Alphas and Iotas WIP

[Justhefax]

Thank you so much for finding that.

Basically, because I’m using multireplace a lot sometimes these typos sneak in there. In that case the typo is only if you chose to be a Captain, the other three roles don’t have it. So LavenderEclipse is also right. There was actually a second problem if you chose to raise a girl, but that was just connected to the name variable I was using.

I’ve fixed it in my in progress build, but haven’t uploaded that to dashingdon yet in case I’ve broken something else somewhere.

Again Empress_Nightmare thanks so very much that’s one of those typos that I could miss very easily. Even knowing exactly what I was looking for it took me five minutes to find it.

[Justhefax]

So first of all no updated build. This does mean that the current build still has those typos connected to the main character’s kids.

Secondly if and when you find a bug/typo if you can please note what character type you chose and what era the character is from there’s a lot of customizing the text to adjust to the main character’s role and era of origin.

I think I’m close to a place where I can update things, but because I’ve been messing around with a few different areas there’s a fair amount of testing to be done to make sure I haven’t broken anything in the process.

Current work going on:

• Finishing introducing the characters. Almost done with the last section where your character meets one of the Labrador crew working at a newsletter called the ‘Electric Shepherd’, I’m probably going to let the player choose newsletters as I keep coming up with good names for them, but that will require a little extra work to keep it from being a purely cosmetic choice.
• The simulations. Always the simulations.
• Sequences hanging out with the crew aboard the Labrador.

I doubt I’ll be ready to update for at least a couple of weeks. With my other WIP featuring tennis it’s safe to assume I won’t be doing much A&I work during Wimbledon. So I’ll try to be back with an update in the middle of July, but late July/August is more likely.

And a dispatch from the Beagle… or rather the Labrador. This is from a sequence hanging out with Mamadou.

Dispatch from the Labrador

Everybody had developed their own routines. Mercedes had the briefings that she didn’t really need because she was a captain, not the captain. Abe poked at things, mostly metaphorically and continued to read through that welcome pamphlet. Penelope had her games with Hamid. Mamadou had his crosswords and a secondary goal, he intended to know the Labraor just as well as any of the engineers.

Which meant that if you wanted to hang out with Mamadou it typically took the form of tours of engineering. They could be enjoyable and when engaging with the astoundingly boring Mamadou actually became more humorous and self deprecating, an endless font of weird stories from the Pacifican bureaucracy. After offering one of those stories about Pacifican bureaucratic silliness Mamadou paused.

“Huh, I need to start rationing some of these stories. Don’t want to run out of things to talk about in the first ten years of a potentially billion year existence.”

“Hopefully there will be new stories.”

“You realize that all of our stories from this life will start off like bad jokes. So I was playing board games with an old captain, former chief, the President of the Isthmian States, and a noted nanotech specialist…”

“Strictly speaking I think a religious figure in some measure is required for those jokes.”

“Thank goodness we have Penelope around then.” Mamadou noted, referencing the still surprising discovery that Penelope Zaboul had been an ordained minister of the Order of the Holy Infinitum.

As ever, thanks for reading. Be back in July/August.

[Empress_Nightmare]

@LavenderEclipse

No they don’t? One says 2 boys 1 girl and the other says 2 girls one boy.

The text after that choices

[Justhefax]

First of all, still haven’t put in a new update, mostly that’s because Ace of Spies continues to have my focus with working on the highly randomized espionage system it’s at a complicated point for both writing and programming. It’s partly because I’ve made just enough progress to make it complicated to make otherwise simple fixes.

I’ve been looking at my progress with the project lately(it’s been over three years since my first post) and have come to two mildly contradictory conclusions.

1. A&I Is not as close to being done as I want it to be. (Though to be fair nothing is ever as close to being done as its creators want.)
2. It’s closer to being done than I think it is.

I’ve been considering cutting A&I in about half just to get something released sooner, there are some natural points where it would make some sense, but it would mean severely truncating the scope(dealing with the alien Nomads and the development of civilization on Elysia would almost certainly be moved into a successor project) and it would mess with the pace of character development that’s otherwise supposed to take place over a long, long time.

I’m not inclined to make any decisions while I’m engaging in my usual minor freakout about not having made enough progress in the last few months, mostly I know what needs to be done, just haven’t found the time to get it done. For instance there’s a lot of structural stuff I want to clean up with the structure the programming has evolved into organically and chaotically. Anyone else trying to make heads or tails of my adventures in Choicescript would almost certainly have a headache from the effort. I’d like to clean up a lot of it.

Really what I’m doing here is the written equivalent of thinking out loud.

Anyway here’s a dispatch from the Labrador from a sequence hanging out with Mercedes.

Dispatch from the Labrador

Mercedes was not the most sociable member of the group and among the most difficult to get to know. An odd thing to say considering that because of her time moonlighting as Gabrielle Nguyen she happened to be in the top one percent most prolific writers among those saved. Mostly in a group with popular scientists with multiple books and a handful of politicians who wrote a lot of autobiographies about themselves, in fact Mercedes might be the single survivor responsible for the greatest volume of fictional work, almost certainly the single most prolific writer of all the ex-captains.

As a direct result she ran a little creative writing seminar aboard the Labrador. It was not exactly well attended. Especially once Mercedes unilaterally banned Eiji and Daisy to keep them from getting a little too expressive with their fictionalized romances.

“I swear, there is no way that those two are actually a couple.” Mercedes remarked after banning a grinning Eiji and Daisy from the seminar which reduced the number of people attending Mercedes’ seminar to… you.

“Seconded.” You concurred. “They’re just too different to either be that affectionate or to enjoy flaunting their affection that much. So what’s on today’s agenda best-selling author?”

“Primarily removing Eiji and Daisy from the seminar. Then… I was thinking board games with Penelope but for some reason you’re still here.”

“I don’t have to be, I can do board games, how about cards? I’m still an excellent bridge partner.”

“You forget the one couple from D shift that’s always up for a game of bridge.”

“Eiji and Daisy.” You answered more or less as Mercedes finished her thought.

“No bridge then.” Mercedes agreed.

“Eh, we’ll figure something out.”

As ever thanks for reading, be back in September/October, hopefully with actual progress!

[Justhefax]

So back in October apparently, no update mostly because I’m messing around with sizable changes that need tuning.

Am nearly done with all 25 of the introductions, but I’m dealing with a few other things that have been bugging me for a while about the intro sequences. Basically every intro/flashback sequence asks the reader to offer opinions on the characters they’ve just been introduced to and then asks for another opinion on returning to the Labrador. I had to do it that way for situations where characters didn’t have intros written, but now that the intros are written asking for the same opinion again is just redundant.

Basically I want to remove that minor choice and maybe add another small character moment or two for the crew of the Labrador.

Still working, still writing, the last section of intros are on the newsletters

Literal Dispatches from the Beagle

Everyone got roped into writing a little bit about themselves which usually got paired with obituaries for a contrast between your own views on your lives and the way your contemporaries viewed you. It was actually quite interesting. For decades into the future you’d exchange obituaries with new acquaintances. An interesting custom and one entirely born of your new realities.

The Posthumans even got roped into things. It was a first real confirmation of who was who in the merry band of survivors known as the Twenty.

You managed to get into working with a newsletter on a more regular basis. It was how you got to know one of your future Labrador colleagues. The newsletter, the Electric Shepherd, was a more generalist paper. Those theoretically running the paper were ready to actually do news if news ever happened, but lacking any news they had selected an interesting group of people to write columns.

Which naturally includes your character and another future member of the Labrador crew.

As ever, thanks for reading. Be back hopefully in November, this time definitely* with actual progress.

[Justhefax]

It has been a thoroughly unproductive couple of months on the Beagle front.

Officially I’m blaming focusing for most of that period on Ace of Spies and secondarily that I always get distracted from writing by something like the World Cup, there may also be some holiday related distractions somewhere in there.

The minor thing I’ve been focusing most on recently is fleshing out the great families the player can choose to be a part of within the story. On selection I have a few sentences explaining the basics of the family you’ve chosen, but it’s not really mentioned past that. The families and members of the great families become more important later in the story so it felt right to add a little more earlier in the story.

Each family will have at least three representatives, some relatively famed within the story of the Beagle and some historical footnotes. I’ve been doing family reunions among the great families which are just weird because these are family members separated by thousands or millions of years, therefore like no family reunion I’ve ever seen written about. These are the things that come up when one does a story featuring characters separated by such a ridiculous timespan. Here’s a quickish example of the Halifaxes:

Meet the Halifaxes

The Halifaxes were an odd great family. You were willing to acknowledge that much. You were part of what was already coming to be known as a Footnote Great Family. A lot of Halifaxes were saved, one of only five families to count over 200 at 215, but for all that quantity there supposedly wasn’t much quality. The welcome pamphlet didn’t mention a solitary Halifax by name except Serena Halifax, who was mostly a footnote herself, a captain of the Beagle during the Gap between universes just before Victoria Brnovic.

In other words the only mention of a Halifax in the welcome pamphlet was as part of the backstory for a more historically significant figure. Worse, because part of the Brnovic story was that Brnovic was part of a generation that rediscovered previously lost DBS technology Serena Halifax hadn’t even been saved.

There was a lot of joking about footnotes. The Halifaxes were taking it all with good humor that might be characteristic of the family. Aside from the humor the commonality for many Halifaxes seemed to be duty and honor. Not very surprising for a family that produced so many captains.

For all the good humor about it, and there was a lot, it was also clear that the Halifaxes didn’t intend to be known as a footnote family for all of human history. There’s merit to that too.

No Halifax had ever launched a coup because they thought the captain had his authority more on looks than merit. Yakov Zonneveld and Renata Ordonez did just that against Gareth Carmona. No Halifax had ever been so self-evidently incompetent as to inspire a coup attempt like Carmona. No Halifax had ever taken undemocratic efforts to stay in elected office like Cameron Grenier and none had ever used military force to depose someone the way that Vania Frandsen did against Grenier.

No, the Halifaxes may not have been forged into greatness in crucibles of fire, but they also hadn’t been incompetent enough to spur coup attempts against them, arrogant enough to start coup attempts on their own. Halifaxes did their jobs. They did their jobs well enough that people kept appointing, electing, and awarding the family long into the future.

You met more Halifaxes at that reunion than you had your entire life and the sheer quantity of Halifax stories was astounding. There was Kyu-Jin Halifax, an earnest ex-Chief engineer trading stories about some of the zanier readiness simulations they ran over their years in charge, Japhet Halifax an amiable politician, entertaining storyteller, and one of the few that hailed from one of the successor states to Mamadou Aoki’s beloved Pacifica, the man was just an endless font of fishy stories.

As ever thanks, for reading. Be back probably in February.

[Justhefax]

This is another update without a new build.

Work on Ace of Spies took precedence, partly because during a time span that includes the Australian Open I was always going to be focusing on the tennis project.

That isn’t to say that work hasn’t continued on the A&I front. I’ve mostly been focused farther along in the story than the parts that I have polished up and are ready to be shared publicly.

I’ll discuss a few things about the story structure broadly based around three/four major crises/events. There’s one where your character passively experiences the event, so it happens and it is important to the story but the only player agency is in the aftermath, so I’m not sure whether to count it for structural purposes.

There will be at least two times after original character creation where you can change your character’s appearance/gender and a few other characters will also change their names/appearances/genders in the background of the story. People won’t really remark on it because in the far future of the Beagle things are more fluid and in the even farther future where everyone has artificial bodies nobody looks twice at someone swapping out bodies or changing names.

Here’s a section about one of the other great families, the academically focused Dominguezes:

Meet the Dominguezes

Your family bothered people. The Dominguezes did very well for themselves, while they were most renowned around your time the Dominguez line of academics never really waned. Of the 232 Dominguezes about half were DAFSA winners, another quarter Chief Engineers which left the captains and politicians feeling a bit out of place.

The whole thing was surreal, with a family reunion coming from across human history most of the Dominguezes shared about as much DNA with you as the founding generation would’ve shared with Cleopatra, Shakespeare, Galileo, any of the ancients.

But you did share a name and over all of those eras the Dominguez name had meant and stood for something. The Dominguez family neither accepted favors it did not deserve, nor bestowed those on the undeserving.

All of those people that you shared a name, but hardly any DNA with, well damn it if by the end of the reunion aka Dominguezpalooza, they felt like family. Not a family that would do you favors without a good reason, but a family nonetheless.

The Dominguezes didn’t really have celebrities within the group, but Nadine Dominguez stood out a bit. First of all though Nadine had engineering training she was more of a diplomat then a scientific type and stood outside the usual archetypes as an envoy to the Nomads making her one of the survivors that had spent the most time with the only intelligent alien civilization the Beagle had ever encountered.

It did not take long for Nadine to declare that she didn’t want to talk about Nomads. That managed to thin out the crowd of interested Dominguezes that had been forming around her. She was still a fascinating and interesting woman embodying the Dominguez spirit in a very interesting time.

There was a lot of that in the Dominguez line. Your people were about action, not talking, for a great family they were remarkably humble. Which did mean the family reunion featured a lot of people demurring when asked about their accomplishments. Ksenia Dominguez was one of the few Dominguez captains in a family that respected the achievement, but was possibly a bit disappointed in Dominguezes that hadn’t published scholarly works.

Julien Dominguez was already turning off the rest of the family, he had been a scientist and by all accounts(mostly provided by Julien himself) a very good one. It was more of his attitude that was turning the other Dominguezes off. He was proud of the work in a family that praised humility. The result was that he was one of the louder members of the family and most didn’t appreciate it.

As ever thanks for reading. Will try to get more A&I work done before the next update probably in April.

[Justhefax]

Another update without an updated build.

Like my work on Ace of Spies my work on A&I has also suffered the past few months because of a family health emergency.

I have gotten some work in, but again it has mostly been further along in the story than the publicly available sections. Next time I hope, emphasis on hope, to have polished off a few new sections that are available and to have made significant progress on the Labrador sections.

On showing and telling: I’m a fan of clunky drops of exposition, you may have already noticed that if you’ve run through A&I once or twice. In this setting I think it makes sense because literally every character alive was either used to providing or receiving significant chunks of information in that form when they were alive.

So your character is used to briefings and because your character is usually operating far outside of the inner circles of decision makers, it feels to your character like they’re on the receiving end of annoying info dumps regularly. It is entirely possible I’m just rationalizing and still need to clean up the occasional big clunky piece of exposition.

Allow me to introduce another one of the more famous great families, the command focused Sorensons:

Meet the Sorensons

When people thought of great families they thought of families like the Sorensons. Part of the famed Five Families of Mars, the Sorensons still aboard the Beagle were something of a contradiction. For one of the most renowned families in human history most of the biggest Sorensons weren’t present.

Jasmine Sorenson, died on Mars. Faruk Sorenson, famed for his efforts in fighting the plague of repopulation, also died on Mars. Lawrence Sorenson, last captain to try to overthrow a democratic government, wrong generation to be saved, also quite possibly a jerk. Vasily Sorenson, one of the most significant junior officers in transit history, also wrong generation. The right Sorensons always seemed to just miss being saved.

The remaining Sorensons were 157 glorified footnotes relatively evenly spread amongst the four types. The family was rebelling against the mildly disparaging notion of being a Footnote Great Family.

Just because the Sorenson survivors didn’t include the most famous Sorensons it didn’t make the remaining Sorensons a footnote family by any means. You met basically everyone and thanks to the perfect recall could probably remember who they were and when they were from. With 157 Sorensons to meet it took some time, but thankfully your functionally immortal robot bodies meant that staying up past your bedtimes weren’t exactly a concern.

The Sorensons included Alejandra Sorenson who represented one of the few Sorensons to gain political power before the First Transit and the exodus of much of the family to Mars. Not nearly considered a major figure in her own right, but she was full of self-deprecating humor and wit. She spent a fair amount of the reunion calling people youngsters and joking about how things worked back in her day. It was pleasantly endearing.

On the other end of the timeline from Alejandra was Isouro Sorenson who dated from the post transit renaissances after the loss of humanity’s home solar system. Isouro seemed to be a talented scientist that dedicated his life to preserving that of the Beagle. He was one of the most relaxed people around, confident that if humanity could survive a supernova, the destruction of our first solar system, the deaths of many other stars, and heat death of a danged universe than dang it the species would survive anything. He was quite pleased that his family had been a significant part in making that happen. Isouro was also quite fond of the word dang.

As ever thanks for reading. Hoping for a more productive next few months on the A&I front. Be back in May or June.

[Justhefax]

Update: No new build.

Have been working on the leisure time aboard the Labrador with the other three shifts(your character being on ‘B’ shift). It’s not the exciting stuff, but things, as they so often are with my work get complicated even with something like filling out time on the Labrador that doesn’t ultimately affect the overall story much.

There are three general types of event for down time with the other shifts. Watching movies/shows(passive activity), engaging in collaborative fiction(think glorified improv aka my version of the star trek tradition of a bunch of the crew getting together for fun on the holodeck), and playing games(adversarial activity sometimes cards, but really think of things like marathon games of monopoly, RISK, or diplomacy)

My problem is that there are(or will be) six simulations(as ever made some progress on them but not enough), but if I’m actually going with the schedule I’ve set up it’s four periods of downtime per every sim, so 24 which runs into a fair amount of work. Not to mention the bits of customization when interacting with different shifts.

Enough about that bit of annoyance. Allow me to introduce another of the great families, the famed al-Qahtani line:

Meet the al-Qahtanis

The al-Qahtanis were a popular bunch, but the family claimed to be underrepresented because the al-Qahtani line was most prominent in the mainline transit era. They did contribute up and down the timeline, but their greatest period of prominence was definitely when people were only getting chosen for the DBS treatment one generation in a hundred. Though the al-Qahtani contingent was close to a hundred the records showed the al-Qahtani family had the second most captains overall behind the Halifaxes, they just got those captains at the wrong time to be saved.

It was surreal, a family reunion across human history. Sharing a name, something of pride in that name, but not much else. There was a party game at the reunion, take a note card, and write in a word or two what the al-Qahtani name meant to you. For 97 al-Qahtanis that exercise returned 58 different answers.

On the bright side that did give the al-Qahtanis plenty to talk about. Your people also had someone to talk about and talk to in Phoebe al-Qahtani.

Phoebe al-Qahtani was a big deal. Mercedes Skorupski made a point of complaining about Phoebe al-Qahtani being a bigger deal than Mercedes’ ancestor and contemporary Hazel Skorupski, who the Skorupskis at least considered as important a part in foiling the coup as Phoebe al-Qahtani. One of the pet peeves of the family at large appeared to be that Phoebe al-Qahtani didn’t make the cut for the top three officers the Doc appointed. Brnovic, Carmona, and Varejao, people were of the opinion that Phoebe was at least as competent as Carmona and missed out on the job basically so that there could be a male representative in the group.

There was also Miranda al-Qahtani, who like a number of the former DAFSA winners in the al-Qahtani line didn’t seem entirely comfortable with the command focused al-Qahtani family. She thought the al-Qahtani name represented Asking Questions, which was both a nice way to describe the goals of a scientist and AQ to go with al-Qahtani. Nobody agreed with her.

Hobart al-Qahtani was a personable enough engineer spending time with the few other technical types from that fascinating time in Beagle history when they were establishing and evacuating extrasolar colonies. To Hobart the al-Qahtani name meant perseverance. One other al-Qahtani agreed with him.

Next steps- Hate to be redundant, but finishing the Labrador stuff. I’m close enough that I can actually say it is more like finishing up at this point, but not there yet.

[Justhefax]

Update… no new build.

I really don’t like updates without new builds even though most of my updates seem to be without new builds.

The last two months I haven’t gotten much work done on A&I at all and that’s for the simple reason that the time I usually budget for A&I has been taken up fixing problems with the new build on my other project.(There’s an entire story about that, but it would really belong on the Ace of Spies thread.)

There’s also some stuff about trying to get up early/staying up late to catch World Cup games from stupid Australia/New Zealand has generally been awful for my productivity(not surprised about that, watching the Australian Open has the same effect on my sleep every year)

The lack of a new build doesn’t mean I don’t have new information to share: I would like to introduce the Matsuzaka family, a noble line in Beagle history with a very humble origin.

Meet the Matsuzakas

People didn’t necessarily know what to make of the Matsuzakas. The most famous Matsuzaka by any definition was still Corporal Kimiko Matsuzaka whose famous foot was the first Beagle resident to set foot on Martian soil during the very first Martian transit. That was all ancient history to just about all of the Matsuzakas. There were even some Matsuzakas that disputed whether the family was even related to Kimiko at all.

It took thousands of years after Kimiko for the Matsuzakas to be considered a great family at all. Even then mostly as academics, academics who were always being mocked and looked down upon by people thinking that the Matsuzakas were trading on Kimiko’s story. You didn’t doubt that for some of the earlier Matsuzakas might have traded on that story, but it wasn’t half the advantage the Sorensons or the Adeshinas got, they were elite from the start. The Matsuzakas had to fight for it.

That in a word was the Matsuzakas, fighters unafraid to stand up for themselves, in classrooms, boardrooms, or anywhere else. The 83 proud Matsuzakas lucky enough to be saved intended to do exactly that.

Nobody better exemplified the Matsuzaka spirit than Olivia Matsuzaka former Consul of the NSR, and thanks to being alive at the right time Olivia Matsuzaka was present for the Matsuzaka family reunion. She was possibly the most renowned of the surviving Matsuzakas and actually mentioned by name in that damned welcome pamphlet.

The Matsuzakas had mostly been a civilian family so while it was a fun get together there was also a lot of being annoyed about the fact that the only people with official jobs were the three former Chief Engineers and the three former Captains, no official roles for the politicians or the scientists.

Antioch Matsuzaka was one of the handful of Matsuzaka captains, they served during the Nomad era and had adopted a few Nomad sayings that nobody else understood. That combination made Antioch somewhat inscrutable and someone that most of the other Matsuzakas wanted to talk to. Especially because they agreed a hundred percent that the current ad hoc command structure the Doc had implemented was insufficient and needed more involvement from the civilians.

That was something Valentina Matsuzaka agreed with wholeheartedly. As a scientist Valentina was more representative of the Matsuzaka family than either Olivia or Antioch and seemed to have a special level of disdain for what she was calling a celebritocracy. At least early in the process she was pointing out that the people dominating the discussion were the celebrities not the footnotes who could easily be just as competent and pointed that out directly to Olivia, the closest thing the Matsuzakas had to a celebrity leader.

Olivia was sympathetic to Valentina’s views. Even the celebrities loathed the notion that they should be in charge because they were celebrities, but she did tepidly point out that for most of the major historical figures their competence was one of the main reasons for their fame. Most of your fellow Matsuzakas were with them for various reasons.

Historical Note: The idea of Kimiko Matsuzaka and the first boot on Mars belonging to an anonymous corporal came from some stories I heard about the Apollo landers. Buzz Aldrin(I think it’s Buzz, he’s certainly the best known lunar lander pilot) had responded to some questions about how much he wished he could’ve been the first boot on the Moon by noting that Armstrong’s seat was literally next to the door so Buzz physically couldn’t have been first out the door. So it was a quirk of design that gave Buzz a less prominent place in history than he could have had. My personal opinion is that NASA might have told Buzz that, but there’s no way on the Moon that the mission commander wasn’t going to be the one with the first boots on the ground.

The idea of Buzz(ie the crew and not the commander) getting the historical status of being first has fascinated me for a long time and it is interesting now because we’re looking at another historical situation in Oppenheimer where the commander gets the credit/infamy instead of the rank and file within the project. History records that Oppenheimer wasn’t actually responsible for the significant developments leading to the A-Bomb, but he’s managed to forever be known as the father of the atomic bomb.

Next steps- Finding a better balance between work on Ace of Spies and Alphas and Iotas! Better planning for the project, I have been trying to approach both my ChoiceScript projects with more of a flexible approach of moving where the inspiration takes me and while I think it would be stupid to keep trucking on one if something really clever struck me about the other my lack of structure does lead to work slowdowns from time to time(say around major sporting events) and that is something I really need to work on.

Hm… long post for not actually having an update.

[Justhefax]

Update no new build.

Have been more productive this time despite Starfield somehow eating into my writing time. Can’t imagine how that happened.

I’ve mostly been focusing on world building, because well I love my world building, and because I’ve stumbled across a few pieces of lore I had written out that needed tweaking. For instance a little while ago the Nobel people awarded the Nobel in medicine to a pair of pioneers of the science behind mRNA vaccines which got me thinking about my method for choosing the scientists that got saved aboard the Beagle and the realization that a lot of science awards go to multiple members of research teams so the Beagle’s DAFSA should as well and now the Beagle has more scientists saved than any of the other groups.

I do have new information to share about one of the great families: I would like to introduce the science and engineering focused Udoh family.

Meet the Udohs

The Udoh family was one of many great families that immigrated to the Beagle, specifically in the first several transits. They came to prominence near the end of the decennial transit era so they didn’t have their numbers boosted in quite the same way that the Kumagai-Adeshinas did.

As a family it seemed the Udohs were beloved mostly for not taking part in political squabbling. The 74 Udohs still aboard the Beagle were mostly engineers and scientists, with only five captains and three political leaders. The most common view of the Udohs appeared to be an optimistic one, that things would be alright. The current extinction of the biological version of humanity challenged that philosophy. But the fact that despite that extinction over 20,000 remarkable souls had been saved along with enough viable genetic samples to revive a diverse and vibrant slice of humanity, why that had done a lot to keep the Udoh optimism thriving.

The Udohs were also the rare great family to actually have their reputed founder saved. Madison Udoh, Martian born and raised, but grew to be one of the greatest Chief Engineers in the Beagle’s history.

That wasn’t why everyone wanted to talk to Madison Udoh, people wanted to talk to Madison because of the very rare experience of growing up on an actual planet. The amount of events required for someone like Madison to be saved were a lot. Had to be in a decennial use of the DBS tech and around a transit, otherwise nobody from outside the Beagle was saved, there were only a handful of decennial DBS eras, then the ringer everyone went through. Spend enough time on the Beagle to become a chief engineer. Get saved. Okay, maybe it was simpler when explained that way.

Paul Udoh was a technically minded scientist who spent time in the engineering wing of Beagle service before going into academia. He didn’t go into a lot of depth about the research that won him and two other members of his research team DAFSAs. Which was perfectly understandable, not a lot of scientists did, but he could go on and on about the indomitable nature of the human spirit and how the era any of you lived in shouldn’t define you. That being said, Paul was also just as excited to hang out with Madison Udoh as anyone else.

Aryna Udoh was one of the last of the Udoh engineers. She hailed from the post-Nomad era and was proof that the Udoh optimism was remarkably long lived. That post-Nomad era was a time for optimism in knowing that there was intelligence elsewhere in the universe and humility in knowing that humanity still had much room to develop. Aryna leaned hard into that optimism and was always happy to talk about the exact reasons for that optimism. Among other families it could’ve been annoying, among the Udohs it was just proof that over eons of time aboard the Beagle some things defining great families just didn’t change.

Next steps: Finishing up a lot of things that are almost done and making progress on a number of things that aren’t close to being done. Next development likely to be found in a new build, finished simulations aboard the Labrador, tweaked introductions to the crew on the Labrador, and more interactions with A, C, and D shifts aboard the Labrador.

[Wolfie]

Love what you’re doing. I can’t wait to read how your world building will influence the game.

Maybe you should add the last update in the title saying it’s world building. It will drive more people who could give new reviews and new ideas for you to ponder.

Anyway good job and good luck ! ~

[Justhefax]

Firstly no new build. I hit on some new structural approaches in Ace of Spies which has eaten up a lot of my writing/coding time.

Secondly in response to Wolfie, thank you for the kind words. I would love to change the thread’s title and remove the (updated 7/8/19), I’m asking the moderators and they’ve acted very quickly in fixing it, which pleases me greatly.

Since I’ve mentioned them in basically every post this year I’ll add a bit more about how the Great Families are relevant to the stories:

About the Great Families

They are great families, not great houses competing in old school feudal intrigues. The group does generally share goals for the success of humanity, continued functioning of the Beagle and well-being for life in general.

There is a cordial rivalry between the families, especially among those with a shared history, the Adeshinas(next family to be profiled) and the Kumagai-Adeshinas, along with the Mejias and Sorensons, and the Five Families of Mars.

It isn’t like the Zonnevelds and Matsuzakas have an alliance to screw over their nemesis the Udohs and Dominguezes. There’s cordial rivalry, but also a shared kinship and sort of respect. They add flavor to the world and a few characters that pop up from time to time.

Like if you’re a Halifax when I randomly name drop Kyu-Jin Halifax later in the story you’ll have some notion of having read that name before if not of knowing who he is. The families offer me a ready made cast of characters to pop up in the background to enhance the feeling of a connected world.

To use an American reference, if 2,000 years from now America is still a going concern we’ll have had 500 more presidential terms and a minimum of 250 more presidents. If say ten each of those presidents are Obamas, Bushes, Roosevelts, and Adamses they will feel like Great American families to someone in 4024, but none of those will necessarily have ever had to interact with each other to develop proper rivalries.

I also did want to say how much I enjoyed Lies Under Ice, the most recent Choice of Games release, Europa is a setting you don’t see a lot of and when you play through all of the random engineers, scientists, and assorted characters that just pop up from time to time it felt to me like a world with a deep backstory where there is an entire moon colony up to their own business while your character is dealing with the bigger decisions.

To put that into A&I situation you’re a lot more the random character in the background that turns up twice to complain that we need to improve those moon domes, than you are the player character in Lies Under Ice.

As ever thanks for reading, hopefully with Ace of Spies under control I’ll be able to get more A&I progress next year.

[Justhefax]

No new build, a bit disappointed in myself.

I thought I was close to a reasonably updated build, but after checking on what I wanted to put in the update it’s just a bit farther away from being ready than I wanted it to be. (To be specific while double-checking on the Expeditionary Group section I discovered that I accidentally had Mercedes Skorupski contradicting herself over the course of like three pages and that’s a writing fix not a coding thing. Writing things are more annoying to fix.)

Have made more progress further along in the story and with organization, I think one of my major problems when I try to get back into the A&I story is the mess my text files have become(current word counts for chapters 1,2, and 3 are 30k, 60k, and 80k respectively), so it has finally come to me adding new files to improve the organization which is particularly helpful with some branching points in the story. I’m slowly learning the consequences of getting too ambitious with the organization.

Meet the Adeshinas

The Adeshina family and the more renowned Kumagai-Adeshinas had a fractious relationship. At some point way back in the pre-transit eras there was a split between the two families, the Kumagai-Adeshina wing basically stopped being relevant on the Beagle. Throughout most of human history the Adeshinas were the last link to the Beagle’s founding generation, it was a bit of a rude awakening to discover that according to the more numerous Kumagai-Adeshinas your 129 Adeshinas weren’t really heirs to the Adeshina line at all.

It was a surreal family reunion with the family members spanning billions of years of human history. Nobody was talking about the Kumagai-Adeshinas.

Except for the two that showed up. Ayoumi Kumagai and Prince Adeshina, the founding couple responsible for the hyphenating weren’t playing favorites with the group. The two of them were very big on mending fences between the Kumagai-Adeshinas and the regular Adeshinas, but the reunion was a time for meeting relatives nobody knew about, learning things long forgotten or discovering what the family did ages after their deaths. Ayoumi and Prince knew that and didn’t stick around for long.

The Adeshina family didn’t seem to finally split off from the Kumagai-Adeshinas until sometime around two thousand years after launch, the two families coexisted until the Kumagai wing sort of got absorbed into other major families around thirty-five thousand years after launch.

Sinclair Adeshina was one of the earlier Adeshinas and one of the relatively few scientists in the family. They were so very excited to see all the greatness that became of the Adeshina family.

Judging from the pamphlet a lot of the transits in the so-called mid-transit era sort of blended into each other. Evelyn Adeshina was annoyed about this and was in a group of Adeshina captains telling fun stories about the weird and zany things from forgotten and forgettable transits.

Newton Adeshina was a DeathWatch transit veteran and lived through a deeply distressing time that caused innumerable existential crises across humanity. Now that he knew humanity had not just survived the loss of their home solar system, but also the heat death of the universe had spurred a great deal of optimism for the future in the old chief.

As ever thanks for reading and sorry about the lack of updated build once again.

Next post should cover the Zonneveld family, the Beagle’s family of traitors though they really would prefer it if people would forget about it. There were only the two traitors over millions of years,

[Justhefax]

So… I still don’t have a new build, but that’s because I’m taking a new approach to handling romantic options.

To make a long story short… shorter at least(I’ll explain the long version once I’m settled on the specifics) I’ve been scribbling out these brief descriptions and introductions for a bunch of minor characters and I realized that I’m particularly fond of some of them. (Zweli Henriquez, the curling loving psychologist from the Malamute and Tondeya Lazzeri the very competent engineer on the Great Dane come to mind) So I’ve been thinking about how to add less detailed romantic interests than the main group from B Shift on the Labrador. IE There wouldn’t be as much Henriquez or Lazzeri content as there would be for Abe Carvajal or Penelope Zaboul, but enough to make them feel unique.

And I’ve settled on a method loosely adapted from some of the programming work I’ve done to add randomness to Ace of Spies. I’ll explain a bit more below.

Basically I’m adding characters and content… so it’s a bit of a headache.

Meet the Zonnevelds

The Zonneveld reunion was pretty great. Even when you were alive Zonneveld family reunions were pretty great. The main reason for that was fairly simple, even 29 Quintillion years after the event people still remembered that the two most famous Zonnevelds, mainly Yakov and secondarily Paloma, were involved in coup attempts against command authority.

Neither Yakov, nor Paloma were spoken of at Zonneveld family reunions. Even among the Zonneveld family nobody seemed to take Yakov Zonneveld’s side in his coup. Phoebe al-Qahtani and Gareth Carmona saw to that. From your discussions with your alleged distant relatives nearly everybody has a goofy aunt or uncle that felt Paloma Zonneveld was right on her coup, but thankfully it appeared that none of those goofy aunts/uncles managed to make the cut.

As a family the Zonnevelds were very passionate about public service, partly because the Zonnevelds always had been and partly because the family was mildly obsessed with making up for the mistakes of Yakov and Paloma. The 162 Zonnevelds present at the reunion were a testament to that.

With the most famous members of the Zonneveld family on the traitorous side of things even the most renowned of the surviving Zonnevelds weren’t much more than footnotes themselves.

Vijay Zonneveld was one of the relatively few Zonnevelds to still captain the Beagle after the previous incidents and he had stories. Many stories.

Francesca Zonneveld happened to be one of the few to manage political office proudly touting the family legacy. “A Zonneveld might commit treason against command but never against her people.” Nobody at the reunion had any idea either how she actually managed to win or why she didn’t just point out that it had been 150,000 years between Paloma and Francesca.

It meant a reunion of doing what normally happened at family reunions, getting to know everybody. The Zonnevelds were a forward looking people largely because looking backwards meant Yakov and Paloma. So while there was always a little catching up on old times and getting to know each other again Zonneveld family reunions were more aspirational talking about plans, ambitions, dreams, or in this specific case the future of humanity an a lot of philosophical concerns that went along with it and everyone was always so supportive.

Only a Zonneveld knows what it is to bear that name with pride which made seemingly the entire family passionate about redeeming or validating the family name. It wasn’t that other families didn’t have their own black sheep, that there hadn’t been Adeshinas or Sorensons on the wrong side of history, but no great family had ever been tainted like the Zonnevelds.

And just a little bit about this new system I’m working on…

Defining Basic Romantic Interests

Basically there will be six values that define how a potential significant other interacts with your character. I just want to get away from the feeling that it doesn’t matter who your character is interested in once the choice is made because I’ve certainly noticed games where the interactions with romantic interests can feel a bit generic after choices are made.

Role and Era of origin. (these are both variables you define for your own character)

Then four boolean choices(not close to settled on these)
Compassionate vs dispassionately cavalier about the feelings of others
Casual(or goofy) vs serious
Historian vs Fresh start
Nostalgic vs Enjoying the rebirth

Basically it should get characters feeling different enough to seem unique during romantic events after a bespoke introduction for them.

As ever, thanks for reading and will be back with hopefully a new build and fresh enthusiasm for the project in June.

[Justhefax]

So the good news is that I have fresh enthusiasm. But not a new build.

I’ve mostly been working farther ahead in the story dealing with some of the more dramatic occurrences in the A&I story. It seems one of the perils of feeling like something is ALMOST done is the notion that it’ll be easier to finish and trying to move on. I’ll get back to finishing up and polishing earlier sections, but for now I’m pleased with my progress.

I am excited for the new system and the extra romantic options it will allow.

Because of the scope of the project and the extreme amounts of time that passes during Alphas and Iotas, I really think allowing more player freedom will help with a sense of immersion. (The timeline from the stats screen covers four different calendar systems… Which I should probably explain better.)

An Example of the System in Action

This comes from a later section in the story not covered by the parts currently playable.

“It’ll probably be fine.” You said to …insert applicable romantic interest(there’s more to your line, but I’m keeping it a little generic for this post)

(Compassionate/historian) “I hope you’re right, but we really need to think about this from their perspective. We aren’t talking about our culture here, but thank goodness we have so many people from back when humanity was more diverse culturally. I think it will really be helpful.”
(Dispassionate/Casual) “You’re probably right. None of this is too big a problem, we’ll be able to deal with it. We’re smart, they’re smart. It will be fine.”
(Fresh start/serious) “It’s a new challenge, we need to address this the way we are and not feel bound to the way we used to do things. I think the most important thing is to take this seriously, we have very smart people we can’t afford to be cavalier about challenges like this.”

You can sort of see how it works. You’re talking to someone and in this example they have a two or three sentence response dictated by their personality of philosophical views on the current state of humanity and how it ought react to challenges. I swear multireplace is my favorite thing in all of ChoiceScript.

Still finalizing the system, but feeling very optimistic.

Will be back in August. As ever, thanks for reading.

[Justhefax]

So… as is the way of things when there’s something interesting going on I got a bit sidetracked the last month. And when what I’m sidetracked by involves sports(IE the Olympics) That sidetracking tends to result in me being a bit more focused on Ace of Spies.

In other words this update is pretty limited. On of my favorite parts of this project is that in the middle of the story it veers into four different sections depending on choices you’ve made earlier. (Think of Choice of the Robot with its final chapter that changed depending on what your robot was focused on.) I call them planetary crises, they’re based on Elysia. All of them occur in each playthrough so you can discuss them later, but your character only has a role in dealing with one of them in each playthrough.

What I’ve been focused on in A&I recently is one of those sections. This is a section from A&I dealing with one of the four crises.

About Intelligent Squid

How do you communicate with squid?

It wasn’t a question that many had occasion to ponder over the years. But Mamadou, bless his soul was on the case. He found some archived books about the subject. There were a series of primers on how to handle potential first contact with a species of aliens that are clearly intelligent, but are just radically different from humanity. They were written before the Schnauzer left to go searching for aliens, but they were still good resources and one of the specific tracts was about the possibility of finding intelligent cephalopods.

What would language be like, would they communicate visually, probably not through sound, but maybe smell or touch? How would they give the squid equivalent of speeches? How could potential squid politicians rally their supporters? It seemed overwhelmingly complicated.

The first question was the simplest and one that was already a problem. On land the writers contended that the squids would likely have an audible language because it’s a more efficient way to communicate through air. In water it’s more problematic and the Elysian squid were still in water.

The Elysian squid had bioluminescence and disguise capabilities so it was very possible their communication was visual at least at a distance. If they were using smell it would be a lot more problematic, humans have always been considered to have awful senses of smell and while it was possible they could modify the artificial bodies to improve their sense of smell, but it would take time for anyone to get used to an enhanced sense of smell let alone decode nuances in scent coming from the squid.

No, visual was definitely the best option.

If you’re interested in discussions of different types of intelligence the other reading materials I would recommend are David Brin’s Uplift series(intelligent chimps and dolphins), Alaistair Reynolds’ series starting with Blue Remembered Earth(elephants), and the Choice of Games project Lies Under Ice.

Will be back in October, hopefully with better progress.

[Cryzhentia]

Looks like coming from stellaris machine age😁

[Justhefax]

So once again I don’t have an update. I got sidetracked with AoS and ahead of where the demo is on what I have been working on when it comes to A&I.

I’d like to discuss the planetary crises again. All four occur in each playthrough and your resolution of your specific crisis will affect the rest of the story. When you’re in a planetary crisis there will be a slightly different stats screen(think of what I do with the stats screen in AoS where it shows different stats based on whether you’re doing tennis stuff or spy stuff)

There will be a stat chart showing progress towards one of four potential resolutions to the crisis, that sort of broadly, but not exactly correspond to the four main skills of Ingenuity, Charisma, Leadership, and Technology. I’m still finalizing how everything works(I sort of obviously get distracted easily and it is in my nature to jump around in my writing as the inspiration strikes me.)

Here’s a brief section about the geological instability crisis.

On Geological Instability

Geological Instability. It’s the sort of polite scientific way of saying that weird stuff is going on under the surface of a planet that could result in a lot of molten rock being casually sprayed into the air without too much notice.

Two polite words. The reaction to it could also be described in two words. Very terrifying. The weather issues so many years ago had been enough to almost convince people that Elysia was unsuitable for human habitation.

It was enough to send the members of the ad hoc Geological Instability subcommittee scurrying to the archives for research. Luckily for humanity among the survivors of humanity were a fair amount of people that actually enjoyed doing that sort of research.

As it turned out it all of that research was also a good way to get to know the fellow members of the committee. The historical reality emerged fairly quickly. The best planets for colonization and human habitation always had active molten cores and plate tectonics just because of the importance of a world’s magnetic field in keeping a population safe from solar radiation. That meant humanity had a lot of experience with this sort of stuff on extrasolar colonies. What humanity never seemed to have actually done was just shut down the molten core of a world to avoid quakes and volcanoes.

Unfortunately nobody from those colonies had been saved. Their research was in the Beagle’s archives, the same archives everybody was poring over, but nobody was there to explain how they dealt with it back on Beta Canopus IV.

It was also a very strange crisis, because as you explained to the Doc that first day, geological crises operate on geological timescales and geological timescales just are not something that humanity is good at operating on. Despite the fact that the Doc and some of the other posthumans had in fact been active over geological timescales, they still tended to look at things like normal people, in times measured in years or maybe decades. Centuries and millennia just are not something that the human or posthuman mind is good at dealing with.

As ever thanks for reading. It’s starting to feel like I’ve been working on this for a while, but I’m also feeling like the project is in a good place. Be back with hopefully a real update in December.

[Justhefax]

So, the last month or so I’ve mostly been sidetracked doing Ace of Spies stuff. I’ve been focused on getting that project into a good place especially on the spy side of things. Not that I’ve forgotten about A&I, but it hasn’t been a productive year for my choicescript projects as a whole, I’ve gotten sidetracked a bunch and my work on A&I has suffered the most, but I still love the idea and the setting, even if it’s ballooning a bit with side characters wandering around. This thing is going to be finished eventually!

Here’s a brief section on the weather crisis:

On a restless atmosphere

Taming a proper restless atmosphere would be work.

The not technically a meteorologist Mercedes was very clear about that. Planetary level weather systems are hugely complicated.

In theory it could be expected to calm down in time. Every planet goes through growing pains in its development. Earth and Mars were both more restless in the ages before humanity arrived on the scene and Elysia was considerably younger in its development as a world than either Earth or Mars.

However that doesn’t mean it would be a good idea. There is a line where meteorological instability can make civilization very, very difficult. Humanity closed in on that line when climate change got really bad, hurricanes, wildfires and droughts. Things never got to the rampant tornado stage. Mars had its own problems with sandstorms, but when almost all the settlements were sheltered in craters, lava tubes, or had old fashioned large walls, the threat wasn’t difficult to mitigate.

After doing some research, thanks to your fellow member of the ad hoc committee Valentina Matsuzaka you knew that meteorological conditions like the ones you had been observing on Elysia would typically have been enough to get any potential colonizing force to look elsewhere. But… the Beagle had already put a lot of effort into building an Elysia that would make for a suitable home for humanity someday in the future. It was not a task that anyone was eager to abandon.

A planetary shield network would be a necessity just as it was for Mars.

But Elysia would be what the Leo Gamarra referred to as a ‘novel challenge’ the sort of thing that the old timers, the one from before the transit era were relishing. For the vast majority of the Beagle’s history and therefore human history, there essentially hadn’t been novel challenges. Nearly everything had a precedent and a lot of the people behind those precedents had left behind QI avatars. This was a situation for which the solution could not be found in what had long been glibly referred to as the old databanks.

For example the potential resolutions of this crisis are all variations of a shield network. The network can be used cautiously to just mitigate the intensity of atmospheric events, it can also be used more proactively if you lean towards a scientific approach to do more to control the weather not just mitigate it, such as driving precipitation to areas with droughts. There will be valiant attempts at technobabble from me in explaining the differences between the options.

As ever thanks for reading. Here’s hoping for a better and more productive 2025 filled with less chaos and more love for all of us.