hypercard rpg procgen stacks

Lots of lovely finds recently while doing research, in particular some period appropriate hypercard stacks, some of which I was able to reach their creator.

advanced block carrying

You ever get an idea for something that should be complicated, that you shouldn’t do, because your codebase is a mess, and you’ll probably need to refactor everything to get it to work? And then you bang out some barely-not-pseudocode and it just works the first time you run it?

\"The Deserts of the West\"

While looking for python fantasy map generators, I came across Martin O’ Leary’s Map generator and through it their NaNoGenMo entry The Deserts of the West, a procedurally generated guidebook that is pretty closely related to what I hoped to accomplish with the Obelisk manual, but a thousand times more technically sophisticated. The map generator itself runs in the page I linked as a sort of jupytr notebook style demo, or you can download and generate a full version of the book from Martin’s github.

Obelisk 1.1.8 alpha notes

Changes since 1.1.5

Is This You?

[…] Link

runes

b-ber

I’m now successfully generating text from Python which is then in turn built into an ePub (with a web reader) by Triple Canopy’s B-Ber static site/book generator. This is pretty exciting to me. As a warm up I generated 100 tables of Potion recipes, preceded by a markov-generated fantasy quote:

obelisk version 1.1.5 alpha notes

This update adds

Digging and Sinking and Drifting Allison Parrish’s Machine Poetics

“For most of my life, my experience of being trans consisted mainly of me thinking that some tiny aspect of my behavior could be a ‘tell,’” writes Allison Parrish in the introduction to her 2015 book Everyword. “As a consequence, I stopped writing stories. […] Link

asemic text

I’m starting to think now about the box, manual and ‘Feelies’ for Obelisk. The full piece should really push the dissonance between what’s in the game and what is hinted at in all the supporting materials. For the game manual, I’d like to have detailed tables of runes, crafting ingredients, spells, etc that I’ll likely generate with python scripts. I’m starting with some python scripts from Allison Parrish that help with creating “Asemic” glyphs. I’m building my versions of the scripts as she does in her example, using a Jupyter notebook. Even though these runes won’t be in the actual unity game, I’d like to create them with some consideration of how they might have fit in an earlier version of the game world. I think they would be cuneiform-like markings in the construction stones, they’d likely have square limits, and the marks would maybe be wedge-shaped like a marking-implement.