yiduiqie

I've had this idea for a while about creating an incremental/idle game with a web browser interface, like Kittens Game, Theory of Magic or Farm RPG. Something about not having to render the game inside a box or separate environment appeals to me a lot, but also I already have some web development skills so there's bias there.

( blather about the development process )

My idea was to build a Cafe Management Sim that's something of a cross between a Cookie Clicker and Neko Atsume, where instead of cats* you are "collecting" customers, who are attracted by your menu items and other features of your cafe. I want it to be very community-focused - instead of the game deciding on available upgrades based on currency, customers will suggest new menu items or offer to stock you with specialty roasted coffee or cookies or whatever. There are milestone events/upgrades based on number of customers visited in day (upgrades increase your min/max visitors in a day and it chooses a random number of visited customers between those numbers daily).

All that's what I've built so far. I want customers to have dialogue events that would allow me to tell a story on top of the mechanics, and it's at this point I have realised a fatal flaw in my plan:

Now I need to create characters and actually write a story. /o\

(Also a long term goal is a graphical interface but that's far future!)

* Depending on decisions made with the graphical interface the customers may still be cats.

I keep forgetting to post about this: we've been troubleshooting the "missing notifications" problem for the past few days. (Well, I say "we", really I mean Mark and Robby; I'm just the amanuensis.) It's been one of those annoying loops of "find a logical explanation for what could be causing the problem, fix that thing, observe that the problem gets better for some people but doesn't go away completely, go back to step one and start again", sigh.

Mark is hauling out the heavy debugging ordinance to try to find the root cause. Once he's done building all the extra logging tools he needs, he'll comment to this entry. After he does, if you find a comment that should have gone to your inbox and sent an email notification but didn't, leave him a link to the comment that should have sent the notification, as long as the comment itself was made after Mark says he's collecting them. (I'd wait and post this after he gets the debug code in but I need to go to sleep and he's not sure how long it will take!)

We're sorry about the hassle! Irregular/sporadic issues like this are really hard to troubleshoot because it's impossible to know if they're fixed or if they're just not happening while you're looking. With luck, this will give us enough information to figure out the root cause for real this time.

After years of struggling to read new-to-me fiction, I’ve recently entered a phase of reading graphic novels and comics and I’ve been reading so much! (It helps that I accidentally got into a comics-based fandom via stress-reading fic late last year.) It’s only April yet I have already read more books this year than I have in any year since 2020, it's truly wild. I haven’t had this much fun reading in ages!

I wanted to share some of the things I’ve been enjoying, so I thought I’d write a rec list. I find graphic novels easier to focus on when I’m stressed than prose novels, and I also love getting to see so much art. I’ve been mostly reading MG and YA works – it feels like there is a lot going on in that space right now! Plus it’s a space where there tend to be many stories focused on friendship, which I really enjoy. I’ve also been choosing more lighthearted things to read. The world is stressful and I can’t deal with stressful reading at the moment.

( Read more... )

Please welcome our anonymous reviewer!

The Poet Empress by Shen Tao is a debut Chinese-inspired fantasy centered on a poor village girl who rises from a concubine to the empress-in-waiting to an abusive prince heir. In a bid to save the kingdom from the tyranny of his reign, Wei decides to kill him in the only way she can, by writing a magic poem. Only deathly poems have to be love poetry, and only by knowing him well enough to love him can she kill him.

( Read more... )