let it leave me like a long breath

been thinking about stuff

or okay so one of the BIG TENSIONS i've been having recently is just wanting to... finish a project, while also only ever really being inspired to start immense sprawling projects that involve a lot of uncertainty in all aspects of the design. which tend to be, you know, difficult to get traction and complete. (hell game is doing the best, in part because it was explicitly a small, unimaginative project where most of the code could be written by rote rather than having to do have amounts of quantifying what the goal even is -- 'have a map where you can click it to move' is on a whole other level from 'make a big complex geological world simulation to walk around in', b/c the latter doesn't just require more code it's also vastly less certain about the shape the code needs to take. hell game has bloated some, but not all that much, in part because what it is and what you do in it is pretty well-defined by this point.)

so i've been shuffling through concepts a bunch and trying to think of a side project i can do that's not going to balloon outwards into impossibility while also not being so trivial and generic i lose interest in completing it. a nice mid-size project.

i uh forget if i posted about my bloodborne farming sim concept -- i mean i mentioned it briefly on tumblr i think -- but it was basically "scurry away from the wreckage of not!yharnam w/ a small crowd and live in a swamp hiding from beasts and monsters while the sky collapses, trying to figure out which plants are poisonous and which are magic and what stuff you can use to make beast-resistant tinctures and what to even do during the ongoing apocalypse". but turns out that is kind of a big project.

and then i uh. started thinking about this post again, and kinda jammed it together with the above for a while before i realized "wait no both thematically and mechanically none of that actually fits together", and then i wrote up a really pared-down list of What I Would Like In A Monster Fetish Farming Game that i will replicate for you here:

• stat gains make you buffer (in specific ways per stat?)
• maybe some tf foods?
• less standard setting / more fantastical
• hot monsters

not strictly fetish related:

• more small areas tucked away for later-game access
• at least SOME focus on perennials / not just watering everything daily
• less of a focus on mercantile capitalism where everything is a cash crop and you have to rebuy seeds each time

so that is what i've been thinking about between working on hell game stuff and playing minecraft.

also i'm not SUPER clear how i feel about everything i make probably being porn. there's definitely some kind of feeling about it, at least.

i said to somebody today that i spend a lot of time constructing these abstract concepts and twisting them around and adding and removing parts, until the concept has a certain quality like 'is a coherent whole'. but that's really subjective and arbitrary and i think the idea behind that is so if i work on a thing all its parts should flow naturally together without any points where i'm abruptly like "oh i have no clue how to relate this part to this other part", but maybe in practice that's unnecessary?

anyway i've still been thinking about side projects. i've been revising the farm game thing, like, "is this a thing i really want to do" "is this a thing i can realistically commit to doing" but i got SOME KIND of concept outlined:

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moving to a frontier town that's at the edge of a mountain range that's actually a giant crater w/ a craggy rocky desert inside. but outside it's a boggy fen swampy kind of place, directly in the shade of the mountains, tho it gets more forest/plains-y a little ways out or in the foothills. ANYWAY. soon after you arrive you make a pact w/ some kinda forest god and that basically gives you the ability to level up.

also, yr pact provides you with a shrine or smth, and the deal is everything you grow in the area surrounding the shrine (to a pretty wide range) effects your stats + your health effects everything in the region. you can (a bit later on) make offerings to summon up the forest god and ask to expand or move yr fisher king zone.

ALSO so you live on the town outskirts and the town has a perpetual materials quest you can give to supply them w/ stuff to expand. or like a bunch of different quests, for different expansions. and sometimes you can pick where the things they build go -- somewhere between soulblazer and dark cloud 2.

ALSO the town is built over/through some ancient ruins, like super old and broken apart and plant-encrusted (i'm thinking the ruins of gehenna pale in jade cocoon, v. overgrown) and you can sometimes get into the depths which is where The Dungeon is.

alsooooo the gardening should be more like actual gardening, w/ a major emphasis on perennials and on yearly flux. stuff like "it's spring so the river is flooding the floodplain w/ silt" or "it's fall so the winds are drifting tons of wild pollens down from the mountains, so all this bare dirt is now wildflowers" or "it's summer so it's spawning season so the river is hopping w/ fish and they're blanketing the river banks". and planting, like, raspberry bushes like "in two years these are gonna be generating berries all over the place", rather than "in two weeks these will generate berries for another two weeks before wilting forever"

levels up: there are stats and skills. stats you raise by eating stuff; you have an xp bar alongside yr stamina or smth and it fills up in various colors based on the kinds of food you eat. when it maxes out the game rolls from everything in the bar and picks one actual stat gain to get. skills you level by doing actions in the domain of the skill (farming, forestry, mining, cooking, you know the drill). this is very haven and hearth inspired. skills are influenced both by their guiding stats and by the skill level itself, in different ways -- getting, say, strength and endurance (or w/e) up will make chopping down trees take less stamina, but it's yr forestry skill itself that determines the quality of the wood or wood products you harvest.

you may or may not be able to fuck the forest god. HOW OVERT ARE THE FETISH ELEMENTS GONNA BE, ASIDE FROM "U TF AS YOU LEVEL UP".

uhhh thinking like, primitive 3d, breath of fire 3 style (as usual) with world geometry and character sprites, tho maybe with a isometric camera that's edge-on instead of corner-on since that fits more with the farming sim genre conceit.