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so my current two week project is an idle game
but it's actually an excuse to try my hand out at magic system stuff
like uh one of the things i've mentioned before is that i'm not really a fan of minecraft mods that add magic systems where everything is just a discrete Magic Thing, so it's not really a system so much as a bunch of disparate specially-coded machines. so what i want to do is figure out a magic system that not only encourages rube goldberg machines to do anything, but also (and really, more importantly) is somewhat fault-tolerant. like botania is fine, but because everything needs to be so precise it's more like assembling specific components. you can't really stumble into a useful effect, you have to understand all the parts and pieces and how to use them and then put all that knowledge together to make a thing. and like sure that's fine for HIGH-TECH THAUMIC ARCHITECTURE, but for nature magic it seems like things should be more subdued.
so i'm thinking about magic primitives, basically.
like uh what i have so far is here, where i've implemented mana pulses and mana beams and some very basic kinds of interactions that use them. the next things would be like, reflecting mirrors and directed focus crystals, so you can bounce pulses/beams in specific directions.
i have this vague idea of being able to both decompose mana (get a half-silvered mirror that when hit by a mana beam, produces two new beams: one that passes through (let's call it 'yielding mana') and one that bounces off (let's call it 'hard mana'). and they would have different effects and be absorbed by different things, and maybe you could use them to power things that excite mana beams and get them running faster or more intensely
and then also i could have a mana collider, where if you push two mana beams in opposite sides, then it'll make a single new beam. so like hard and hard mana makes earth mana, and yielding and yielding makes air mana, and hard/yielding and yielding/hard make fire and water mana. and then you can run those through the collider to make various higher generations of mana, and that would be the highly-technical, high-intensity engineering kind of magic. but i kinda want to also have some magic that's easier to get into and more liable to produce something interesting just if you randomly place down some stuff
(this is both for this specific project and for theoretically adding magic components to my random plant system, where some plants or materials will have certain magical uses, and i'd like there to be kind of naturally-occurring magical fields generated by interactions between different kinds of magic plants and their environment. but like... what would the actual rules for that be, you know? physics is difficult.)
but it's actually an excuse to try my hand out at magic system stuff
like uh one of the things i've mentioned before is that i'm not really a fan of minecraft mods that add magic systems where everything is just a discrete Magic Thing, so it's not really a system so much as a bunch of disparate specially-coded machines. so what i want to do is figure out a magic system that not only encourages rube goldberg machines to do anything, but also (and really, more importantly) is somewhat fault-tolerant. like botania is fine, but because everything needs to be so precise it's more like assembling specific components. you can't really stumble into a useful effect, you have to understand all the parts and pieces and how to use them and then put all that knowledge together to make a thing. and like sure that's fine for HIGH-TECH THAUMIC ARCHITECTURE, but for nature magic it seems like things should be more subdued.
so i'm thinking about magic primitives, basically.
like uh what i have so far is here, where i've implemented mana pulses and mana beams and some very basic kinds of interactions that use them. the next things would be like, reflecting mirrors and directed focus crystals, so you can bounce pulses/beams in specific directions.
i have this vague idea of being able to both decompose mana (get a half-silvered mirror that when hit by a mana beam, produces two new beams: one that passes through (let's call it 'yielding mana') and one that bounces off (let's call it 'hard mana'). and they would have different effects and be absorbed by different things, and maybe you could use them to power things that excite mana beams and get them running faster or more intensely
and then also i could have a mana collider, where if you push two mana beams in opposite sides, then it'll make a single new beam. so like hard and hard mana makes earth mana, and yielding and yielding makes air mana, and hard/yielding and yielding/hard make fire and water mana. and then you can run those through the collider to make various higher generations of mana, and that would be the highly-technical, high-intensity engineering kind of magic. but i kinda want to also have some magic that's easier to get into and more liable to produce something interesting just if you randomly place down some stuff
(this is both for this specific project and for theoretically adding magic components to my random plant system, where some plants or materials will have certain magical uses, and i'd like there to be kind of naturally-occurring magical fields generated by interactions between different kinds of magic plants and their environment. but like... what would the actual rules for that be, you know? physics is difficult.)
