Tag: Deep Time

  • Ray Cats

    Ray Cats

    In 1993, Sandia National Laboratories released a report addressing a problem that wouldn’t matter for thousands of years: once you’ve built a lead-lined nuclear waste disposal bunker, how do you convince people in the far future not to dig it up? Since you can’t assume that these hypothetical people will speak your language or even have the necessary level of scientific development to know what radiation is, the problem is nontrivial. The report offered, among other things, a famous message to be inscribed on such a facility: “This is not a place of honor”.

    The field of “nuclear semiotics” bloomed following the Sandia report: various thinkers suggested covering the site with menacing concrete spikes, establishing an “atomic priesthood” to guard the tomb, and designing architecture that made a “dissonant and mournful” whistle to dissuade explorers. French author Françoise Bastide and the Italian semiotician Paolo Fabbri proposed something especially novel: the genetic engineering of “ray cats”, whose fur would include a pigment that changed color or glowed when in the presence of ionizing radiation. By seeding the cultural idea that seeing a glowing cat meant invisible danger, one could, in theory, create a sort of biological Geiger counter paired with a taboo that would cause people to heed the warning.

    Story Premise

    Now, imagine that we did all of that at once. Then, advance the timeline 10,000 years.

    Our protagonist is Yucca, an ambiguously gendered member of a humanoid feline species. These white-furred cat people live in villages dotting the post-post-apocalyptic desert, existing at a mostly pre-industrial technological level but with access to a handful of higher-tech devices due to salvaging remnants of the past civilization.

    A few miles away is an underground vault beneath a landscape of black reinforced concrete spikes jutting out of the ground at irregular angles. The ( (unopened) entrance is a heavy locked hatch, fitted with a panel engraved with letters in an unknown language paired with simple pictures. Although the words are only partially deciphered, the picture in the center is widely interpreted as an  angel of death.

    Everyone knows that anyone who goes down there is infected with something: your white fur turns blue, you sicken, and can pass that cerulean sickness on to others. They shun those with blue fur as curse-bearers according to wisdom passed down from millennia ago, but will nonetheless will trade for the resources buried within the vault in a thriving black market. The foolhardy and the desperate risk becoming sickly pariahs in hopes of salvaging a big enough score to retire in luxury. Yucca is no fool, but they are desperate: they have no home and no family, having drifted into town with a past they refuse to discuss.

    Gameplay Loop

    Although built to endure, the subterranean tomb complex began to weather and crack long ago. Although the main door of thick adamant remains impassable, the concrete walls can be breached if one digs deep enough to find the weak spots buried beneath the soil – is willing to expend some explosives cracking them open. Therefore, the basic minute-to-minute gameplay resembles the previous descriptions of Deep Time: a 2D side-scroller with procedurally generated, fully destructible terrain that you mine out for resources. Any ore or salvaged technology the player manages to retrieve can be taken back to town to sell, allowing them to buy equipment upgrades to make later delves easier.

    However, the deeper you go, the higher dose of invisible corruption you’re exposed to. Thus, while Yucca begins the game with snowy white fur, each layer down they reach dyes it a further shade into the blue. NPCs will react differently depending on Yucca’s current shade: most people will shun you and increasingly refuse to deal with you, but those in the black market will treat you as more one of them and give you access to higher tiers of equipment upgrades. In addition, repeated loops into town unlock more dialogue with NPCs, letting you learn their stories and giving a greater understanding of what’s going on.

    The vault is split into multiple sections storing different things: radioactive shamir, acidic alkahest, infectious protoplasm, and the like. Most of the challenge comes from figuring out how to even get near these things without injury, but you will also encounter active opponents: hostile creatures making their nests there, unscrupulous rival salvagers, robotic sentry units, and pitiable beings mutated by the depths.

    Further down, even stranger unknowns lurk, unexposed to the light of day for thousands of years. A deep mystery will unravel itself by degrees as you read messages written by the builders, and discover the truth of the facility’s construction: the danger is still present, in your time, as it was in theirs.

  • Going Back To The Well

    Going Back To The Well

    So, game development update. So far I’ve got some core functionality implemented: you can move around, swing a pickaxe to break rocks, and rocks drop different kinds of ore (right now it’s stone, iron, gold, amethyst, and diamond) that you can pick up and put into your inventory. Rocks are procedurally placed, and more valuable rocks start appearing at lower levels. You can take the ore to a shop screen and sell them for money, which you can then spend to upgrade things like pickaxe strength and inventory size.

    The next big step was going to be implementing basic platforming mechanics (climbing, etc.) but I’m getting pickaxe hitbox offset issues whenever I use analog stick input rather than keyboard, so one thing at a time. I look forward to sharing a prototype build in the near future.

    Scope Uncreep

    All of that said: hitting issues like that so quickly made me realize that, for my first proper video game, I need to combat my tendency towards scope creep a little. Therefore, I’m now thinking that, instead of immediately aiming for the full version of Deep Time, I’m going to first make a vertical slice prototype: all the basic mechanics should be there, but I’ll just be building the first layer, the Anthropocene. Which works out, actually, since that layer was already an embedded form of a complete game idea I had in the past called “Ray Cats”, with the protagonist intended to be included in Deep Time as an NPC. Coming back full circle on that one.

    Therefore: new game, (mostly) same as the old game: Ray Cats. Pretty much everything I’ve already written about feature-wise stays, I’ll just be starting with a subset of that concept that I can finish within a reasonable amount of time due to requiring fewer assets. If that works out okay, I can potentially release it as a standalone game, and then expand upon it into the full Deep Time experience later.

    What is Ray Cats about, you ask? Well, you may have noticed a number of references in prior posts to events that happened during the Anthropocene: experimentation with dangerous substances, ultimately necessitating their entombment in insulated underground facilities. If you were an engineer designing a permanent resting place for radioactive waste, what could you do to convince people in the future not to dig it up? How would you communicate with an unknown person a thousand years from now who doesn’t necessarily speak your language and might not even know what radiation is?

    That’s what Ray Cats is about. I’ll do a post describing it soon.

    Novelty

    Game development aside, I’ve also got that novel I mentioned before, simmering in the background. That’s undergoing a shift in perspective as well: I came to conclusion that not only would writing it alongside a game about the same thing sap my interest in one once I finished the other, but it would pull the writing in two directions: a story tends to take the shape of its vessel, and the demands of a serial novel and a video game are very different. The more I thought about it, the more clear it became that Deep Time (in the form of Ray Cats or otherwise) wanted to be a video game, which meant that if I was to write a novel, it needed to be about something else.

    Fortunately, I am never without ideas on tap – the time necessary to execute them is the only limiting factor. I already had a number of concepts floating in my head for the last several months, so it was simply a matter of selecting one of them to put more energy into.

    The tentative title is “Godmind”. It takes place in a world where you can attain psychic powers through meditation and altered states of consciousness. Although at the basic level this resembles ESP-type abilities, the scale goes up much higher, to the point of interfacing with the collective unconscious to rewrite physical laws.

    At the beginning of the story, the protagonist wishes to develop this capacity, but struggles to exert even the slightest bit of mental force. Then, through special circumstances, they briefly access the Absolute, suffusing their soul with all-knowing omnipotence. It’s the ultimate rush – then, seconds later, it’s gone, leaving only a gaping hollow in the core of their being. Desperation grips them: they will do anything to get that state of divine consciousness back.

    I already have a post written up describing some of the core ideas involved, so look for that soon as well. Plenty of things on the way!

  • Deep Mechanics

    Deep Mechanics

    So, I’ve described the geologic strata in Deep Time, and the geochemical ores you can mine there, but I haven’t written about how you get to those places and dig up those things. This is a game, so let’s talk about game mechanics.

    Deep Time is a 2D side-scroller in the vein of Terraria or Minecraft. The world is built out of (mostly) square blocks arranged on a grid, which can be hit with a pickaxe (or similar implement) to put them into your inventory, and later on placed back into the world in different configurations if you desire. The initial arrangement of blocks is procedurally generated, with rarer and more valuable minerals found further down. The purpose of the game is to dig as deep as you can, extracting minerals to turn them into money and equipment upgrades that increase your ability to dig even deeper.

    Deep Time is designed to be playable primarily with a controller. Although a point-and-click mouse interface provides precision for block placement, in my own daily life I already use a mouse quite enough for work and find it more relaxing and quintessentially video-game-like to switch to holding a controller specifically for playing video games with.

    Movement

    Something I really like about the early game in Terraria is how, before you get the grappling hook, you genuinely have to treat caves with caution: you’re limited to setting up ropes to navigate vertical spaces and can’t always see how far down a drop is, so even a single careless descent can lead to a sudden death. I want to spend more time in that zone of play, where caves feel the way they do in real life: dark, cramped, and dangerous. Likewise, climbing should feel physical and effortful: whenever you’re holding on to a rope or a ledge, you should have to hold down a button not to let go. I’m considering doing something similar for crawling through tight spaces, although that’s a less fully-formed concept. That aside, the equipment would be unlocked along an upgrade pathway as follows.

    Rope

    The default means of traversal. Essentially climbable blocks you can set.

    Climbing Gloves

    Treat all blocks as climbable blocks, still requiring a button hold.

    Grappling Hook

    Cling without holding a button.

    Boost Gear

    Gain a double jump.

    Mining

    Like with movement, I want to add some interesting friction to the process of mining blocks. I’m not trying to make it frustrating (that’s not fun, and I principally want this game to be fun more than realistic) but it should feel tactile in the way that climbing does.

    Fracture Drill

    Because vibrations in solid matter can be modeled as quasiparticle “phonons”, they follow the same underlying rules as photons: as such, your “drill” is actually a magitechnological device that acts as the analogue of a laser but for crystalline defects in rock, firing a beam of cracks through whatever you press it against. It drills adjacent soil blocks as long as you hold down the button – I could make you press repeatedly until you upgrade it into a continuous hold, but that seems more annoying than is worth it. Upgrades include drilling in half the time, drilling stone (and then metal) blocks, and drilling as a toggle instead of a hold.

    Tesseract

    A fourth-dimensional quasicrystal that’s bigger on the inside, explaining why you can carry a ludicrous number of blocks with you. Upgrades to have more slots, be able to hold liquids, and letting you hold radioactive/dangerous things in your inventory without harm. Part of me wants to avoid giving this to the player in favor of a crunchier, less effortless form of inventory management, but it’s hard to do that without making things tedious.

    Scan Drone

    Each miner is given a robotic “fairy”, a small floating device made of centimani (computing and hologram projection) and orichalcum (electromagnetic hover) that acts as both an assistant and a spy, recording everything you do in service of the organization you work for. Its basic function is similar to the scan visor from Metroid Prime: when near a scannable object, hold down the button until a meter fills to gain the lore entry associated with it. Most things in the game can be scanned in this fashion, contributing to an encyclopedia completion percentage. The drone can be upgraded to also be able to send a ping in a radius around you (revealing the locations of ore and creatures), translate ancient scripts when scanned, and show the direction of waypoints you’ve locked on to.

    Combat

    Although I’m aiming to make combat relatively less common than many similar games, the threat of hostile creatures adds to the gameplay so there will still be random encounters and a few bosses. Enemies are fairly rare but powerful enough not to be ignored, often more like puzzles to carefully avoid – sort of like enemies in Spelunky. You have three main tools to do this with.

    Force Blade

    A glowing sword that briefly manifests near you to cut nearby objects – the basic melee weapon. Can be upgraded to deal more damage, attack faster, and attack farther. Also used to cut down trees and the like, with an upgrade that makes it selectively not cut non-enemies.

    Mass Driver

    A pistol-like magitech coil gun that launches small iron bullets. I hate having to maintain supplies of ammunition in games, so the mass driver requires a reload action every few shots (I’m thinking three by default) but doesn’t run out of ammo. It fires fast and accurately, with no range limitation save for the inherent narrowness of the underground environment. Upgrades increase the clip size and damage per shot.

    Energy Shield

    Makes you invulnerable to most attacks as long as you hold the button to keep it out, facing in the direction you’re standing. Upgrades make it protect from every direction, retain invulnerability against special attacks that would normally pierce it, and parry attacks back with exact timing.

    Base Building

    There will, of course, be base building mechanics. Making entire towns of villagers wouldn’t really fit the theme, but you could certainly build lodgings for yourself and a few other named miner NPCs – since they would presumably be coming and going on their own delves, I imagine it would be less like a person who lives there and more like a room where NPCs could randomly spawn to trade with. Amenities would include the familiar spread of beds to sleep in (restoring health), boxes to keep items in, workbenches for making equipment, and so on. I’d like to incentivize the creation of outposts at different geologic strata – I’d accept back-to-base teleportation for QoL reasons, but it shouldn’t be easy to go all the way back up, there should be a sense of depth and distance created by the difficulty of ascending from the hole you’ve dug yourself into.

  • Principles of Geochemy

    Principles of Geochemy

    The ancient alchemist sought many things: chrysopoeia, panacea, and elixir vitae among them. They believed that, through the application of the right sequence of chemical operations – calcination, distilliation, sublimation – they could transmute base matter into these higher states. In practice, they failed for so long that they began to speak of their fruitless struggles as a metaphorical pursuit of spiritual development instead of a physical one.

    What they didn’t realize was that the magnum opus already lay waiting beneath their feet. Thus, the modern science of geochemy: the alchemy of the Earth. By applying alchemic methods to less mundane base materials, turning lead into gold became an afterthought.

    Ten of the most notable geochemical materials are described below.

    Cintamani

    Sanskrit for “wish-fulfilling gem”, cintamani is a transparent quartzoid crystal composed primarily of silicon. Due to the tunable electromagnetic bandgap inherent in its nanostructure, this gem does in fact fulfill one wish: the desire for an ideal photonic crystal, which can refract and shape light with enough precision to operate as an optical computing substrate as well as a light projector.

    Although very occasionally discovered as granulated inclusions in upper-strata sandstone, most of these gems hide far deeper down, with the size of a given specimen correlating with its depth. Due to their rarity yet crucial function in the geochemical industry, cintamani are some of the most highly prized minerals a miner can find, enough that a single large gem can buy a comfortable retirement by itself.

    Adamant

    In classical usage “adamant” was a simply a poetic variant of “diamond”, but today geochemists define it as a distinct carbon allotrope. While made of the same type of atoms as normal diamond, at certain high temperatures and pressures those atoms can arrange themselves into a complex geometric lattice of incredible tensile, compressive, and shear strength, like thickly bonded layers of graphene. The resulting material takes on a smooth texture of glossy black, lighter than equivalently strong metal alloys.

    The Anthropocene ancestor culture discovered adamant but never deployed it at scale, so although fragments can be found at that layer, most of it must be recovered from deeper down.

    Orichalcum

    From the Greek words for “mountain copper”, Plato claimed this mythic metal covered the temple of Poseidon in lost Atlantis. In its current usage, orichalcum refers to a brassy-toned, cuproferrous metal alloy found in the Anthropocene and lower strata. In its natural form, orichalcum ore generates a magnetic field similar to magnetite but significantly stronger. The presence of untapped orichalcum deposits throws off traditional compass readings, so miners typically rely on alternative means of navigation.

    When refined into a pure state, orichalcum acts as a room-temperature superconductor: its lack of resistance means that electricity can travel through wires made of it indefinitely without power loss. Due to this property, orichalcum is the basis of all electromagnetic equipment used in modern society.

    Eden Amber

    Eden Amber, more commonly called simply “amber” by miners, takes its name from an early archaeological report of Paleolithic ruins, which described the world depicted on the buried murals as “like Eden”. Amber is a translucent, yellow-orange polymer made of hardened resin that remains alive in a state of dormant cryptobiosis despite the passage of geologic eras around it. Likewise, it passes this property on to anything enveloped within it: amber-filled Paleolithic sarcophagi contain mummies presumed to still hover between life and death, although none have yet dared to wake them up.

    Eden amber can also be processed into a sort of living plastic that “remembers” prior shapes, allowing for conveniences such as jackets that flatten their own creases and ropes that neatly re-coil themselves.

    Alicorn

    A calcareous crystal named for the purported material of a unicorn’s horn. In normal caves, the familiar shapes of off-white stalactites, stalagmites, and flowstone sheets form over slow millennia as dripping water deposits dissolved grains of calcite. Alicorn, then, is flowstone that flows at a visible rate, accelerated by a quasi-biological sustained chemical reaction within it. It possesses all the useful properties of concrete but also heals its own cracks and potholes like flesh scabbing over.

    Alicorn is not only the basis of modern architecture, it is the closest thing to the true bones of the Earth.

    Shamir

    According to the Talmud, King Solomon commissioned a search that turned up a “grain of Shamir the size of a barleycorn”, depicted by tradition as a green stone. Supposedly the Shamir was stored in a container made of lead, as anything “shown” to it would disintegrate. Today, “shamir” refers to a radioactive actinide, a stone that fluoresces a faint blue-green visible in the absolute dark of the depths. True to the legend, it generates intense gamma radiation, making it a source of both terrible danger to miners and incredible value to them, as simply placing a grain of it into a pot of water will boil it, thus functioning as a source of energy even without enrichment into industrial fuel.

    During the Anthropocene, scientists are believed to have discovered how to forge a synthetic superheavy element with enough protons to settle into the hypothetical “island of stability” that would allow it not to decay in a split-second the way high atomic numbers typically dictate – they used a different term, but what they produced was shamir. The largest known structure buried in that layer is a thick-walled vault of lead-lined concrete filled with barrels of shamir.

    Alkahest

    The ancient alchemists believed in a universal solvent, the “alkahest”, that could dissolve any material, and thus could not be contained. Much more recently, miners discovered narrow, irregularly shaped holes extending across geologic strata. Following them all the way down revealed tiny puddles of violet-tinged liquid in pockets at the bottom of the Archaean stratum. This liquid the miners dubbed alkahest: a terrifyingly toxic, incredibly corrosive superacid that will burrow through kilometers of rock when given a chance, only stopped from going further by the high heat of the mantle denaturing it into two gaseous chemicals, both of them also extremely poisonous.

    Amazing for geochemical applications on the surface, but only the bravest miners dare attempt to recover it. Can only be contained in bottles coated with a chemically inert fluoropolymer made of processed amber.

    Protoplasm

    During the Anthropocene, some biologists believed that a primordial form of life could be found, referring to it as “Urschleim” or “protoplasm”. Although not discovered in that era, more recent delves into the Archaean stratum managed to locate and recover the true protoplasm: the clonal colony of the first living thing on Earth. This genetically simple, anaerobically respiring bacterial mass derives sustenance through chemosynthesis of sulfides released by water superheated by proximity to magma. It appears as a pinkish gelatinous substance deemed off-putting to handle but harmless to touch.

    Protoplasm is essentially a stem cell soup that can be seeded with the genetic material of other species. These cultivated cell lines, in turn, can be applied to wounds to heal them, and are also the basis of the cloning tanks used to decant new miners.

    Yliaster

    Long before the Cambrian Explosion brought forth the numerous forms of multicellular life as we know them, when only bacteria crawled the surface of the infant Earth, a civilization a century more advanced than our own sent a spacefaring vessel across the stars. We don’t know the reason, but either due to a crash or abandonment, that titanic vessel remains buried deep in the Proterozoic layer. No conventionally understood engine powered it: instead, within spherical chambers symmetrically placed throughout the wreck, perfect orbs of pure white lay dormant. Miners call this material “yliaster”, joining the Greek word for matter and the Latin word for star.

    Yliaster is an exotic form of matter characterized by its negative mass: gravity, as well as mechanical forces of motion, act oppositely on it from normal matter. In other words, if gravity pulls down, it floats up – and if you push it forward, it pushes back. The use of yliaster is hypothesized to have allowed faster-than-light travel by creating a bubble of negative gravity around the ship to shape spacetime in a slipstream around it.

    Lychstone

    The Carboniferous era is named for the fact that it left behind a rich layer of coal: a great bloom of rainforests grew faster than decomposer species could break it down, so after a mass extinction due to dropping temperatures, the piled plant matter sequestered its carbon into the ground rather than releasing it back into the environment. Coal is made of compressed corpses.

    Now, imagine if the glimmers of proto-consciousness contained within those countless living things compressed together as well. If a plant holds even one percent of the capacity for qualia as an animal, then the mass grave of Paleozoic plants left behind the structural traces of a composite soul within their compacted remains. Lychstone is the result: undead coal, buried in the cold dark for so long it’s forgotten what sunlight feels like. Desperate, confused, bitter. Leaping with a withdrawn addict’s frenzy at the first light and heat brought near it in a hundred million years. Ready to explode.

  • Bones of the Earth

    Bones of the Earth

    Deep Time is a story about how physical depth encodes the almost unimaginably distant history that took place before humans emerged to scratch the last few moments of it onto tablets and scrolls. The protagonist, a miner sent down to drill for precious metals, gems, and oils, is not only digging up materials of industrial value, they are excavating the end products of biogeochemical processes that happened on an inhuman time scale. It takes a million lifetimes to make a drop of petroleum, something we burn up just to leave a driveway. That’s not an indictment of personal guilt, that’s a foundational fact of existence: all present things constitute the iceberg tips of hyperobjects embedded in a volume of time so vast as to render itself invisible, just as we cannot help but see the walls of a room at a glance but must squint to notice the curvature of the planet. We think in individual events and objects but the true driving forces of creation are dizzyingly complex systems in which we are enmeshed merely as tiny pieces.

    All of that said, Deep Time is also a science-fantasy adventure story about digging up magic glowing crystals, because that tiny personal level matters to us humans, and if our lives expire in a cosmological blink then we might as well have fun with them.

    What follows is a list of the stratigraphic layers of the Earth’s crust, as will reveal themselves to our forthcoming hero. Changes are likely to occur as writing continues, so don’t overly concern yourself with spoilers.

    Postmodern

    The post-post-apocalyptic civilization that constitutes the “present day” of the story. Gleaming towers of quartz jut from the ground, grown from seed crystals using “flux” magitechnology to force their development into desired shapes. Marble statues litter the hexagonal city blocks, their mass construction made viable by the marvelous discoveries of geochemy – and cheap cloned labor to mine the necessary materials from beneath the streets.

    Anthropocene

    The first interesting geologic layer, corresponding roughly to what we would vaguely recognize as modern-day civilization – or at least a fantasy facsimile of it. Put simply, the steel-plastic-concrete junk stratum. Nuclear-powered robots guard arcology-bunkers leftover from before the war. Not a place of honor, but plenty of artifacts to dig up if you’re willing to risk a little radiation poisoning.

    Paleolithic

    The birth-age of the mitochondrial Eve, grandmother of all living humans, who transcended death through a special form of amber that preserved living things submerged within it as though frozen in time. She founded an empire as advanced as any in recorded antiquity, but archaeological evidence disintegrated after its collapse, as her people built with biodegrading wood and bone, inlaid with pearl, jet, and remigium.

    Phanerozoic

    Broadly, the period of time recognizable to the general public as “prehistoric”: the age of ammonites and dinosaurs, technically encompassing all the layers prior. Haunted by Carboniferous coal revenants and stalked by Cretaceous closed-loop cave survivors in prototaxite forests. Contains the fruits of the Cambrian Explosion.

    Proterozoic

    The stratum deposited over a geologic era three times longer than all the previous periods combined. Life as we know it only consisted of simple microscopic creatures during this era, but miners still covet the layer for its inclusion of wreckage from an extraterrestrial incursion: advanced technology from a spacefaring species that visited the planet hundreds of millions of years ago.

    Archaean

    The deepest layer of crust, only still extant in rare relict shards that avoided subduction into the mantle. Here the first biological life nucleated around a crystal of unearthly origin, and here it still remains: an undying clonal colony persisting as a protoplasmic ooze, the blood of the Earth itself.

    Hadean

    The upper mantle, named for the period of Earths’ early history in which it had not yet cooled from its creation. Floating within the magma, giant geode cities are inhabited by primordial crystal creatures, the Hekaton, encased in a rocky prison that later became the Earth. Their bodies naturally generate flux, which they use to sculpt their environments.