Here is how we decided our game: Step 1: Talk about the theme for hours and come up with a few to choose from. Step 2: Re-meet to choose one from those. Step 3: Someone suggests something ENTIRELY different. Step 4: Accept that one in a heartbeat.

I can't even.

So far we've trashed a casual game where you just descend down a hall with a rope and you have to evade monsters and find treasure on the sides of the hole. a turn-based game where you explore a tiled area, trying to avoid monsters and digging out stuff a tile-based tactical combat game where you go deeper in... space? hell? earth?

Now we are digging and building stuff. Possibly space dwarves. Here are some of the visualizations of the ideas: (made on Inkarnate)

I think the team is asleep. It's almost 2AM here, same as another one of us; 1AM at one person's locale and 3AM at the other twos.

One of us has been working on coding the systems, one on UI, one person on music, one doing graphics and I'm working on the system formulas and have been stuck (and of course) distracted.

But inspiration just stroke me, unsurprisingly, during bio-break.

I was trying to calculate energy and material requirements for buildings and stuff and trying to figure how to balance that.

Instead, I decided to start from a different perspective. I divided the day (Cycle/C) into 4 periods (P), divided those into time units (T) and decide how many seconds that unit is. I'm going to measure everything with that in mind. For example Digging 1 block = 1T Mining 1 time = 1T Moving across 1 block = 1T Unloading bag = 1T 1 C = 4 P 1 P = 10T 1 T = 3 Seconds 1 C = 4103= 120 seconds Workers spend 1P to sleep and 1P to eat and have fun. So they have 20T to use every cycle.

I still haven't fully figured it, kinda feeling like Skeleton Jack from NMBC: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NrwTy6ZlwPg

Or have I found the answer? I'm so close! I know it.

Okay, I'm gonna think out loud. ...I may or may not have taken a break to sing some NMBC songs pretending I'm in Karaoke.

I'm back now.

So, let's consider the size of the map. We haven't decided, so I'm going to start with an arbitrary 20 units. Let's say we have to move half of that between an ore vein and the storage. For ease of calculation, I'm going to assume the distance is 9 units. 1. Storage to ore: 9T 2. Digging: 1T 3. Return trip: 9T 4. Unload: 1T That's a total of 20T! So one worker can make one full trip with that kind of distance. Of course the worker may start from the mess hall or something which may complicate calculations. This sounds a bit too much for me - unless the output is good.

Let's try a closer and farther one. The formula is basically 2*(Distance+1). 4 Distance will be 10 units. In fact, I'm not trying a farther one because time won't be enough.

Question: What happens when workers are tired? Do they fall asleep? Stop what they are doing? Finish it then sleep extra?

Honestly, I don't like this. Traveling takes too much time. 9 block may not be a small difference but it's also not that much, we should be able to do better. Let's try halving it, so moving across 1 block is 1/2T.

The formula will be 1+D0.5+1+D0.5=D+2 So 9 block distance=11 T 4 block distance = 6T 18 block distance=20T -which is the maximum distance. I like this more.

Another variation: moving between levels. This will require walking through the stairs. Let's say these take double distance. So if you just move 1 floor, you count as walking 2 blocs instead 1 and if you move 2 floors that counts as 4 instead of 2. Basically, each floor adds +1. But since we are thinking about going back and forth, for our calculation we are going to add +2

So if we are a total of 9 block distance, including 1 floor change=13T, 2 floor change=14T 4 Block distance with 1 floor change=8T, 2 floor change= 9T 12 block distance, regular is 14T with 1 floor=16T, 2 floor distance=18T, which is maximum distance. I think this is fine.

Well, to be perfectly honest, I think we can decrease it even more but let's take this for now. It's not super punishing but it makes a difference. It discourages from counting on far away storages and encourages building closer to veins. We want this.

SO let's do a quick recap. Moving across 1 block takes 1/2T (1.5 seconds) and moving up or down the stairs take 1T per floor.

Now comes an equally important question - how much ore we carry. But first, some sleep.

1. Add an Abed emoji
2. Add a Troy emoji
3. Add more emojis

PS: Team, I'm not procrastinating ok? IT'S PART OF MY PROCESS

My last blog was actually helpful to me, so I am going to try the same again.

So here is our status: We want to keep digging down. For that, we need workers. Workers need to rest, eat and have fun. To keep everything up, we need energy. We produce energy by dumping ore into reactors. We find ore by digging veins. We also use ore to construct buildings, stairs and hire new workers.

I tried to visualize it:

(Ignore the top one for now - we may add an ore processing thingie but we start simple)

Bottom right is the simple chart. Worker "Time" "produces" nodes, nodes produce ore, ore produces energy and energy keeps the workers up. Bottom left adds more context and reveals the reasons of digging further.

First of all, ore is limited per node so we need more over time. Energy does keep workers up, but it's spent, not transformed. Also, workers spend some time not working (which also means energy spent). One important thing not noted there is that the ore is also spent for construction and purchases.

So perfect sustainability is not possible and the only way to go is to dig further and further.

I like where we are now. Everything is clear.

We can express everything roughly in terms of each other if we need to.

I added some simple maths for random ores. Each level (as in, each row) can have 0-4 ore nodes, each of which can contain 20-100 ore. With the maths, you get 61 ore per level. Let's say that the workers can carry up to 20 ore per trip.

Each ore can be used for 1 unit of energy (this is the one I find hardest to get the feeling of)

Buildings require 10-40 ore. We spend energy per "period" (ie 4 times/day)

A sleeping quarter+eating quarter+morale quarter altogether spends 16 energy per day. Not sure about the system at the moment, but I'll assume that you need one of these per 5 workers. That means:

Input: 16 energy/ore Output: 100 WorkerT 100 WorkerT is more than enough to dig another 16 ore for energy. Even one trip to the smallest ore node returns 20 energy and spends only a portion of the WorkerT.

I'm getting a bit overwhelmed and I'm pretty sure some things won't add up. I need to see this action. Time to document these for our coders!

Also, feel free to read our team's blog entries:

• Ragnor: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/$239794/i-am-in
• Stormjack: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/$239794/finding-the-game-like-a-pro
• Stormjack: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/$239794/status-late-night-revelation
• Stormjack: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/$239794/3-ways-to-improve-communication-using-discord-experts-dont-want-you-to-know-t
• SUPERDAZE: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/$239794/making-fadelands-a-space-western-themed-track
• Stormjack: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/48/$239794/main-pass-on-resource-conversion-and-delay

Hey everyone, I can't seem to type blogs. Descripion section greys out the moment I click it. I've copied this from notepad and will try to paste it. If you see it, that worked but it's not ideal obviously. Anyone has any idea? Using Win10, Chrome.

PS: Problem solved, it was grammarly.

Thanks to @LudumDare on twitter, problem's solved: Grammarly caused issues, disabling it on LD website fixed it!

Original message: Hey everyone, I can't seem to type blogs. Descripion section greys out the moment I click it. I've copied this from notepad and will try to paste it. If you see it, that worked but it's not ideal obviously. Anyone has any idea? Using Win10, Chrome.