Altered Alterations

I’ve slain the evil fluctuations that were plaguing my dear faiths. Populations now behave in a nice, heartwarming way: they grow for a while, and then taper off until you do something to encourage their growth. Well, the graphs warm my heart anyway. For those of you who don’t get my jabbering about graphs, just believe me that it’s way better now.

There were quite a few problems causing this, actually. For one, I turned on too many things in the game before testing them all individually. For another, I had a cool idea for regulating population that while cool, was totally not the way populations really behave. Thirdly, I was making formulas without considering very much what the graphs/maths/calculus behind them was.

Another funny thing happened in Faith, which shows how it’s starting to have some character. I noticed that as time went on, my faiths were all getting pitifully low “economy” scores. My people were lazy bums! I took a look at the default laws and values in the game, and noticed something was missing that exists as part of most societies - “Hard work encouraged”. So I quickly added it into my admin panel, and economies started to go to normal.

I’ve been working on Faith in 15 and 20 minute blocks throughout the week whenever I’ve been studying or working for long enough for my vision to blur, or some such. The last week in Faith development has been almost entirely fixing bugs and adding things to troubleshoot this problem. I’ve gotten a lot better understanding of my creation though, having now watched more than 8000 simulated years of behaviour!

I was quite productive this weekend in both schoolwork and Engineering Faith. I have Beings of Worship working now, which means you can define the gods, heroes, and whatever else your people will worship. It took a fair while to get a system that crammed the massive variety of beings people might worship into a simple little discription. Some details need to be added (such as the concept of an evil being) but it’s going pretty well.

In addition, I did some testing to see exactly how all this stuff I’d set up was behaving. As it turns out, it’s behaving pretty psychotically. I set up a graph so you could see your faith’s progress over time, and took a look at how my three test accounts have been doing. My first account was doing quite normally. My second, and third though, had really bizarre spikes in their properties at regular intervals. The third also had a quite lame spike in population and subsequent plummet that can only be described as retarded.

I spent some time and tweaked some values, and it seems like the spike/drop behaviour is caused by my code for birth and death, and I have a feeling the weird downward-spike-and-resume behaviour is a bug in my graphing code. While I expected things to be behaving really weirdly (since I haven’t tested any of that stuff yet) it was amusing to actually see my bugs and graphed out like that. The game is complicated enough now that it’s starting to take a life of its own.

Now it gets serious.

Altering Time’s yearly makeover is done, and Engineering Faith is, as expected, the focus of 2005. “Faithful Engineering” has been launched, a full-fledged weblog to track the development progress. You can now expect fairly regular updates, which can be monitored through any RSS newsreader from my new news feed.

I will write here about progress, insights, and new ideas that go into the game. While I will continue to post in the Forum about it where appropriate, I will try to keep any new info here for everybody to see.

At the moment, I’m aiming for testing to begin by the end of the year. There’s no reason that can’t be accomplished - I’ve learned a lot in the last two years about web development and games, and I’m enjoying putting it to use.

Now back to coding!

Altering Time is now on a new, better server, allowing Faith development (which was stalled by a database problem) to resume. There also was a landmark in Faith development, in that the first person other than me saw it (Chris.) Of course he was a little disappointed that you can’t do anything yet, but who wants to do things in a game anyway?

Despite being very busy, I’m still working on Faith on and off. I’ve solved some design problems with the Events system and the Laws interface that were discouraging me, so things are coming along.

Things are coming along, slowly but surely. Coding started in the last couple weeks, and some basic sections have begun. There’s some tables in the database, and some basic code that manages multiple games and pages. Still hoping for a basic game framework (not at the this-is-fun stage, but at the create-use-finish kind of stage) in winter.

Visitors have voted, and “Logo A” has been chosen for Engineering Faith’s logo. There may be additional logo or other design work that needs user voting, so I’ll post that when it comes. Game design is coming along as well.

Engineering Faith has been announced (and this page has been posted.) Check back for more news!