Arbitology: Dei Gratia Rex News

It's definitely been a while this time. I do apologize for that. I have a great deal of difficulty writing these things when I don't have new features and content to talk about.

The short version is this: DGR is not cancelled. My life situation changed dramatically in the last 14 months, and I'm still figuring out how to get things done under less than ideal conditions. I did make a few more small things to prevent atrophy of skill, and they will be linked in the companion Tweet.

If you're interested in more details, read on. Fair warning though: I can't promise that it will be especially riveting material.




The last time I wrote one of these, I mentioned a death in the family and quite a mess left in their wake. That's largely resolved at this point. On the other hand, I've had to pivot to, first and foremost, being a caregiver for my aged and mobility-challenged mother. This consumes a lot of time. More than that though, it consumes time in small and medium chunks throughout the day, every day. I didn't realize what a luxury it was to lock myself in a closet office for 6-to-8 hours per day, heads-down on the game. I cannot do that anymore. I also didn't realize how nice it was to work on a table rather than trying to steal snatches of time with a laptop while spending hours per week in waiting rooms. Moreover, I didn't appreciate even little things like being able to wear headphones.

Had I made different life choices, I could no doubt have hired someone for this. Alas, the money I did have was spent long ago. It wouldn't have gone far anyway, given the absolute state of the Medical-Financial Complex in the Land of the Free. This falls to me to do, and honestly I don't mind it. There are far worse things in this world, and it's really the least I can do to repay all that has been done for me. All the same, it has made forward progress on DGR difficult.

All that said, I refuse to give up. It's probably a sunk cost fallacy, but I'm not letting all the time and money I invested in this go to waste. That would be a genuine tragedy, even if I have no illusions about what the most likely outcomes in indie games are. If I'm honest though, this game dev nonsense is one of the few things I have, and DGR is the only project of mine that's ever got any sort of traction.

Speaking of which, in this brief pause I've taken on DGR, I made a few small games. They're playable in the browser, free, and, insofar as such a thing exists in games, finished. There will be details on that in the companion Tweet, since I can't really put the links here. I will say I am somewhat pleased with Dream Warrior. The others perhaps not so much, but I worked out some cool tech in all of them that I'm going to add to DGR. Working on simple things of limited scope unburdened by the weight of thousands of simulated characters with 50-ish possible qualities and two-and-a-half novels worth of text has been about my limit of late.




In all honesty I don't know.

Assuming my plans hold, I will be attending a local convention with an equally local game dev group again this year. In support of that, I'll freshen some things up here Very Soon (no, really), and hopefully replace that awful trailer I made years ago.

I should have known better than to post definite plans with dates attached in the last update. I'll forgo that this time. Now that I've got some (recent) experience in finishing, I'm really going to try to apply that to DGR in the coming months.

If I can help it though, I will at least endeavor to communicate better. Nine months between updates was a bit excessive.

It's been a while, hasn't it?

I've honestly been a bit stuck between competing desires. Until recently, I had never missed a monthly update. Some were a bit late, but even through the pandemic years, I did not miss any monthly updates. On the other hand, I really don't like to post bad updates and even more so, as mentioned earlier, I don't want to use this space as a personal blog. In the end, in order to post something, I'm afraid it will have to be a less than good update and also a bit of a blog.

On the other hand, if you're interested in playing something else I've made, there might be something of interest here.




In late March, my stepfather passed away. He left in his wake a bit of a mess, both physical (because he was a hoarder) and financial (because he had a lot of debts, some of which were at > 28% interest). Further, my mother is not in particularly good health and needs significant assistance in even routine tasks. I've been working to fix those messes, while also having many new responsibilities. I have not taken to this new reality very easily, if I'm being honest.

I have faith in this project. That remains unchanged. Lately though, in light of my new circumstances, it has been hard to justify doing "unpaid labor." As such, very little work has been done on DGR in the last few months. Things will change. However, every time I think I've nearly rounded the corner, I find new things that sap my time and energy. This time I am not going to make any specific predictions, instead only saying that I do plan to return to as close to full time on DGR as is possible, as soon as is possible.




I have been working on this game for over six years. I have been starting to have doubts about my ability to finish. Quite by chance, I found a post recruiting participants for a Narrative Design Jam. It's hosted on another site that, in addition to hosting jams, sells video game online. Valve, understandably, filters links to such sites. I don't blame them; were I operating something like Steam, I would not allow my partners to link to competitors either. There will be no links here, but I'm sure you can find it via my other social media.

Anyway, my efforts in May went to finishing something. I stripped down the DGR engine and made a narrative-focused game, Dreams of Gold. It didn't win the jam, but it was one of the nominees. I'm quite pleased with that result. More than that, I finished a game for the first time in a few years. Some people played it; indeed, you, too, could play it today if you wanted! It is a very different game though, and I would not be upset if you didn't.

I got some tangible benefits out of it also. I worked out a process (and wrote code to automate most of it) of producing pre-compiled builds, which is a lot nicer than shipping full source for everything. This will work more or less unchanged for DGR. I also got a few bug reports for the underlying engine. I have already applied these fixes to DGR.

Less pleasantly, there just wasn't an audience for the game. It's a weird art game, so that's to be expected. I wasn't quite expecting it to sink so hard, so soon though.



This has really inspired me to finish DGR. As niche as it is, there are levels. I admit, I was hoping something might happen with DoG, and maybe I might make a few other small games with micro budgets that may earn a tiny profit, so I could keep the lights on for a while via games. But no.




Now that I have found some ways to be at least a bit productive, I am going to get more done on DGR. Hopefully I can apply the lessons on finishing here as well. Also, as it's already the 20th, I'm not planning a post in early July, but instead resuming the regular cadence on the first Saturday in August.

Welcome to another regular monthly update. The bad news is that there isn't much to report. The good news is things should be returning to something approaching normal by this time next week. I've still got a lot of other work to do now, both the paying kind and otherwise, but at least I should be able to carve out large blocks of time to work on DGR going forward.

I'd like to thank everyone for their patience and understanding. I really appreciate the kind messages.




Rather unexpectedly, there was a recent discussion about DGR on another forum. It's still going on at the time of writing, in fact! Also much to my surprise, there was a rather vigorous discussion of some of the names used.

DGR is an alt-historical scenario. From the beginning I have striven for "hard historical fiction," in the sense of hard sci-fi, however. I'm trying to get as many details right as is possible, even if I'm also allowing enough invention to allow the game to be replayable. This does include even superficial things like names.

A central conflict in this game is that of two competing claims to the English throne: the Norman claim, gained by the incomplete conquest, and the Saxon claim, from the northern barons' support of Edgar Ætheling. Both are of these are fairly large, strong realms. Both of them claim to be the real England.

I ended up with "Bryttania" — etymologically connected to the title "brytenwalda" — as the title for the Anglo-Saxon England, and simply "England" for the Norman England. I fully admit that the former isn't a good name. However, they aspire to more than a title like "Northumbria" communicates. A compelling argument was made in the aforementioned thread to have each side call themselves England, but in their own tongue: thus "Englaland" and "Angleterre" for Saxon and Norman respectively.



I'm not fully convinced of this myself. If someone were to briefly look at the above screenshot, they may not really know what those names meant. Almost everyone, on the other hand, will recognize "England." Either way, I would definitely not mind hearing more input on this!

In any case, that discussion inspired me to decouple the display name from the internal name. So regardless of which way I go, it will be easy enough to mod the name to your preference.




I'm honestly not sure. The more I try to plan things, the worse they seems to go. What I do know is that I'll let you all know on (or around!) the first Saturday of next month. Thanks for reading these updates!

Things continue to be hectic on my end. If you're interested in that sort of thing, there will be a few details at the end. Otherwise, here's a quick update on some new developments.




As expected, these continue. There are some events that set up long, ongoing situations.



Ongoing doesn't mean perpetual though.



There was also a fair bit of work on an event with rather momentous implications. If you're familiar with some of the influences on DGR, you'll probably have expected this. However, unlike said influences, there are a few different species of this event, and you may or may not encounter it at all!






I'm kind of hesitant to turn these update posts into a personal blog. Also the common advice is to never talk about negative things in an official capacity. I'm going to go against the grain a bit, because I think everyone who has been following these updates should know what's going on.

Long story short, both of my parents are in old and have been in poor health for a number of months. One was recently admitted to hospice. There were some complications in getting to that point, which required quite a lot of work on my part. It may take days or it may take months, but this isn't a situation where recovery is possible. I have a lot of things to do on that front, and I cannot plan around any of them. This means I can't really block out large stretches for work, because there are frequent interruptions. I also have to be available to help them most of the time.

Further, DGR was always intended to be a 12-18 month project. Obviously that was massively arrogant on my part. The progenitor of this sort of game takes 5+ years to make one and is rather more experienced and talented than am I. Perhaps creating a simulation of thousands of characters was a bit of over-scoping as well. Either way, the money I set aside is long gone at this point, even if I brutally optimized my expenses and sold my valuables. When short term work appears, I more or less have to take it. I don't have anything right now, but in April there will be another fairly sizable contract.

All this means that work on DGR has slowed considerably. This isn't a choice I've made. This isn't an abandoned game, either. It's just the consequences of life (and taking too long in finishing). I'm sorry this post didn't have that much content. Hopefully next month will see a better post!

The first Saturday of the month has come and gone. Apologies. I'm kind of behind on everything right now. I have an unfortunate amount of things going on right now, and will for some time to come. I'm still doing as much work as I can despite that, but sometimes things like update posts slip through the cracks a bit.




As expected, these events are continuing. One of the reasons I saved these for the end is that I expected they would interact with lots of other systems. This expectation turned out to be accurate. Just for one example, a promised hunt and some interactions with previous systems:



Also as expected, the fact that many of them are secretly seven events masquerading as one to hit all seven personality templates, it's slow going. This expectation also turned out to be accurate, I'm afraid.




Ages ago, I wrote about a design goal of having no entirely good or bad traits. I think the examples I used then were having sufficiently angry, shy, or dull characters having options available in some events that neatly sidestepped some unwanted consequences.

This is something that I have continued through the entire project. One thing that is often hard is finding downsides to generally positive traits. I did find the good fortune of discovering a few places recently in which frugality and kindness were less than ideal. Of course, as always, spending willpower can allow your king to act out of character.



Continuation events are another things I wrote about ages ago. Briefly, these are events that have delayed consequences. These continue to be written as well.






More family events for the foreseeable future.