May 20, 2021
In Obelisk, the disaster to blame for the state of the game isn’t so much the invention of money, rather it’s a system of extraction and materialism difficult to challenge, since it’s enshrined in the rules of the game. The obelisks in the game can’t be reasoned with, they remove the slippery complexities of human judgement and relationships in order to assign value to humans and to smooth the path for war and enslavement. The NPC’s are just trying furiously to get some pie in the sky, and the ground is collapsing.
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May 16, 2021
This was a vibrant land.
The limb of the horizon, viewed from the dark rocks of its shores, was engulfed in the green sea and the teeming business of whales.
The sun at noon was high and gold and blessed the air and the clouds and the collaboration of birds that bore it aloft.
The forests of this land were rich and verdant.
Its soils were fecund and bore great and plentiful fruit.
The people of this land were close and storied and they sang great epics of their histories.
The wildlife of this area was rich and too numerous to name in a lifetime.
It is said that even the animals of this land were heroic and had known deeds and adventures that changed the history of the world and of which humans could only guess at.
The stones of this land were full of beautiful gems and useful metals that were treasured but never knew a price.
The people of this land understood debt but minted no coin.
It’s said these people had no kings or queens, and all of those who lived here were equal and valued.
It is said that the days in this land were long and the weather fair.
The seas here produced enough fish so that the waters were always thick with them, shimmering like quicksilver.
This was a holy land. Its people loved one another.
This land was filled with music.
This was a peaceful land.
This was a land that lived in harmony with death.
This land knew no borders or flags but was prosperous and storied.
This land knew hunger and strife but persevered through work and kinship.
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May 16, 2021
There’s some npc behavior now and one “ending” is in (and I need to finish in a week for the Capstone show) so I am calling this version 1.0 beta. ¯\(ツ)/¯ After the show I am going to need to stop working on this and move on, but it would be nice to revisit it some day collaborating with a “real” programmer to make it more deeply systematized. One of the things I wanted early on that just isn’t feasable with my current design and the time I have left was a sort of economy where the obelisks exchanged stones both through workers and then automatically when one territory encroached on another, and then a great obelisk that was some sort of representation of worker’s bodies tokenized in stones. It’s only kind of hinted at here. Also, slightly more intelligent npc behavior, it’s very clunky in my prototype.
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May 11, 2021
Big update that will not seem big to anyone but me.
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