’s still interesting. The sex bot angle is weird but that’s not the most interesting part for us, perhaps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn's_Children_(novel)
Both Saturn’s Children and Schismatrix find some sort of resolution with the protagonists moving to the outer solar system.
I guess in terms of political experimentations one could also look at the Mars series. Red Mars in particular had an interesting start. I didn’t enjoy the endless geography but politics was interesting.
Perhaps waking up in the outer system, and working your way back up into good standing, and in doing so, discovering (and at the same time determining) your past might be a cool metaplot for the beginning.
I like the Skyrim structure. It’s the CRPG I’ve played the longest. You can decide whether to join the empire or the rebels; you can join all the major guilds; you can become a thane to multiple jarls; and that’s all outside the main plot which is about fighting the bad dragon that is waking/resurrecting the old dragons.
I’m thinking that I should get it to run, and then write little 100-word stories that I think might fit until we have maybe ten or twelve, and then start thinking about how we could put these into the game? See how that goes, figure out whether that’s a good way to go about it?
#Games #Bussard #Fennel