Monday Musings #58 – Attunement Recap

Happy glorious Monday!

First, a huge thank you to everyone that's been playing the Attunement Update and sending in bugs and suggestions. Today I wanted to celebrate some of the discoveries from the last few weeks and share some fun bug stories in case you missed them.

Nuclear Launch Detected

There's been an edge-case for Lava Generators for a long time where you can technically make a small triangle of barriers, but it's too small to make any interior lava so it's basically useless. I didn't want to explicitly patch it out because you can still make fun shapes with it. Reasons TM, And it becomes part of the discovery.

That said, with the recent updates to show Heat on the lava itself visually instead of just through the UI, the value of the intensity in the shader is proportional to the number of lava tiles in the generator. Guess what happens when you accidentally ask a shader to evaluate 1/0?

It's so powerful it even pierced through to other planes. It also had the secondary effect of generating infinite negative power and vacuuming up entire power grids. All easy fixes, but super funny to see them slip through to players looking to make their own blackhole suns.

Torrential Eureka

This one is a bit technical, but a player noticed that after the update, a Torrential Streamway moving to a regular Streamway was not compressing as expected.

This turned out to be a result of the new performance optimizations, where Streamways only evaluate every 3 ticks because that's the length of time required to move from one slot to the next, but Torrentials are 50% faster and so evaluate every 2. The hitch was being caused by the guaranteed timing mismatch between the two.

At first I tried swapping their order to make sure the normal streams went first, which solved the Fast->Slow transition (the normal always grabs the awaiting fast), but it did not solve the Slow->Fast->Slow case. I had almost resigned myself to making the entire Streamway network operate on single ticks (which would be 2-3 times as expensive for perf), but then I had a flash of inspiration...

Since each type worked completely fine on their own, and there's a guaranteed down-time tick on either system, simply changing Torrentials to evaluate every tick solves the problem cleanly. They still operate within themselves, but also have the benefit of weaving in between off-ticks of the regular Streamways as long as their order is processed correctly.

This has a super cool side benefit too - there's been an issue for a while of how to handle super long chains of streamways: which goes first? How do you know which one is connected to which? The solution for the longest time has been guesstimating the right length of chain for performance and likelihood, but results in the occasional 'missed' transfer - which manifests as bad compression at an intersection. It's rare but does happen.

The eureka moment potentially has implications here too. I can try to process specific sections of the network on 1's while the rest of the system works on 2's and 3's. It'll take a bit more investigation to work through it, and there may be some things about Deltas and Undergrounds specifically that I can do, but I'm super happy because it felt like a very nebulous problem to tackle until now.

Pretty Slick

And my last, and favorite anecdote goes to Coolcatt5000 who discovered an emergent use of game mechanics that I hadn't even intended directly, but is absolutely in the spirit of what MoteMancer is trying to be: a sandbox game of logistical puzzles to solve in whatever creative way you can think of.

I had originally designed an Underground Ichor Slick, but after early testing and feedback from players, it was honestly too powerful. It was fun for a moment but ended up trivializing so much of what made MoteMancer unique. Slicks are still a player favorite, and are both super powerful and unique in the genre, so giving them a slight handicap also just fits them better.

Coolcatt saw the problem on a totally different level though.

There's a Runeshroom Ritual called Seep that grows Ichor Slick under affected structures. It was definitely intended to be a partner to Rampant Bloom that allowed you to run Slicks under structures just like roots, and let that be part of your toolbox. You could use entire buildings as your way to do undergrounds, but it's a little awkward to wrangle properly given the organic shape of the Seep ritual.

But since any structure is affected, that includes MoteMancer's locked-footprint underground structures, like Underground Saltways. Because the ritual simply checks the footprint of the affected structure, you can use them to piggy-back a slick and get an honest to goodness underground in the process.

Amazing.

This type of emergence is very hard to create in a game, and I'm super happy that MoteMancer is able to dance in that space. The best part is that this has been in the game for months and was only just discovered. I look forward to seeing what other emergent behavior bubbles up in the future.

Onward We Go

Summer Sale is just about wrapped up, and there are a handful of trickling in bugs and QoL that I should address in short order. After that I'm going to do my very best to focus on art, even though you all keep suggesting super reasonable and awesome UI/UX features. It's a balance but animations definitely need attention.

One thing I'm super looking forward to is revisiting Mana Roots and Streamways now that the shape of the game and its performance profile are more or less settled. It gives me good paths to chase to improve their look and utility while keeping things performant.

Thank you all once again for your time and feedback and helping to make MoteMancer better. Every bug report, suggestion, and unique discovery helps make the game stronger.

The future is bright!

Back to the Lab 🌿 ~CyanAvatar