So I was explaining the weird history of my Tinselfly mechanics to someone at last night’s game developers get-together, and something just sorta clicked.

I’ve been hesitant to start level design, even though everything’s finally in place for me to do so, in part because I’m unsure about the fitness of my core mechanics in this project. My rationale goes something like this:

• My current mechanic was designed from beginning to end to be a fun combat system.
• Tinselfly will include very little combat.
• Therefore, I should pick should a mechanic more appropriate for Tinselfly and use my combat mechanic in a game set in a universe with random combat encounters or something. Both Tinselfly and said combat-based game would be more fun because I did this.

However, I think this is a logical fallacy. The mechanics suitability for a combat-based game does not necessarily make it unsuitable for Tinselfly.

Instead, I could be thinking this way:

• My current mechanic was designed from beginning to end to be a fun combat system.
• Compared to combat-based games, non-violent games can often be lacking in that hard-to-describe fun factor.
• Therefore, I should adapt my mechanic to Tinselfly, since I’m already confident it’s will be fun, and I because non-violent games deserve that same fun factor too.

The story for Tinselfly is pretty bleak in parts. And while there are certainly games out there — great games — that you feel compelled to play even though they’re not what you’d call ‘fun’ at all times, I don’t ever want the players of this game to see the moment-to-moment gameplay as a drag.

* * *

Part of the problem with adapting this mechanic is the inherent absurdity in many combat-based games, absurdities that have to be there to make the game sustainable.

Take dungeon crawls. Where did all those monsters come from? More to the point, why do the keep coming back after you slaughter them by the hundreds? What do they eat? Why does everyone’s discarded armor fit you, regardless of species or body type?

If I’m going to have constant, fun challenges for the player, I might do well to think a little less about where those challenges are coming from. There should be an inexplicably inexhaustible supply of people to help. An absurdly dangerous trek to the grocery store. Bureaucracies that are puzzle-like, not just in terms of paperwork, but in the layouts of civic buildings.

The Tinselfly universe, the version sitting in my head, is very real to me. It is nuanced and detailed and believable.

That could be a problem.

I can’t just gamify the player’s path through a naturalistic universe or the player’s perception of a naturalistic universe.

I have to gamify the universe itself.

A while ago, Marie told me an old proverb: the faintest ink is better than the best memory.

I’m usually not much for proverbs. Most quotes that stick with me are from mediocre movies. But this one really stuck with me, and I’ve trying to integrate this thought into my life more, whether it’s taking notes at meetings or making maps of video games.

With that in mind, I’ve started a little wiki of sorts for Tinselfly (massive spoilers will eventually make their way there, if anyone cares). I’ve still got a long way to go, but the idea is to write down every decision I’ve made about the characters and story and whatnot, because there’s really a lot just sitting in my head that’s never been written down, anywhere.

I probably have more discarded, forgotten ideas related to this project than I could possibly write down. And while it’s important to cut and change things, I would like a record of what’s been changed and why. Might be good to have.

* * *

One of my biggest concerns with anything project like this is being precious about it. While this project is, of course, important to me, I don’t ever want to find myself in a situation where I’m so enamored of a particular idea that I’m unwilling to step back and evaluate its fitness for inclusion in my final product.

You’d think that getting all this stuff out of my head and into a more permanent, public location would cement these ideas in my head, and it would become harder to fight that preciousness, but the reverse has happened. Seeing these ideas written down, and re-reading them helps me with that evaluation process.

Like my approach to my journal in general, sometimes you have to write something down so you can realize how stupid it is. It’s so much easier to be precious about an idea when you haven’t actually had to explain it to anybody.

Yesterday, for no particular reason, I started playing Myst again. My one video game of choice lately (La Mulana) causes my computer to randomly shut down without warning, I had a hankering for a video game to play, and I wanted to reacquaint myself with adventure game tropes (and to that end, I’ve also started Syberia II).

So since I was thinking about Myst, I went looking to see what one of the developers, Robyn Miller was up to.

And I was reminded that he has a web site named Tinselman.

* * *

My stupidly-long-in-development game project Tinselfly is the combination of two different things I was working on a couple years ago.

The name Tinselfly and the game mechanics come from a fairy-tale-themed follow-up I was doing to a game I made for a contest put on every year by Jennifer Ann’s Group. There was a damsel in not-so-much distress, and flying insects that emitted razor-wire-like strings from their bodies, like spiders emit spiderwebs. Hence the name Tinselfly; an earlier potential title was Damselfly.

The other project was Basil Street Bridge, an outer-space adventure starring a girl named Robin, who may have been consciously named after Robyn Miller.

Mash these two projects together, and you get an outer-space adventure named Tinselfly with a lead named Robin.

* * *

Am I getting into creepy copycatting territory here? Probably not.

Is this just a massive coincidence? Probably not that, either.

When an idea ‘just pops’ into my head, I like to trace it to its source. To the extent that I’m going to put a lot of effort into tracking this stuff down, I’m more likely than others to look at my work and find it depressingly derivative.

When I first played Myst, I really wanted to be the next Robyn Miller when I grew up. Which would make my brother Rand Miller, the other lead developer of Myst. I thought, in my own naive highschooler way, we might be the next Millers and make the next Myst or something. You know, and do a Gap ad.

The Robin character in Tinselfly is sort of an exaggerated version of myself. Her homeworld is based on my home town.

So in its own way, there’s this weird convoluted logic behind why Robin is named Robin, since I’ll conflate Robin and Robyn and myself.

* * *

I’ll probably stick with the name Robin and the title Tinselfly, but it’s something to think about I guess.

New Tinselfly build up.

Been doing a lot of math lately. While I consider Tinselfly to be fantasy, it has sci-fi elements like spaceships and living on other planets and whatnot.

I would never call this hard sci-fi. I don’t even like hard sci fi. However, I don’t want people who are particular about scientific accuracy to check out of my story because I didn’t do my homework… and I also think it’s reasonable to say I have a responsibility to avoid spreading misinformation about science or astronomy or whatever, even though this is a work of fiction.

So while I’m still going to have artificial gravity here and there, and invisible force fields keeping the air in fantastic low-orbit cities, I’ve nixed faster-than-light travel, have constrained my setting to a single solar system, and am trying to make sure the sizes of planets and distances and travel times involved are reasonable.

So we’ve got this small but reasonably-sized gas giant Proserpina here, and a moon orbiting it, and a station between the two.

Say you were living on the station but commuting the moon — I now know that it would take 18 minutes to get there, at a 1-gee burn accelerating halfway there and decelerating halfway back, because I know the the mass of Proserpina and a reasonable spot where that station would have to be.

Of course, if you were doing the commute in game, I wouldn’t make you sit on a shuttle for 18 real-world minutes; time is always compressed in games. But the important part is, I know that the commute is reasonable, and that this is something people might actually do, assuming that space travel over short hops like that is cheap enough in this universe. My own commute to an office a couple miles away takes longer than that.

Part of this endeavor also revolves around making sure the size of things you see on screen makes sense. So above, you’re a couple hundred meters off the surface of that little moon, looking back at Proserpina, and that’s really how big a smallish gas giant would look through a typically wide camera lens.

I want to make sure the player understands these scales, or at least, understands that the scales involved in astronomy are so big that they’re beyond comprehension. A big theme of the story is how the characters feel very small, very insignificant.

If you run my latest build, you can zoom out (with the right mouse button or mouse wheel) all the way to outer space, with smooth transitions during every step of the process.

It’s not quite done yet, but I think most of this is more than sufficient, given the challenges involved. The numbers here are so big that my game engine can’t adequately deal with them at face value — I can’t just add a 56,000 km wide sphere to my scene and expect it to render properly in the background .

So what you’re seeing here is a composite image, where the landscape and the spaceship and some of the water is being filmed with one camera, and miniature versions of the stars and Proserpina and its moons are being filmed with another camera.

There’s a little bit of code sort of linking the cameras together. When the main camera turns, the miniatures camera turns the same amount. The scale is something like 100,000:1, so if the main camera moves back 1 meter, the miniatures camera moves back a hundredth of a millimeter so things stay lined up right.

If you look closely, you can see a seam in the image above, where you’re seeing two different versions of the water. Maybe I can fix that, maybe not; I won’t be terribly sad if that stays.

The hardest part was the atmosphere — it had to look right both from the ground and orbit. The way everything gets super bright as you’re exiting is totally accidental, but I kinda like it.

Mostly, I’m really happy with the effect. But it doesn’t interact with the light at all right now, so it glows a bit too much.

Also, my planet needs much more texture — that should be easy to fix.

I actually think a straight zoom like this is a terrible way to communicate scale, but I’m glad I’ve implemented this in a generalized sort of way where I can do whatever I want with the camera and have things show up properly.